A secret family recipe dating back more than 100 years has been the inspiration for Keswick-based Luchinis — the first company to manufacture ice-cream in Cumbria.
Now based in a shop in Keswick’s Tithebarn Street, five generations of the Luchini family have worked for the firm down the years, with 14-year-old Lexy, who helps during school holidays and on busy weekends, the latest recruit.
It was Lexy’s great-great-great grandfather, Luigi, who first came to Cumbria from Italy in 1901 and set up a shop in Cockermouth, making and selling Italian recipe ice-cream.
Luigi’s son, Ralph, took over the family business, and his son, Tony, is now the senior partner and runs the company with his partner Margaret, with help from Lexy, who is Tony’s step-granddaughter.
The couple opened the present shop in Keswick on 1st March, 1986.
Tony’s nephew, Christopher Coulthard, has become a junior partner and it is this duo only who hold the secret recipe for Luchini’s ice cream.
“Our recipe is secret, but what we always insist on is using the finest ingredients with eggs and milk straight from the farms to make our ice-cream,” said Tony.
“The business is definitely weather-dependent and this year has been a bit of a nightmare, with the town shut down for the first part of the year and all our good pay days at shows and events cancelled. But we will survive and carry on.”
The company has a fleet of four ice-cream vans which have permanent posts at various beauty spots in and around Keswick, including Fitz Park and Castlerigg Stone Circle.
The well-known vans can also be seen and heard — playing their well-known Just one Cornetto music — around the streets of Keswick during the summer months.
One of Luchini’s former employees, the late Danny McCall, manned one of the vans for 50 years.
Although he retired 15 years ago, and died 10 years later, many people still remember him and talk to Tony about their memories of the man he describes as a “legend” for many generations of youngsters in Keswick.
Tony said: “He worked for my dad and for me, and was so popular he was worth three or four salesmen.
“Many people thought Danny was my dad because he looked Italian.
“He would regale everybody with stories of his exploits in the early days, including an incident just after the war when the company ran out of sugar and he and my dad went up to Glasgow to buy a ton of it on the black market.”
Luchini’s stocks around 18 different flavours of Italian-style ice cream and gelato in the Keswick parlour, where visitors can read about and see photographs detailing the family’s long history, from their escape from poverty in Italy to the establishment of the oldest ice-cream manufacturers in Cumbria.
