Sweet Indulgences

“We dare not trust our wit or making our house pleasant to our friend so we buy ice cream."  ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), author, poet and philosopher

July is National Ice Cream Month and what’s the first thing I thought of? Not running out to Brewster’s for a Peanut Butter Cookie Dough or White Turtle cone, or stopping off at Dairy Queen for a dreamy Peanut Buster Parfait, possibly the perfect food.

Nope, my mind goes back to the days when I was growing up and my Dad made his own ice cream in our family candy store.

My mother and father at their candy store, 1948. You can see the ice cream machine behind my mother's right shoulder.

Dad reserved Sunday mornings for making handmade ice cream because the weekdays and Saturdays were filled with making hand-dipped chocolates. On Sundays (every one in the summer, every other one in the winter), Dad would go down to the store, lift the wooden cover off the silver ice making machine  -- about the size of a small air conditioner -- and start mixing the ingredients -- cream, sugar and flavorings. For tradition’s sake and to honor the man who mentored him, Dad would only make four flavors of ice cream -- vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and maple walnut. (My brother remembers that Dad tried making sherbet a few times – orange and lemon lime, but that didn’t last long).

Our store also had a fully-loaded soda fountain with all the fixings -- dry nuts, wet nuts, pineapple and chocolate sauces, sweet cherries and other flavors. Hot fudge warmed in its own crock pot and stayed plugged in all the time in case anyone wanted the dark, rich sauce ladled over their ice cream.

My father at the store. Above his head on the sign, you can see the words "Ice Cream" and then the listing for the four flavors he made from scratch.

As a treat, Dad would often bring home hand-packed cardboard containers filled with the delicious ice cream and we would eat it while we sat in front of the black and white TV, stirring it up until it was more of a liquid. I always thought chocolate was the best of all. I can still remember dribbling chocolate on my flannel pajamas while I was eating. I don’t think those stains ever came out.

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, in its infinite wisdom, began in the late sixties to require that everyone making ice cream purchase a pasteurized ice cream mix for their handmade ice cream. Dad could still add his own flavorings to the mix, but the flavor was never the same as his original, handmade dessert. Progress.

Eventually, when the labor became too much, Dad bought Hershey’s ice cream to sell for cones and sundaes at the fountain, thus allowing for any number of different flavors. But sometimes having a lot of choices isn’t what we really want. How much sweeter it would be to have only four homemade flavors to choose from.

By Teresa K. Flatley

July, 2007