At Large and At Small (7 page)

In the fall of 1974, en route from California to our college in Boston, Kim and I decided to conduct a transcontinental ice cream tasting. We plotted our zigzag journey on a huge map, basing our ports of
call on the recommendations of friends, and, after we sampled each shop’s wares, assigned them a rating ranging from one to three ice cream cones. Starting at McConnell’s in Santa Barbara (three cones), we pressed on to Snelgrove in Salt Lake City (two cones); Platte Valley Creamery in Scotts-bluff, Nebraska (two and a half cones); Snowbird Frozen Custard in Indianapolis (one and a half cones); Ohio
State University Creamery in Columbus (one and a half cones); and Bailey’s in Cambridge (two cones). As you can see, it was all downhill after McConnell’s, the sanctum sanctorum of ice cream: a shrine so beneficent that it served two kinds of vanilla (with and without specks), two kinds of chocolate (milk and bittersweet), and two
kinds of coffee (smooth and peppered with ground espresso beans,
samples of which an undeserving customer once Scotch-taped to a letter that said, “
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS STUFF IN MY ICE CREAM?
”).

Fifteen years later, when my husband and I got married, it was a foregone conclusion—at least on my part— that ice cream would play an important role in the ceremonies. At our rehearsal dinner, our New York City loft was filled with the strange grinding noises of
three hand-crank ice cream makers, each of which, under Kim’s supervision, produced five quarts: vanilla, coffee, and mint chip. George and I gave the other members of the wedding party engraved silver pens. Kim received an engraved silver ice cream scoop.

My brother and his scoop now reside in Jackson, Wyoming. Although Kim works as a mountaineering guide, leads kayak expeditions, plays jazz
recorder, teaches courses on snow morphology and the aerodynamics of bird flight, takes nature photographs, and manages a small investment fund, I think of him primarily as Wyoming’s Emperor of Ice Cream.

Every few months, under the auspices of Central Wyoming College, Kim offers a class on the physics and chemistry of ice cream making. Have you ever wondered why homemade ice cream requires a
mixture of ice and salt between the tub and the canister? Answer: salt lowers the freezing point of water by pushing apart the crystal lattice of ice, drawing the energy needed for this disruption
by stealing heat from the ice cream mix. If there was no salt packed around the canister to cool the melting ice below 32 degrees, the mix, which freezes at around 27 degrees, would remain liquid even
if you cranked for a hundred years.

Aside from the ingredients, what are the two most important variables in ice cream production? Answer: butterfat, which should be high, and overrun, which should be low. Ice cream must legally have a butterfat content of least 10 percent. Ben & Jerry’s has 15 percent; McConnell’s has 17 percent (and formerly had 22 percent, but too many customers complained
that, post-sundae, the roofs of their mouths felt waxy). Overrun is the proportion of air whipped into the mix while it freezes. The cheapest commercial ice cream, which has 100 percent overrun, is half air and has the consistency of frozen shaving cream; McConnell’s has 15 percent overrun and the consistency of ambrosia. Kim likes to reduce the overrun of Breyers Coffee, which he rates excellent
in flavor but excessively fluffy in texture, by placing a few scoops in a plastic bag and smashing them with a meat-tenderizing mallet. (“How often do you do this?” I asked. “Always!” he answered. “Why eat all that air when it’s so easy to get it out?”)

What makes the mix turn into a scoopable mush rather than a greasy ice cube? Answer: the combination of cold and agitation, which can be accomplished
in a commercial ice cream freezer, an electric home ice cream maker, a hand-cranker, or the back of a B-17 bomber. According to a 1943
New York Times
article Kim is fond of
quoting, American airmen stationed in Britain “place prepared ice-cream mixture in a large can and anchor it to the rear gunner’s compartment of a Flying Fortress. It is well shaken up and nicely frozen by flying over enemy
territory at high altitudes.”

