At Large and At Small (6 page)

The New York Times
called Mr. Cabaniss a “First Amendment hero.”
I didn’t give a fig about the Constitution. I cared about the contents of Mr. Cabaniss’s truck. As far as I was concerned, a vote against Jef-Freeze Treats was a vote against ice cream, and a vote against ice cream—even against Klondike Krunch Bars and Power Ranger Pops, which constitute the heart of the Cabaniss inventory—was a vote against the pursuit of happiness.

I recently calculated (assuming
an average consumption of one pint of ice cream per week, at 1,000 calories per pint, and the American Medical Association’s reckoning of 3,500 calories per pound of stored body fat) that had I eaten no ice cream since the age of eighteen, I would currently weigh −416 pounds. I might be lighter than air, but I would be miserable. Before I was married, I frequently took a pint of Häagen-Dazs
Chocolate Chocolate Chip to bed, with four layers of paper towels wrapped around the container to prevent digital hypothermia. (The Nutrition Facts on the side of the carton define a “serving size” as a quarter of a pint, but that’s like calling a serving size of Pringles a single potato chip.) Now, under the watchful eye of a husband so virtuous that he actually prefers low-fat frozen yogurt, I
go through the motions of scooping a modest hemisphere of ice cream into a small bowl, but we both know that during the course of the evening I will simply shuttle to and from the freezer until the entirety of the pint has been transferred from carton to bowl to me. A major incentive for writing this essay was that during its composition this process was not called greed; it was called research.

My favorite flavors are all variations on chocolate, vanilla, coffee, and nuts, none of which is good for you. I do not like fruit flavors. They are insufficiently redolent of sin. Strawberry ripple is the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lie such nouvelle atrocities, recently praised in
The New York Times
, as tofu-anise, cardamom, white pepper, and corn ice creams.
Corn?
Why not
Brussels sprouts? (I shouldn’t say that too loudly, lest the Ohio State University Department of Dairy Technology, which has created sauerkraut sherbet and potatoes-and-bacon ice cream, derive inspiration for a new recipe.) On the other hand, ice cream shouldn’t actually kill you. When I called the Häagen-Dazs Consumer Relations Department a few days ago to verify the butterfat content of Mint Chip,
I was alarmed to hear the following after-hours message: “If you have a medical emergency with one of our products that requires immediate attention, please call Poison Control at 612-347-2101.” What medical emergency could a few scoops of ice cream possibly precipitate? It is true that circa 400 b.c., Hippocrates, or one of the anonymous writers who were later known as Hippocrates, warned that
snow-chilled beverages might “suddenly throw… the body into a different state than it was before, producing thereby many ill effects.” It is also true that in 1997 the
British Medical Journal
noted that “ice cream headaches” can be produced by cold temperatures on the back of the palate, which stimulate the spheno-palatine ganglion to dilate blood vessels in the brain. However, the article concluded
with the heartening sentence “Ice cream abstinence is not indicated.”

As I have said, I take a dim view of healthful ice cream, and was thus cheered to learn from a spokeswoman at the International Dairy Foods Association that sales of high-fat ice cream are going up and sales of low-fat ice cream are going down. Had I lived in eighteenth-century Naples, however, I might have softened my anti-salubrity
stance. According to Filippo Baldini, a physician who wrote a 1775 treatise on the medicinal properties of
sorbetti
, cinnamon ices are an efficacious remedy for diarrhea; coffee ices for indigestion; pine-nut ices for consumption; ass’s-milk ices for maladies of the blood; cow’s-milk ices for paralysis; and sheep’s-milk ices for hemorrhages, scurvy, and emaciation. This pharmacopoeia sounds right
up my alley. In fact, if Dr. Baldini were practicing today, I would add my name to his patient rolls without delay. “You’re looking a trifle emaciated, Ms. Fadiman,” he’d say. “Here’s a prescription for Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. BlueCross BlueShield will reimburse in full.”

