My love affair with ice-cream obviously goes back to my childhood… what pleasant associations, sitting on a rug in the back garden in the sun with my mum, a newspaper on my lap and eating ice-cream… Obviously I wasn’t reading the newspaper, although I did begin to read when I was very young.
I’m not usually very bothered with cakes or desserts or sweet things, but ice-cream… you can never eat ice-cream too often or eat too much of it! In actual fact I don’t eat it very often… but when I do I really love it.
When I was young we used to have a block of ice cream after lunch on Sunday, either plain vanilla or Neapolitan which had a band of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla ice cream. I would eat either the strawberry or vanilla first, and save the chocolate until last. Now I don’t really like strawberry, nor chocolate, but a good vanilla is a favourite.
The ice-cream man used to come round with his van, ‘ding-dong, ding-de-dong!’ I don’t remember buying ice-cream from him, but if I did it would be a small slice between two wafers, or a slice in a cone, none of this soft squirty Mr Whippy stuff then! We usually had a lolly… except it wasn’t a lolly on a stick, it might have been called an ice-pole, i don’t really remember, but it was triangular in shape and he would cut it in half and you could buy a half for a halfpenny.
I went to France when I was a student, camping in a tiny village near Menton, right on the Italian border. After spending the day on the beach we would wander back to the camp-site, stopping off in the little village to have a coffee or an ice-cream, and I was amazed that there was such a variety of flavours… I would always have a pristache-praliné, a small ball of each in a little metal dish with a tiny spoon… heaven, sitting in the Mediterranean sun, eating ice-cream.
After a long day on the beach… nothing better than pistache-praliné ice-cream! Yes, this is us by the Med…
My finest hour as regards ice-cream was when I was pregnant with our first child and we were on holiday in the north-east of England at a tiny fishing village called Staithes. nearby was a farm which produced its own ice-cream and you could visit the place, see it made, sample it and buy it… Oh, my, goodness! There were various different offers on to sample the wonderful flavours, including one which allowed a taste of every one of the twenty-four varieties they made… which sounded fun, and delicious… I expected a tiny spoon or one of those little wooden scrapers you get with individual ice-cream tubs, which would hold about a salt-spoonful… not in North Yorkshire… I was given a glass bowl, roughly the size of a football, but very elegant, and she proceeded to give me a small scoop – yes, scoop, of each of the twenty-four flavours… I accepted the challenge… and it may have taken me nearly ninety minutes but I enjoyed every yummy mouthful… Well, I was pregnant at the time!
Lois Elsden 