Ice cream is young. For more than a thousand years, our ancestors had to settle for flavored snow — quick to vanish without modern refrigeration, and thus a luxury, reserved for the rich.
Sorbet was accidentally invented in the 16th century, when the Italian scientist Giambattista della Porta tried to freeze wine and wound up with boozy slush. Only in the late 17th century did someone have the grand idea of improving sorbet by using milk, “which first you must cook,” as noted in a recipe by Antonio Latini, the steward of a noble Neapolitan household.
But ice cream has always been part of American history — because our nation, too, is young. Thomas Jefferson wrote out a recipe for it in longhand, demanding “good cream” and a stick of vanilla, and served it encased in pastry to guests when he was president. While the French and Italians refined ice cream as an art, Americans made it the dessert of the people, building labor-saving machines that drove prices down.
Now ice cream belongs to everyone. And as its eaters and makers have multiplied, so have its flavors, to match the collage of cultures that defines us as a nation. Here is a sampling from a dozen shops across the country where tubs of vanilla and chocolate stand side by side with those of orange blossom, soursop, labneh, chikoo, li hing mui and ginataang mango malunggay.
A place for Iranian delights in Los Angeles
The most coveted ice cream flavor here is known, unofficially, as gol o bolbol — the shop’s original name and a trope of Persian poetry, juxtaposing the rose (gol) with its thorns and the nightingale (bolbol) who longs for it anyway. Suffused with saffron and rose water, it is delicately sweet. Pistachios are caught in its crevices; patches of cream surface, lunar white.
Saffron & Rose’s founder, Ali Kashani-Rafye, started selling bastani (Farsi for ice cream) in 1980 at his grocery a few blocks from here, catering mostly to Iranians who had settled in the Los Angeles neighborhood after their country’s 1979 revolution. (The area is now known, affectionately, as Tehrangeles.) His recipe, still in use today at the shop that his descendants run, demands liquid milk, not powdered; salep, dried orchid bulbs ground into flour, for elasticity; and slow churning until the ice cream resists, pulling back from the spoon like melted cheese.
Sometimes a scoop of ice cream is paired with faloodeh, kinked rice vermicelli in rose-water syrup, frozen and then thawed to a suspended slush. Mr. Kashani-Rafye’s grandson, Farbod Papen, known as Freddy, explains to customers that they may anoint it to their taste with bottles of sour cherry syrup and lemon juice, standing at the ready — looking, he said, “like ketchup and mustard.”
1387 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, and another location in Irvine, Calif.; saffronroseicecream.com.
Where Miami goes for Cuban vanilla
In the dark days of 2008, Miami-born Suzy Batlle (pronounced BAT-zhay) was laid off after 20 years as a mortgage banker. She’d just had cancer, just been divorced and had two children to support. She tried selling real estate, and when that didn’t work, she followed her kids’ advice and opened an ice-cream store.
She chose Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood for the address, a nod to her Cuban parents who had fled Castro’s regime in the 1960s. In the park across the street, men played dominoes from morning to night. Sometimes they stopped by the shop looking for mantecado. “I don’t even know what that is,” she told them — and then she figured it out: the Cuban vanilla, but richer, with egg yolks.
Mantecado is a fixture on the menu now, along with Violeta, inspired by the flowery perfume “splashed all over every Cuban baby,” she said; and Abuela Maria, a swirl of broken Maria cookies, knobs of cream cheese and ruby streaks of guava and guava marmalade — an adaptation of a 4-o’clock snack, best downed with a cup of Café Bustelo. “I’ve had little old men crying holding my hands,” she said. “They can’t believe they’re tasting this flavor again, after so many years.”
1503 SW Eighth Street, Miami, and a location in Dallas, azucaricecream.com.
Coconut ice cream Thai-style in Kentucky
Local ingredients are the primary focus at this parlor in the distillery district of Lexington, Ky., but exceptions are made for sweet red beans, which in Thailand are often eaten with sticky rice, and taro in pale lilac, tasting giddily of bubble tea.
Toa Green, who runs Crank & Boom with her husband, Mike, grew up in Frankfort, the state capital. Her parents came from just north of Bangkok. From the age of 7 she worked at their restaurant, Smile of Siam, with her father up front and her mother and sister in the kitchen. “I called it the family farm,” she said. It was all-consuming: “I didn’t go out Friday nights. I didn’t go to summer camp.”
When she left for college, she vowed never to work at a restaurant again. But later, she realized she missed the rhythm of that life, and she coaxed her parents out of retirement to open a restaurant in Lexington. She started making coconut ice cream, a staple of Thai street vendors, who scoop it into a hot-dog bun. “People would come in and ask for ice cream — and nothing else,” she said. Now the restaurant is no more; the ice cream is all.
1210 Manchester Street and 119 Marion, Lexington, Ky.; crankandboom.com.
Caribbean Christmas in Brooklyn, N.Y.
One night a few years back, Shelly Marshall was sick with chikungunya fever from a trip home to Trinidad, and yearning for the soursop ice cream of her youth. Khalid Hamid, then her boyfriend, sallied forth, bought an ice cream machine and made it for her. It was awful. “Too icy,” he said.
After Ms. Marshall recovered from the fever (and the disappointment), she headed to Pennsylvania State University to take its celebrated course in the science of ice cream. She returned and taught Mr. Hamid everything she knew. Running an ice cream shop was a gamble, but she was a risk management consultant. (Mr. Hamid is a psychologist.) In 2015, the couple submitted a business plan to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Power-UP! competition. They won first place and $15,000, and were married.