Although very cold ice cream numbs the taste buds that perceive sweetness (the basis for the entreaty that
used to adorn cartons of Häagen-Dazs: “Please temper to a soft consistency to achieve the full flavor bouquet”), I prefer my ice cream untempered. I also like it even better in the winter than in the summer. Seasonal Good Humor trucks notwithstanding, it is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather. If that were the case, wouldn’t Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have
established their first ice cream parlor in Tallahassee instead of Burlington, Vermont, which averages 161 annual
days of frost? (Ben explains his product’s winter popularity by means of the Internal-External Temperature Differential and Equalization Theory, whereby, he claims, the ingestion of cold foodstuffs in freezing weather reduces the difference between the internal body temperature and
the ambient air temperature, thus making his customers feel comparatively warm.) Wouldn’t John Goddard, an outdoorsman of my acquaintance, have arranged for a thermos of hot chicken soup instead of a half gallon of French vanilla ice cream with raspberry topping to be airdropped to him on the summit of Mount Rainier? And wouldn’t the Nobel Prize banquet, held every year in Stockholm on the tenth
of December, conclude with
crêpes Suzette
instead of
glace Nobel
? As the lights dim, a procession of uniformed servitors marches down the grand staircase, each bearing on a silver salver a large cake surrounded by spun sugar. Projecting from the cake is a dome of ice cream. Projecting from the dome is an obelisk of ice cream. Projecting from the obelisk is a flame. When the laureates—who have
already consumed the likes of
homard en gelée à la crème de choux fleur et au caviar de Kalix
and
ballotine de pintade avec sa garniture de pommes de terre de Laponie
with no special fanfare—see what is heading their way, they invariably burst into applause.

The Greek grammarian Athenaeus tells a catty story about Diphilus, an Athenian dramatist who lived in the fourth century
B.C
.:

Once upon
a time Diphilus was invited to Gnathaena’s house, to dine, so they say, in celebration of the festival of Aphrodite.… And one of her lovers, a stranger from Syria, had sent her some snow… the snow was to be secretly shaken up in the unmixed wine; then she directed the slave to pour out about a pint and offer the cup to Diphilus. Overjoyed, Diphilus quickly drank out of the cup, and overcome by the
surprising effect he cried, “I swear, Athena and the gods bear me witness, Gnathaena, that your wine-cellar is indubitably cold.” And she replied, “Yes, for we always take care to pour in the prologues of your plays.”

When the prologues of Diphilus were unavailable, the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had borrowed the trick from the Middle East, sometimes chilled their drinks with ice and snow.
The ice, which was cut in winter from ponds and streams, and the snow, which was carried from mountaintops, were stored underground in straw-lined pits. If the pits were sufficiently well insulated, their contents could remain frozen throughout the summer.

By the seventeenth century, rich Florentines were so addicted to cold drinks that, in a poem called “Bacco in Toscano,” Francesco Redi called
snow “the fifth element”:

He is mad who without snow

Thinks to receive a satisfied guest
.

Bring then from Vallombrosa

Snow in God’s plenty.…

And bring me ice

From the grotto under the Boboli hill.

With long picks

With great poles

Shatter

crush

crunch

crack, chip

Until all resolves

In finest iciest powder…

Redi also mentioned something called
pappina
, a semisolid dessert made from
snow beaten with fruit juices or other flavorings. However, as the late British food writer Elizabeth David observed in
Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices
, “Ice-diluted and ice-cooled sherbets do not… equate with frozen sherbets any more than putting a few pieces of ice into a glass of drinking water turns that water into ice, or than the milk half-frozen in the bottle
on your doorstep on an icy morning has become ice-cream.”

It has long been believed that
real
sherbets and ice creams—desserts that were artificially frozen by submerging their containers in icy brine or other refrigerants—were introduced to France in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henry II, who brought the recipes from Italy. In 1861, Isabella Beeton, the author of
a British domestic bible called
The Book of Household Management
, declared this contribution to French cuisine so invaluable that Catherine should be forgiven the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Elizabeth David pooh-poohs the Catherine story.
She
thinks the Italians did not figure out how to make ice cream until
the seventeenth century and that the first French ices were made around 1660 by
a distiller named Audiger. This is Audiger’s recipe for strawberry
sorbet
:

For [32 oz.] of water crush one pound of strawberries in the said water, add eight to ten ounces of sugar, and then the juice of a lemon.… When the sugar has melted, and all is well incorporated, filter the mixture through a sieve, and cool it.… Put three, four, or six containers or other vessels according to their size
in a tub, at one finger’s distance each from the other, then you take the ice, which you pound well, and salt it when it is pounded, and promptly put it in the tub all round your boxes.… When all is thus arranged you leave it for half an hour, or three quarters.… Then you move the ice covering your boxes and stir the liquor with a spoon so that it freezes into a snow.

