THE ICE CREAM CHRONICLES, part one

I've been touring the Shore, checking out trends in ice cream for a Food cover story (running this coming Wednesday, June 20), and learning the darndest things. I had much more material than could make it into the space allowed me, so I thought I'd offer up some extra scoops here.

I'm quite curious about the sundaes vs. regular cups/cones thing - you know, do folks order more sundaes or do they go for basic cups and cones? One scooper told me, emphatically, "Cups and cones. With the variety in flavors today, with all the accents already mixed in, you don't need to pay extra for toppings on sundaes." Logical, I thought. Once upon a time, there was chocolate-vanilla-strawberry, with a side of butter pecan, pistachio and, maybe, coffee, but now you get chips of this, combos of that, and all manner of mix-ins mixed in at the start.

Then I chatted with another scooper, who said, "Sundaes are big. Real big. But there's a difference in how people order them. Women take their time, consider the options and really work on putting together their sundaes. Men just come up to the counter and and say, 'I'll get the hot fudge.' They want to get the ordering over with."

We both laughed at that, though the scooper insisted over my giggles that it was absolutely true. Knowing how I personally labor over constructing my own sundae order and even go so far as to ask whoever is making my sundae to put things together in a certain fashion, I can't dispute the distaff angle of his theory. I always feel awful that I'm probably holding up the ordering line.

While what the typical kid orders at an ice cream parlor makes me shudder, there was one thing a scooper said that made my jaw drop to my knees. As I spied Day-Glo blue ices in one of the tubs at this particular shop, I commented that this surely was no color that EVER had appeared in nature. I mean, it looked sci-fi supernatural. Wacky. So I asked the parlor owner who in the world would order shocking-blue ices.

"Kids," the proprietor of the shop told me. "It makes their tongues turn blue."

Golly. When I was a kid, my favorite ice cream combo was chocolate with marshmallow topping. I thought soft chocolate trumped hard chocolate in those days, and I always tried to steer any ice-cream-eating expedition to Carvel. (Alas, Carvel is not the same any more; the formula must've been changed.) When I lost out, when the ice-cream-eating took place at the old Minuteman in Somerville and, later, when I was a teenager, at the Buxton's in Pluckemin, I got a little fancy. In those pre-rocky road days, I used to urge scoopers to mix some chocolate chips and mini-marshmallows into my chocolate, then top it off with gooey marshmallow sauce. Before there was rocky road, I was leaning to rocky road. But nut-free rocky road. My old high school chum Erin, who worked at Buxton's, must've gotten in serious trouble for deviating from the strict recipes to make my special-order ice cream. But it tasted good.

Oh yeah: I still hate nuts in ice cream. I just don't get setting something that's crunchy-dry against something that's cooling-smooth. That's one counterpoint that never has worked for me. In fact, when I learned the love of my high school life habitually ordered nuts on his sundaes, I gasped and reconsidered my devotion. Could I care for someone who had such poor taste in matters so culinarily critical?

I quickly softened in my judgments, and have remained open-minded in my assessments of friends and their ice cream choices. So, tell me, friends: What is YOUR favorite ice cream flavor? And why?

cheers,
Andy
6.17.07
p.s. I'll do another round of ice cream chatter later this week. Please do check out the cold, hard facts of our local ice cream scene this Wednesday in Food.