We All Scream for Ice Cream
I lived in a New York City apartment building but we could hear the ice cream truck up on the sixth floor. There would be a flurry of begging for change, then we kids would race downstairs. I liked Creamsicles, with their frozen orange juice exteriors and vanilla ice cream centers. In later years, there was the Mister Softee Ice Cream truck, and when no truck was in sight our parents would often take us to the Carvel store across the street, where my delight was a vanilla cone dipped in melted chocolate that instantly turned into a hard shell.
When I was thirteen, we moved uptown, and ice cream was still summer’s best treat. By the entrance to the park down the street was an ice cream cart, always there summer after summer, and always seemingly run by the same college student. Those were the days of getting ice cream “on credit.” If we were caught without money, we’d ask “Can I get it on credit?” and we’d hold up whatever precious possession we had to leave as collateral. Skate keys, jackets, balls, frisbees. The answer was nearly always yes, and we’d return with the money later that day or on the next. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to cheat; it was a transaction taken seriously.
When I was an adult and working as a professional recipe tester for the New York Times, I began making my own ice cream. First was the ice cream maker that required freezing a tub of sealed liquid, then inserting it into a holder with a handle on top that had to be hand-cranked. The next step up was a a similar model that had an electric crank. It made a scant quart of ice cream, worked well, but was good for only one use before the tub needed to be refrozen for some hours.