During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Italians were believed to make the best frozen desserts. (Many people still hold this opinion, including a friend of mine who, on a recent visit to Sicily, was told by some local friends that they wished him to experience a “traditional Catania breakfast.” He had lugubrious visions of pasta heaped with eggplant. However, the breakfast, served at an elegant café, turned out
to be
granita di caffé con panna
: an espresso-flavored quasi-sherbet topped with whipped cream.) In 1778, a Benedictine monk in Apulia published recipes for ices and ice creams flavored with coffee, chocolate, cinnamon, candied eggs, chestnuts, pistachios, almonds, fennel seeds, violets, jasmine, oranges, lemons, strawberries, peaches, pears, apricots, bitter cherries, melons, watermelons, pomegranates,
and
muscatel grapes. In Victorian Britain, the duke of Beaufort employed a Neapolitan confectioner who invented a new
sorbetto
(the flavor, unfortunately, is not recorded), a feat so momentous that it warranted waking His Grace in the middle of the night to tell him the good news.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the earliest record of ice cream dates to 1744. The man who ate it, at the home
of the governor of Maryland, said it went down “Deliciously.” His tastes were shared by George Washington, who owned two pewter ice cream pots, and Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own eighteen-step recipe. It was not until after James Madison became president in 1809, however, that ice cream realized its full ceremonial potential. A White House guest wrote:

Mrs. Madison always entertains
with Grace and Charm, but last night there was a sparkle in her eye that set astir an Air of Expectancy among her Guests. When finally the brilliant Assemblage—America’s best—entered the dining room, they beheld a Table set with French china and English silver, laden with good things to eat, and in the Centre high on a silver platter, a large, shining dome of pink Ice Cream.

After that historic
moment, it seems inevitable that in 1921, the commissioner of Ellis Island would decree that all newly arrived immigrants be served ice cream as part of their first American meal.

Americans now eat more ice cream per capita than the citizens of any other nation, and I am proud to say that
from an early age I have worked hard to do my part for my country. I fixed the starting date of my own ice
cream calculus at age eighteen because that marked the beginning of the period when I could consume my favorite food ad libitum. However, a substantial fraction of my pre-adult self was also made up of cream, milk, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla extract, and carrageenan (a natural stabilizer made from
Chondrus crispus
, a cartilaginous red alga that is harvested with long rakes from intertidal rocks
along the North Atlantic).

Although partial to Toasted Almond Good Humors, I was aware, even as a very young child, that the kingdom of ice cream contains an exquisite haut monde as well as an affable proletariat. On special occasions, my parents would arrive home from New York City bearing a lavender box, swathed in dry ice, from Louis Sherry, in which reposed a frozen confection called Mocha
Praliné. (O vanished love! What would I not give for a taste of you now!) Shaped like a birthday cake, Mocha Praliné was made of coffee ice cream decorated with fluted extrusions of whipped cream (
frozen
whipped cream, which gently resisted the tooth rather than squishing) and embedded with Tootsie Roll–sized logs of hazelnut-impregnated chocolate fudge. The logs were faintly gritty in texture
and—there is no other way to describe them—excremental in color and shape. Who knows what regressive satisfactions, what thrillingly broken taboos, were bound up in their consumption?

When I was in the third grade, we moved to Los Angeles, where Mocha Praliné was unavailable and my
brother and I were consequently morose. Our mother, to her everlasting credit, attempted to console us by frequently
taking us to lunch at Blum’s. Lunch was a chocolate milkshake. Period. (Although on other occasions she touted the merits of raw carrots and whole wheat bread, she was wise enough to recognize that if you drank an entire milkshake—the contents of the soda glass
plus
the contents of the metal shaker—you would hardly touch your hamburger anyway, so why order one?) As teenagers, we favored bowls
of Baskin-Robbins Chocolate Mint (the color of fly-specked absinthe), which we bought by the half gallon, carried home on our bicycles, and excavated with a spade large enough to dig a grave.