In the 1940s of ancient memory, it was a rare treat when my father would bring home, on a summer evening, a pint of ice cream to be shared among the five of us. This was in the days of "ice boxes" and before the refrigerators that replaced them had freezer compartments -- so the ice cream had to be consumed immediately. Which it was.
There was also the Good Humor truck:
which jingled its way down East 9th Street evenings and weekends during the summer months. A small boy could wangle a raspberry or grape popsicle for 5 cents or a chocolate covered bar on a stick for 10 cents (if his parents would front the money).
An ice cream cone (single scoop) at the candy store around the corner cost 10 cents. I remember the shock when the price escalated to 11 cents. If the price of an ice cream cone could change, was there any hope for stability in our fallen universe?
Then sometime in the last of the 40s or the first of the 50s the icebox was replaced with a big new refrigerator from Sears with a freezer compartment. Ice cream could now be purchased by the half-gallon and eaten not occasionally and rarely but every single day. It became an evening staple. It wasn't very good ice cream, but I didn't know it then. Pumped full of air, it was the white bread of ice creams.
But even Meadowgold and their like were superior to the "ice cream" that we tasted and rejected in England in the 1970s which was made with whale blubber.
Then came the revolution. Heavenly ice cream emerged from its long Dark Age. Reuben and Rose Mattus of Brooklyn Heights introduced faux Danish Haagen-dazs and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield gave us Ben and Jerry's. A revolution and a revelation! Following their precedent, many brands of superior ice cream and gelato emerged. But beware, because Haagen-Dasz is now owned by Nestle and Ben and Jerry's by Unilever.
Beware also of the various masquerade ice creams that clutter the freezer section of the supermarket. Ice cream made not of cream but of tofu, oats, soy, coconut oil, kefir -- ghastly travesties, all of them.
I think we're in a golden age of ice cream. I especially think so in the summer, when we drive down to the Whippi-Dip in Fairlee for some of Gifford's peach ice cream. (Is it bad or good that Gifford's, out of Skowhegan, Maine, is the "Official Ice Cream of the New England Patriots?")
The best ice cream ever: the transcendent rum raisin at Angelo Brocato's in New Orleans. No question.
Words of wisdom in the carpe diem category: "There are no chocolate ice cream cones in the next world" (LERM).
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