My dad had a pretty sizable sweet tooth and that meant dessert with every meal – including breakfast. This was probably because, when he was a kid, the family ran a small grocery store and he and his siblings had free access to the candy counter.
Ice cream was one of his favorite treats. During his childhood (he was born in 1904), ice cream was usually homemade and, because most people had only ice boxes or spring houses to keep food cool, when you made ice cream, you had to eat it all. Commercially-made ice cream had been around for about fifty years by then but was only available in larger cities. The first ice cream cones, incidentally, were introduced at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. In the small Wisconsin town where he lived, ice cream was produced only occasionally at a local dairy and the homemade variety was much more common. This was usually a Sunday afternoon project conducted around a large washtub full of ice with the wooden hand-cranked churn swathed in wet burlap to “hold in the cold.” It took an experienced touch to know just when to stop cranking, pull out the paddle and pack the cylinder in salt and ice to “ripen.”
During my childhood, few people had home freezers. Refrigerators had tiny ice cube compartments barely cold enough to freeze water, and not quite cold enough to store ice cream for more than an hour or so before it became soupy. What commercially made ice cream we had was obtained in the form of ‘hand-packed’ from the local drugstore soda fountain and rushed home to be served immediately. Several times each summer, when we were growing up, Dad would declare it was a perfect day to make ice cream. Mother would cook up a thin custard of egg yolks, sugar and milk, add heavy cream, vanilla and a little salt and chill it in the refrigerator while Dad made a visit to the ice plant for a big block of ice. He usually made ice cream during strawberry season, nearly always on the Fourth of July and for our annual family picnic reunion when he hauled the ice and equipment to our picnic site on the former farm of Mother’s parents in Clarke County, Iowa. Often, there would be a Sunday afternoon or two sandwiched in there that seemed to be a “good ice cream” day, as well.
After we moved to the acreage and had milk cows, our own rich milk and abundant cream and a big deep-freeze where Mother could freeze big chunks of ice to have on hand for such things, he bought an electric ice cream churn and Mother pretty much took over the ice cream making. There were lots of experiments with different recipes and flavors of ice cream and I vividly remember the strawberry ice cream with whole strawberries that froze hard as rocks and didn’t soften up until the ice cream itself had long since melted.
There was a cafe in my home town that also manufactured ice cream. They had a wide variety of flavors and the ice cream was equal to any of the more expensive ones you can buy today. Dad bought it in three-gallon tubs, weekly, and we usually had three or four flavors in the freezer to choose from. On hot summer days, when Mother deemed it too hot to cook, we ate cold sandwiches and ice cream for supper – a combination I still enjoy. Bedtime snacks were common at our house and, especially during summer, these usually involved ice cream. We made ambitious sundaes and banana splits. We ate dishes of ice cream buried in chocolate syrup, fresh peaches or sugared berries, and made floats and sodas with just about every flavor of soda pop known to mankind. And, of course, if there was pie, cake, pudding, Jell-O or cookies for dessert, Mother always asked if we’d “like a scoop of ice cream with that.” Considering all the whole milk we consumed, ice cream, homemade cottage cheese and mountains of whipped cream, I don’t think any of us had a shortage of calcium. I have since changed my ways, and though I am grateful for hard, dense bones. I guess it’s a trade-off and I’m glad we hadn’t heard about cholesterol then!