Alternatively, you can use liquid nitrogen. Kim’s ice-cream-making technique underwent a revolution a decade ago, after a geology expedition in Yellowstone with two friends—one the daughter of the
pâtissier
to the king of Denmark, the other a geochronologist from U.C. Berkeley. As they were climbing Dunraven Pass, Kim mentioned—somehow it seemed apropos—that he had
never been able to make a perfect homemade ice cream because the mix took about half an hour to freeze, during which time its ice crystals grew, through the process of melt-freeze metamorphosis, to a larger than optimal size. The geochronologist, whose name was Garniss Curtis, commented that a colder refrigerant would freeze the mix faster.

“I’ve tried dry ice bubbling in alcohol,” said Kim.
“It was a mess.”

“No,” said Professor Curtis. “I mean
really
cold. Dry ice is only minus 107 Fahrenheit. Liquid nitrogen is minus 320.”

Kim returned to Jackson and took a large thermos bottle to the local sperm bank, which uses liquid nitrogen to preserve its merchandise. “Young man,” said the director, eyeing the thermos, “that’s quite a contribution.” Kim explained that he wished to make a
withdrawal, not a deposit. He took home a liter of liquid nitrogen and became an instant convert.

In the brave new world of nitro, no ice cream maker, either hand-crank or electric, is necessary. If the mix has been pre-chilled in a kitchen freezer, liquid nitrogen freezes it so fast that one needs only a metal pot and a metal stirring spoon (glass or plastic would shatter). I have frequently
witnessed the process, which can justly be described as Macbethian. Because liquid nitrogen boils at 320 degrees below zero, when it comes into contact with warm air and is forced to change from a liquid to a gas, it seethes and steams like water in a spaghetti pot.

Although Kim has created many more complex recipes, the following ultra-simple one is my favorite. I’m not sure you should try it
at home.

1. Mix one pint half-and-half and one pint heavy cream.

2. Stir in several teaspoons good instant coffee, to taste.

3. Stir in sugar to taste (at least one cup: remember that because cold desensitizes sweet-sensitive taste buds, frozen ice cream will taste less sweet than mix).

4. Stir in Kahlúa to taste (at least two tablespoons).

5. Chill mix in kitchen freezer for about forty minutes, until small ice crystals begin to form around periphery.

6. Pour one inch of mix into large metal kitchen pot with insulated handle.

7. Ask friend with steady hands and thick gloves to hold handle.

8. Put on goggles and gloves.

9. Slowly pour liquid nitrogen from Dewar flask into pot while stirring mix vigorously with metal spoon, continuously
scraping freezing mix off interior of pot. Liquid nitrogen will freeze flesh as well as ice cream. Watch where you pour.

10. Resist temptation to pour in big slug all at once. This creates spectacular mushroom cloud but freezes ice cream to texture of fossilized Rice Krispies.

11. When mix is stiff but not brittle, stop pouring. Wait until bubbling and hissing stop. If you eat ice cream before
liquid nitrogen turns to vapor, you will suffer frostbite of the throat.

Kim has never suffered frostbite of the throat, though he did once suffer frostbite of the toes when he splashed a few −320° drops on his bare feet. However, in defense of liquid nitrogen, he hastens to mention that his only ice cream near-fatality occurred in connection with an old-fashioned hand-cranker in his pre-nitro
days.

He was on a river trip in the Grand Canyon. Because he was one of the organizers, he had been able to conceal in the food supplies, without the knowledge of the other paddlers, a five-quart ice cream maker, a large sack of rock salt, and an insulated picnic chest containing several bags of ice and the ingredients for coffee ice cream. On the fifth morning of the trip, with his tent neatly
stuffed and his gear stowed, he found himself waiting impatiently on the riverbank for the other expedition members to get ready. After an hour, he threw the ice cream ingredients into his kayak, threaded the rope of his quick-release rescue rig through the drain hole of the ice cream maker, and set off down the Colorado River.

Paddling alone in the Grand Canyon is a bad idea. Paddling alone
in the Grand Canyon with a five-quart ice cream maker strapped to the back deck of your kayak is a
very
bad idea. In the middle of Nankoweap Rapid, a
wave broke over the stern, filled the tub of the ice cream maker, and tipped Kim over. Normally, he would easily have performed an Eskimo roll, a way of bracing the paddle against the water in order to turn an upside-down kayak right side up. However,
the weight and drag of the water-filled tub created so much resistance that he was unable to roll.

