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You Scream, Ice Cream

The Source

I guess it dates me if I remember the days when food was seasonal. Restaurants didn’t offer iced tea until May, and the opening of the local ice cream shop was the harbinger of summer. Now we can eat trucked-in vegetables all winter and the ice cream parlors are year-‘round businesses. ‘Tis a pity. Part of the joy was in the waiting. I can recall our substitute for air conditioning when Dad would load us into the ’63 fin-tailed Buick at 8 p.m., we’d roll down all four (hand cranked) windows and our family of four would dash out across the Chambersburg bottoms to cool off with the promise of the Dosh Dairy Delight dangling in the distance. I’m sure that my father could have gotten more from the trade-in value of his cars were it not for ice cream stains on the back seats. My Mom was a lover of strawberry, brother Keith favored chocolate, but Dad and I were a more stoic lot, always opting for plain vanilla. Back then you only got sprinkles when you dropped your cone onto the Meredosia parking lot. If there was any damage done by errant rocks, Dr. Robert Herr, DDS, could take care of that at the next appointment. Store bought ice cream was available, packed rock hard in a white Prairie Farms container, but if you wanted real ice cream you had to go to Dosh or Griggsville. The Griggsville man’s ice cream machine, however, was forever on the fritz and on most occasions you ended up with a cone splashing over with very cold milk. Ralph, the owner, would take a drag on his cigarette and mutter, “Gotta get that damn thing fixed.” Ralph never tapped the ashes off his cigarette so Griggsville had its own version of the Meredosia gravel sprinkles. When you’re ten it doesn’t matter. And of course nothing could …or can ever…compare to homemade hand-cranked ice cream. I’ll admit that an hour cranking, adding ice, dumping in salt, then cranking some more added to the taste of the delicious stuff scooped into Grandma’s soup bowls. Who hasn’t had a delightful brain freeze when consuming a bowl of homemade ice cream? I know, I know…the secret in avoiding the frigid pain is to eat it slowly but when you’re a youngster who’s half dead from cranking, “slow” is not an option. And I don’t ever remember Grandma saying, “Slow down,” or “You can just have one bowl.” At Grandma’s house you could do what you pleased and if you died, you died. There’d just be more ice cream for your brother. I recently read that the earliest form of ice cream was made by the Persians who’d pour grape juice over snow when the weather was hot. I have no idea where they found snow during hot weather. The BBC reports that a chilled mix of milk and rice was served in China around 200 B.C. Sounds pretty disgusting. And of course that jolly old emperor Nero would force his slaves to carry snow down from the mountains to make his Roman treats. Nero was a poophead. I don’t think I’d eat any of his ice cream. Arabs were the first to use cow’s milk in the mixture, for which we should all be eternally grateful, getting us off the grapes and rice kick. There’s a long-disputed rumor that in the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan had ice cream and that Marco Polo stole the recipe and brought it back to Italy. I’ve eaten good Italian gelato in some mighty rundown Italian cafes. I think Marco may have still been in the back room churning away. Charles I of England was so impressed with the “frozen snow” when he visited France that he gave his chef a lifetime salary if he promised to keep the formula a secret. I wonder why the secret to making ice cream always ends up in the hands of poopheads? We can thank the Quakers for more than their wonderful oats as they are credited as being the first to bring ice cream to the United States. Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson all tasted and enjoyed the stuff mightily, and in 1843 Nancy Johnson of Philly was issued the first U.S. patent for a hand-cranked freezer. Nancy was no poophead. The delightful stuff never really got a foothold in the American household until the invention of home refrigeration. Whatever course of frozen history you choose to follow, it’s come a long way to end up in Dosh at the hands of a sticky-mouthed little kid from across the river. I once asked my seventh-graders how their family made homemade ice cream. Of the 24 in the class, only six knew what I was talking about. I nearly cried. Our nation is doomed.