The flavor of the day is beer. That’s right, beer. A restaurant called wanting beer ice cream for an all-beer dinner promotion. The cream-meisters at Greenwood Ice Cream didn’t flinch; after all, the Atlanta company was making uncommon ice creams long before Ben met Jerry. A rich vanilla base, some Guinness stout and–voila!–beer ice cream.
“What do you think?” Mitchell Williams, Greenwood’s president, asks his production manager as they huddle over a sample.
“Tastes like vanilla to me,” says Jackie McGhee.
Williams dips into the carton and tries it himself. “Yeah, that’s subtle,” he agrees, “but it could have been hideous. It just goes to show that there’s no such thing as a bad ice cream flavor.”
Maybe he’s right, judging from the way Americans scarf down ice cream. This nation, founded on the pursuit of happiness in all its flavors, is the undisputed ice cream capital of the world. According to the International Ice Cream Association, a trade group based in (where else?) Washington, the average American eats almost 5 gallons of ice cream a year, 1 1/2 gallon more than any other nationality. The eating peaks in July, the season of our independence, also remembered for the Baskin-Robbins bicentennial flavor of the month, Valley Forge Fudge.
Apple pie, my eye. Ice cream is the real national dessert. It’s as American as French vanilla.
“Everyone thinks America invented ice cream. We didn’t. We just made it better than anyone else,” says Ed Marks of Lancaster, Pa., who founded a national ice cream fan club called the Ice Screamers. (The highlight of their annual convention last weekend was a banquet with palate-twisters such as roasted garlic ice cream.)
True, Americans didn’t invent ice cream. The Italians, Chinese and others had been making something like it for centuries by the time George Washington bought a “cream machine for ice” in 1784. But the country he parented took to the frozen dessert with ravenous ingenuity. Americans invented one of the first ice cream makers (1842), the first ice cream soda (1874), the first ice cream scooper (1878), the first ice cream sundae (1881), the first ice cream cone (1896), the first soft-serve ice cream (1938) and, for all we know, the first Guinness stout ice cream (1998).
Changing with America
Americans love ice cream so much that they seem to view almost anything edible as an eligible flavor. This democratic belief in giving every taste a chance ripples through our history. More than a century ago, Delmonico’s restaurant feted the well-heeled of Manhattan with flavors like asparagus and pumpernickel rye. Fast-forward to the 1920s, and there’s Howard Johnson churning 28 flavors under his first orange roof in Massachusetts. Another half a century, and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are in Vermont throwing everything from candy bars to trail mix into ice cream, dreaming up names like Rainforest Crunch. No wonder David Letterman did a Top Ten list about the flavors they supposedly rejected, including “Rocky Roadkill” and “Cookies ‘n’ Crack.”
The craving for ever more flamboyant ice cream flavors has only accelerated as more ice cream makers turn up in homes. Americans buy between 1 1/2 million and 2 million units a year, most of them electric–meaning we don’t even have to turn a crank anymore to customize frozen desserts according to our every whim and dietary requirement.
“I make it with goat milk, and I don’t use so much sugar,” says Gail Damerow, who lives on a farm in Gainesboro, Tenn., and wrote the book “Ice Cream! The Whole Scoop.”
More than 31 flavors
But no one has taken the flavor chase further than Baskin-Robbins, the international ice cream shop chain whose “31 flavors” sign (one for each day of the month) doesn’t begin to tell the story.
Baskin-Robbins has been churning out flavors for more than 50 years, from the classic (French vanilla, introduced in 1945) to the trendy (Coffee Biscotti Chocolately, 1997) to the topical (Lunar Cheesecake, 1969) to the regrettable (Dirt ‘n’ Worms, a recent kiddie flavor with gummy worms candy). Years ago, when ice cream lover Fidel Castro boasted that Cuba would soon create more flavors than America, Irv Robbins took patriotic offense and phoned El Supremo’s minister of information to tell him that Baskin-Robbins alone had 290 varieties. Now there are 856 entries in the company’s flavor guide, a bound volume that must read like the encyclopedia of instant gratification.
Sticking to basics
Not everyone thinks the fascination with novel flavors is a good thing. At the Four Seas on Cape Cod, one of the most famous ice cream stands in New England, owner Dick Warren refuses to play the Ben & Jerry’s game. “When you put candy in ice cream, it tastes like candy,” he says. “All these ripples and chunky monkeys–you don’t need them.”
He abruptly stops the speech to take a call from another part of his brain. “Of course, Ben and Jerry have made millions doing that, so maybe I’m the stupid one.”
They’re even more fundamentalist at Doumar’s Cones and Barbecue in Norfolk, Va., a drive-in with a special place in ice cream history. Abe Doumar was a Lebanese immigrant who was among the first to make ice cream cones, at the turn of the century. The restaurant still uses his 90-year-old, propane-powered griddle conemaker. And it still serves, as always, only six flavors of ice cream.
The reasons for having so few varieties are both practical and philosophical, says Abe’s nephew, Albert Doumar. “My curb waitresses don’t write down orders. If I started piling on flavors, there’d be trouble in the parking lot because they can remember only so much.
“Besides,” he adds, “vanilla is the only real ice cream. All that other stuff is fake.”
Many Americans apparently concede the point. For as long as the industry has kept track, the nation’s favorite flavor–and it isn’t close–has been vanilla.
They just never say which kind of vanilla.
SILKY SMOOTH GINGER ICE CREAM
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Chilling time: 4-12 hours
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Processing time: Varies, see note
Yield: 1 quart
This ice cream, an example of the eggless “Philadelphia style,” comes from “CookWise” by Atlanta food scientist Shirley Corriher. She credits food testers Susan Mack and Andy Armstrong for coming up with the idea of using ginger preserves, adding to the smooth texture.
2 cups half-and-half
1 cup each: heavy or whipping cream, sugar
4 tablespoons ginger preserves
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
1. Heat half-and-half and cream in medium saucepan to just below a boil (175 degrees). Remove from heat. Stir in sugar, preserves, vanilla and salt. Refrigerate 4 to 12 hours; place in freezer 5 minutes. Process in ice cream maker following manufacturer’s directions.
Note: Processing time will vary with ice cream maker.
Nutrition information per 1/2-cup serving:
Calories ………. 310 Fat ………… 18% calories from fat .. 53
Cholesterol ….. 65 mg Sodium …… 75 mg Carbohydrates …… 36 g
Protein ……….. 2 g
HONEY PEACH ICED BUTTERMILK
Preparation time: 10-15 minutes
Chilling time: 4 hours
Processing time: Varies, see note
Yield: 5 cups
Here’s a light version of peach ice cream. We say light because it uses honey, not sugar, and buttermilk, which, despite its name, is lower in fat than whole milk. Adapted from “The Best Ice Cream Maker Cookbook Ever,” by Peggy Fallon (HarperCollins).
2 cups peeled, pitted, sliced, very ripe fresh peaches
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup honey or to taste
1. Mash peach slices thoroughly in large bowl with potato masher. Mix in lemon juice and cinnamon. Whisk in buttermilk and honey. Refrigerate at least 4 hours. Process in ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s directions.
Note: Processing time will vary with ice cream maker.
Nutrition information per cup:
Calories ……….. 95 Fat …………. 0 g Cholesterol ….. 2 mg
Sodium ………. 65 mg Carbohydrates .. 22 g Protein ………. 3 g