Zooming through the rapid upside down, his head underwater, Kim thought, “Ice cream is going to be the death of me.” Finally, with a huge effort, he managed to roll the kayak on his fourth try. He paddled, shivering and panting, to a nearby sandbar.

Half an hour later, the rest of the expedition
floated around the bend. As one of its members recently recalled, “There sat Kim in the 120-degree sun, as calm as Buddha, cranking the handle of a gigantic ice cream maker.”

“Were you angry that he’d taken off without the rest of you?” I asked.

“Not after the first spoonful.”

y husband and I sleep in a white wooden bed whose head posts are surmounted by two birds, carved and painted by an artist friend. On George’s side there is a meadowlark, brown of back, yellow of breast, with a black pectoral V as trig and sporty as the neck of a tennis sweater. On my side
there is a snowy owl, more muted in coloration, its feathers a frowzy tessellation of white and black.
Sturnella magna
and
Nyctea scandiaca
have one thing in common: they are both fast asleep, their eyes shut tight, their beaks resting peacefully on their breasts.

Alas, the lark and the owl who rest beneath their wooden familiars have a far harder time synchronizing their circadian rhythms. George
is an early riser, a firm believer in seizing the day while it is still fresh. I am not fully alive until the sun sets. In the morning, George is quick and energetic, while I blink in the sunlight, move as if through honey, and pour salt in the coffee. When we turn off the light at 11:30—too late for him, too
early for me—George falls instantly asleep, while I, mocked by the bird that slumbers
above my head, arrange and rearrange the pillows, searching for the elusive cool sides.

In the fourth century b.c., Androsthenes, a scribe who accompanied Alexander the Great to India, observed that the tamarind tree opened its leaves during the day and folded them at night. He assumed that it was worshiping the sun. Twenty-two centuries later, the great Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus designed
a flower clock—a circular garden whose twelve wedge-shaped flower beds, each planted with species whose petals opened at a different hour, told the time from 6:00
A.M.
(white water lily) to 6:00
P.M.
(evening primrose). In humans, the circadian clock is centered in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a freckle-sized, sickle-shaped cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, but it can be activated by
proteins produced by genes all over the body. Scientists at Cornell have successfully reset human biological clocks (though only temporarily) by shining bright lights on the backs of people’s knees, suggesting that the mechanisms for controlling sleeping and waking are embedded in nearly every human cell—as well as in every flower petal, every insect antenna, every bird wing.

Chronobiologists
have also established that out of every ten people, eight follow a normal circadian cycle (that is, rising naturally at around 7:30
A.M.
); one is a lark; and one is an owl. These settings are genetically encoded and cannot be erased. Once an owl, always an owl. (The same goes for other species. Wilse Webb, a psychol
ogist at the University of Florida, spent five years trying to teach rats not
to sleep between noon and 6:00
P.M.
“They, by their contrary nature,” he told Lynne Lam-berg, an expert on sleep patterns, “spent five years teaching me otherwise.”) I would wager my softest down pillow that the Cornell scientist who thought up the light-on-the-backs-of-the-knees experiment was an owl. At 8:00
A.M.
, could any biologist dream up something so lunatic (from
luna
, moon), so surreal,
so redolent of the punchy wee hours and so incompatible with the rational light of morning?

“When I write after dark,” observed Cyril Connolly, “the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose. Then why not write in the morning? Unfortunately in my case there is never very much of the morning, and it is curious that although I do not despise people who go to bed earlier than I, almost
everyone is impatient with me for not getting up.” Connolly put his finger on the human owl’s perennial problem. The natural world discovered the benefits of shift work long ago: it is easier to share a given territory when not everyone is out and about at once. No one faults the bandicoot for prowling after dusk; no one chides the night-flying cecropia moth for its decadence; no one calls the
whippoorwill a lazy slugabed for sleeping by day and singing by night— but people who were born to follow similar rhythms are viewed by the other nine tenths of the population as a tad threadbare in the moral fiber department.