BROWN: Ice cream and sweet memories

Published 10:11 am Wednesday, July 24, 2024

When I remembered that July is the month to celebrate ice cream, my thoughts suddenly cluttered with memories of this sweet delight and my late husband, Otto, who was a lover of ice cream.

Late Saturday evening I decided to surprise Otto with some homemade ice cream. His appetite had been suffering since his surgery and long sojourn in the hospital, so I thought a creamy delight might be just what the doctor ordered. Within a few minutes, the mixture ripened in the refrigerator while I retrieved the churn from the freezer, where it resides during the summer months.

I quickly assembled the modern contraption, poured the mixture in the Freon-filled chamber, plugged it into the electrical socket, and in a flash, the frozen dessert was churning toward completion. Bless the convenience of modern-day appliances. I do not want to live without them.  

Back in the good ole days before you could produce a freezer full of homemade ice cream you first had to acquire an enormous bag of crushed ice and a weighty box of rock salt. Then locate the heavy metal mechanism, the wooden churn complete with the chiseled out over-flow hole, and try to find the ever-absent cork, a necessary item when you harden the cream.

Once the ingredients are gathered, you designate a volunteer to operate the hand-cranked handle of the apparatus. This is not a task for a wimpy individual. The captain of the turning patrol must be ready to churn for what seems like hours. If you calculated the ratio of ice to salt incorrectly, the result was a grainy cold mixture that did not satisfy your craving for a frosty dessert. 

Our secret family recipe is an old-fashioned custard that was loaded with country eggs, white cane sugar and fresh real cream, none of those store-bought ingredients in Nanny’s concoction. I remember the occasion I was permitted to lick the dasher clean as the exact moment that I fell in love with homemade ice cream.

Our grandmother preferred plain vanilla cream unless the peaches were ripe, then she loaded the confection with tiny morsels of scarlet-colored fruit, adding a confetti of color to the mixture, that had already been sweetened to perfection.

Nanny insisted that the cream needed to be packed and cured but I do not remember that happening often, we usually dipped and ate it directly from the churn, and leftovers never presented a problem. 

Beware of the salty residue she always warned, it will ruin the entire batch.