Ice cream should not be complicated.
I am not referring to the making of ice cream, as I might if I wrote a food blog. I have wrestled with one of those handy dandy ice cream makers in the 1990s, which guaranteed endless delights, and succeeded only in making a flavorful slush. Nor do I refer to the complexities of finding new or seasonal flavors of frozen treats. Not one cubic inch of peppermint stick or egg nog ice cream did I find in any of my stores this season, which is no doubt one of the few pieces of good news to pass along to my doctor, and there are a few exciting new flavors that were announced along about last May which have never appeared anywhere in my vicinity. But aside from the occasional longing for something novel, I am able to furnish most of my own desires with vanilla and the occasional Chunky Monkey.
No, I was thinking of my family’s history of fighting with restaurants about ice cream. For a dining establishment, ice cream should be fairly simple: either a generous scoop in a bowl or, if your menu runs that way, a generous scoop piled with insane amounts of fudge, marshmallow caramel, whipped cream and a few dozen peanuts. As long as your wrist is limber and your ice cream scoop is clean, what’s the problem?
The women in my family: that’s the problem. Not ALL of them: I don’t recall my mother, for example, ever making a fuss about ice cream in any sort of eating establishment (beyond her mourning for the death of the five cent cone.) But among the members of my family tree, there are several who wound up with their pictures posted under warning signs in restaurant kitchens. Let us go back a few decades to consider my grandmother, who once picked up a slice of apple pie al a mode at a buffet style café.
The size of the slice was adequate. The ice cream addition was also of a good size, and just at the right temperature, melting just a bit from the proximity of pie. And then she spotted the doily.
What kind of burro-brain, she demanded, would put any sort of ice cream on a doily? She was NOT paying for a doily that was going to soak up her ice cream, nor did she intend to sit at her table sucking vanilla ice cream out of a fancy piece of paper. The resulting furor left a permanent mark of those of her grandchildren who were present, as well, we hope, on the restaurant (now out of business, possibly from the expense of all those doilies.)
I would like to note that, in my opinion, she was completely correct, as was an aunt of mine whose appetite for hot fudge sundaes was the stuff of legend. Her issue was not so much a matter of ice cream, but she would firmly refuse to dip a spoon into the dish if the kitchen had forgotten her maraschino cherry. I agree that a kitchen that could forget such a detail is simply too busy. This complaint always brought dividends. Feeling that to produce a plate with a single cherry on it might be interpreted as an insult, the waiter would generally turn up with anywhere from two to siz cherries. This always put her in a forgiving mood. (If I wrote a food blog, I would mention the times she would order a hot fudge sundae and I would order a hot peanut butter sundae, and we would, with amazing damage to the tabletop exchange halves of our respective sundaes. Why the place didn’t just offer hot fudge/hot peanut butter sundaes I have no notion. But they’re out of business now, too. So there.)
The final two adventures, in which, again, I think the relative who complained was in the right, are completely my fault. Once upon a time, a cousin of mine had a slice of apple pie a la mode in an establishment which also offered a dish of cinnamon ice cream. She asked the waiter if she could, instead of the vanilla ice cream offered with the pie, get a scoop of the cinnamon instead. The waiter and the kitchen had no problem with this, and she enjoyed the result.
I’m the one who glanced at the tab and said “Hmmmm. They charged a dollar extra for cinnamon ice cream.” What can I say? The ensuing fifteen minute argument about why it should cost a dollar to scoop ice cream out of THIS container instead of THAT one was my doing. My aunt and I left the place before the argument was done, and I still look back in shame at this act of cowardice.
But I will take no blame for the OTHER incident, when my aunt, cousin, and I decided a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream was just the thing to finish off our meal at another eating establishment. We continued to chat about the news of the day, each of us working on our bowl (you didn’t think I meant one bowl for three people, dd you? Waiters who made that mistake around us did so only once.) But again I acted the troublemaker.
I said, “Um, have you found any chocolate chips in your chocolate chip ice cream?”
They paused. They had not, but they had all assumed what I had been thinking: maybe this was some special version with white chocolate chips. But we hadn’t encountered chocolate chips of any color with our teeth or taste buds, and we finally flagged down the waiter to ask. As I recall, he didn’t even have to check; he knew the answer.
“Oh, the kitchen just finished a container of chocolate chip and didn’t want to open a new one.”
Had we started a riot, no jury in this land would have convicted us.
Now, these were four different dining venues, three of which are now gone where the good times go. And I dislike conspiracy theories, so I cannot believe word went out among the hospitality community about us. But I HAVE noticed that whenever we order ice cream, sorbetto, or gelato nowadays, we are told that the kitchen JUST NOW ran out of that flavor. Coincidence? THAT answer isn’t complicated.
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