ICE CREAM, YOU SCREAM

i thought i would write about ice-cream. my favorite, way back when, was Spumoni, but i bet it's not easy to come by now, at least the good stuff. the Italian grocer beneath my apartment on Brady st. in Milwaukee 35 years ago had some real authentic Spumoni, and frozen Cannoli's that were to die for.

the only flavor of ice-cream i would currently refuse to eat is bubblegum. Rick the Prick, a particularly despicable mistake from my past, bought a 5 quart bucket of it once & then wouldn't let us have or buy any other flavors til we ate that up. it was in the freezer for at least a year, maybe more. totally disgusting, none of the kids would even eat it. we threw it out when he finally left.

my daughter Teale & i commonly have urges for nuts and chocolate. the ultimate was Ben & Jerry's Wavy Gravy, but they discontinued it... twas chock full of hazelnut and gooey fudgey stuff. i've written them a bunch of times begging them to reconsider, to no avail. i think i heard a rumor that they also discontinued Cherry Garcia, which is a shame too if true, because fruit & chocolate is also a very good thing. yup yup.

i remember the old Baskin Robbins days, i was loyal to their Jamocha Almond Fudge. that was a good thirty years ago. and Pistachio, what could be yummier than cool green pistachio? i do remember getting sick on Rum Raisin, my mom bought one of those HUGE tin cans of it from the Schwanns guy when i was a kid & nobody else would eat it so i ended up eating the whole friggen can mostly, eventually. i guess i am not inclined to ever have that again either.

i like the strawberry cheesecake from Kwik Trip tho it's a tad sweet. i adore cheesecake tho, mostly because it is richer than sugary. texture is very important to me. i used to make ice-cream commercially, for the pizza place i owned in New Jersey in the mid 70's, The Ruby Slipper. i could buy uber heavy cream from the local dairy for 10 cents a pint, would go buy fifty pints at a time. the flavors i was most partial to were our Honey Nut, and Toasted Coconut. my secret was heavy on the cream and light on the sugar.

we had a four big electric freezers for that, but i do remember hand cranking it as a kid every year on the fourth of July. usually that was plain ole vanilla, but there wasn't anything plain about it in my memory. and my mom would make the most amazing Hot Fudge, which i actually liked leftover cold even better, stolen one finger lick at a time out of her secret stash in the fridge. yup yup haven't tasted that in forever either, i have never made it tho it certainly is simple enough. i do believe it is simply sweetened condensed milk with lots of good chocolate melted in. or i heard once on the radio you can melt some vanilla ice-cream with some chocolate for the same effect.

by the way, i am sort of stuck on the phone with my ex (father of my 4 wonderful kids) who is hiccupping & trying to speak Dragon. if i were to make up an ice-cream i would start with some rich buttery Hickory Nut Pie made by this waitress named Sue in Leroy, and mix it in with some creamy Vanilla Custard. that pie is the best thing i have ever tasted bar none, much like Pecan but all the better because of the Hickory Nuts, and the love. i did have Shoefly Pie in Pennsylvania once, at a truckstop, after filling up on chicken livers & biscuits. Oh My GOD. what Sweet Agony... literally.

i remember as a kid my dad would promise us ice-cream after spending a day doing yardwork. he'd pile us in the old rusty white ford station wagon & drive into town to the Pines Drive-in. the choices were chocolate or vanilla or twist. twist was the best of both worlds i always thought. then it was a race to slurp it down as fast as the hot summer sun was melting it. the best bite was always the last one, that last bit of drenched honeycombed cone. the trick was to push it way down with your tongue so you didn't run out of ice-cream before you ran out of cone. remember that? i can't recall the last time i had an ice-cream cone. lick lick.

on main street Hartford (my home town) there were two drugstores with soda fountains. one had the high old fashioned stools that sun around, and the other modernized and put in a lower counter but the stools still spun. both places, Poole's and Chapmann's, had gobs of gum underneath the counters. an ice-cream cone was a nickel a scoop. i remember buying a double decker of butter pecan one day and walking out the door with it... damned ice-cream fell right off onto the sidewalk. that was the day Elvis died. bummer.

and when we were really little and such treats were extremely rare my dad would go through a long drawn out magical mime routine that would culminate in his threading a make believe needle with make believe string and threading it into one ear & out the other, then tying it in an elaborate bow on top of his head. then we would have to shout all sorts of abracadabra words and do whatever else he could contrive as he built the suspense to the max. the result was as completely magical as could be when finally he manifested a round yellow carton of KreeMee Vanilla ice-cream.

for my sixth birthday party, my mom took some of that same ice-cream and added a few drops of red food color & a few drops of peppermint extract. she'd mix it all creamy & pink & then scoop it into paper cupcake cups & refroze it til it was hard once again. decorated with candied violets & served with cake. i am starting to realize how much love and ice-cream have in common. it is a reward. i mean, nobody ever gets punished with ice-cream do they? "SHUT UP & EAT YOUR ICE-CREAM AND DON'T LEAVE THE TABLE UNTIL YOU ARE FINISHED!!!" ha ha ha. but then....

when i was in college i got a weekend babysitting job working for a Shorewood doctor. they had a half gallon of Butter Pecan ice-cream in the fridge. somehow i figured out that it was totally addictive with salt. sprinkle of salt, spoonful of ice-cream. sprinkle of salt, spoonful of ice-cream. i ate the entire thing. had to walk to the corner store and buy another carton. then i had to open it & eat the amount that was originally missing. oops, somehow that one got polished off as well. back to the store. i have conveniently forgotten how many times that happened but i have since lost the urge to binge, at least on ice-cream. i was mortified at my loss of control. self punishment i guess.

now-a-days, Teale & i can make a pint of Ben & Jerry's last for a week or more. we don't do it very often. if it is generic cheapo ice-cream, i prefer vanilla whilst she prefers chocolate. i adore sherbet, especially when i have a sore throat. and one of the things i cherished about Manhattan was Italian Ice. Culver's has an intense Lemon Ice in the summertime that is guaranteed to give this greedy sensation freak a blinding ice-cream headache... with chunks of Blackberry, or Strawberry, or Peach...

Blanche Eisenacher, the old lady down the road who was my surrogate gramma, used to indulge me once in a while when i visited her. her place was a haven for me & i would ride my bike there pretty often. the ice-cream was not frequent, and was all the more special because of that. she must have been scrimping always. she would make an entire ritual out of it. her table was covered with old worn oilcloth, and i loved going outside & pumping a new bucket of water for her which then sat on the kitchen counter with a long gray enameled ladle for drinking out of.

she had little green glass (depressionware) desert cups and it would take her forever to scoop a scoop into each one. then she would open a jar of wild blackberries she had put up and scoop some of those over the ice-cream. we would sit there together and savor every last bit. she would gossip about the neighbors and tell me stories about her childhood, and about taking the train to Minneapolis as a young woman to become a domestic. she met her husband Harry at a Saturday night dance. i remember sitting with him sometimes & listening to the Milwaukee Braves on the big old static-y radio in the front room, sun scattering through the white lace curtains. he was sort of scary tho, he was nearly deaf so he yelled mostly. LOL. when he died she was so forlorn.

so, that's about it for ice-cream, at least for now... Gee Willikers, i hope you have enjoyed my trip down memory lane.
smooch,
auntie hattie