Last July, they opened Island Pops in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Soursop is on the menu, banana in body and pineapple in soul, as well as ponch de crème, a Caribbean eggnog spiked with moonshine and embedded with black cake made of fruit fermented in rum — a batch “that goes back 10 years,” Mr. Hamid said, a present from his father-in-law. Rum infiltrates sorbet, too, including one stained red from sorrel, the flowers brewed with cinnamon and cloves. “It reminds us of Christmas,” Mr. Hamid said. “That’s when flowers bloom in Trinidad.”
680 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y.; islandpops.com.
Stretchy Syrian booza in the heart of Texas
The first time Asmaa Khattab made ice cream for her husband, Kareem Alrefaai, he said, “It took me back 18 years.” He was remembering his hometown, Damascus, Syria, before it was shattered by war. In one of the oldest souks stands Bakdash, a shop more than a century old, where booza (Arabic for ice cream) is beaten in buckets with giant wooden mallets, up and down in an inexorable throb.
Bigdash, which Mr. Alrefaai and Ms. Khattab opened in 2016 in Richardson, Tex., was named in homage. Half-hidden in an industrial park, it was originally meant to be just a kitchen for Ms. Khattab’s small catering business. But she kept getting more orders, until her husband had to quit his job at a gas-station convenience store to help her. They make booza with a base of milk and cream, primed with rose water, mastic — a sun-dried sap that brings the chew to chewing gum — and salep, pulverized orchid bulbs. The mixture is pounded into an inchoate mass that tugs like marshmallow, then stretched and rolled into logs under a shower of pistachios.
Early on, they sometimes had to sleep in the shop or the car (“A.C.’s better in the car”), so they could make enough ice cream to keep up with demand. But Mr. Alrefaai didn’t mind. “All those ‘Shark Tank’ episodes we’ve been watching?” he said. “This is it.”
717 Lingco Drive Suite 210, Richardson, Tex., bigdash.com.
Filipino scoops in Seattle
The ingredients in ginataang mango malunggay are announced in its name: ginataang means cooked in coconut milk; mango needs no translation; and malunggay is moringa, the gently bitter, matcha-like undertone of their leaves keeping the fruit’s sweetness in check.
The flavors here come from the restive minds of Kryse Panis Martin and her husband, Darren McGill. She grew up in Daly City, Calif., home to the country’s highest concentration of Filipino-Americans, and was raised in part by her Filipino grandmother. He has roots in the Miwok, Pomo, Paiute and Wappo tribes. Once they were in a band: she sang, he D.J.’ed. Then they got married and had a child, and “that was pretty much the end of our musical career,” he said.
Nine years ago, they tested out a food cart in Portland, Ore. They went on win a citywide burger contest, and were invited by a Microsoft representative to park on the company’s campus in Seattle. They now have two restaurants in addition to the ice-cream shop, where they devise a new slate of flavors each month. From the archives: toyomansi, evoking a dipping sauce of soy sauce and calamansi, as sharp as lime; and kare kare, a Filipino oxtail stew reimagined as peanut butter with a briny caramel of patis (fish sauce). When customers don’t recognize a flavor, “it starts a conversation,” Mr. McGill said. “They don’t know it — so they try it.”
509 13th Avenue, Seattle; cdicecream.com.
Creamy Peruvian sweets in Pennsylvania
Lucuma is a fruit, but tastes like butterscotch. Cherimoya is a shape-shifter, too, conjuring up pineapple, banana and strawberry all at once. Both are native to the highlands of Peru — far from the Pocono Mountains in East Stroudsburg, Pa., where Julio Amenero turns them into ice cream.
Mr. Amenero grew up in Lima, Peru’s capital, and when the economy imploded in the 1980s, his family found a new life in the United States. For years he worked in microfinance while his father cooked at a hotel. By 2009, they’d saved up enough money for their own restaurant, Inti. His parents ran the kitchen. “I tried to cook, but I’m not good,” Mr. Amenero said with a laugh. “I like ice cream.”
He took ice-cream-making classes in Peru and Argentina, his wife’s home country, where the dessert is a national obsession, and opened Llama Ice Cream in 2017, next door to Inti. In a small factory behind the shop, he makes batches in the Latin style, almost prodigally creamy. Each month he imports 100 kilos of lucuma. Like much of the fruit he relies on, it ripens too quickly to be shipped fresh. He must make do with frozen pulp — or, better, dehydrated and ground to powder: “More intense.”
266 River Road, East Stroudsburg, Pa., llamaicecream.com.
Mardi Gras Homemade Ice Cream
Indian flavors in Columbus, Ohio
Mita Shah, a former marketing statistician, was once a devoted customer of this strip-mall parlor — so devoted that, one day in 2000, she divulged her much-finessed recipe for mango ice cream to the owner. It was such a hit, he offered her a job. She countered: What if I buy the place instead? “Within a week it was mine,” she said. Since then, she has introduced about 20 of what she calls “international flavors,” many of which speak to her upbringing in Gujarat in western India.
One of this year’s new flavors is jamun, or black plum, sweet with a faintly disciplinary tang. It appears alongside chikoo, a fruit with a hint of malt; pan, a menthol crumble of betel leaves, nuts and seeds that stings the mouth clean; and the perennial No. 1 seller (150 gallons a week), kesar pista, sunny from saffron, with a low hum of cardamom and studdings of almonds and pistachios.
Ms. Shah’s husband, Dilip Shah, a recently retired chemical engineer, helps run the shop, but she is the only one permitted to make ice cream. She said, “Nobody can touch my machine.”
1947 Hard Road, Columbus, Ohio.
Mexican ice pops in Kansas City, Kan.
At age 7, José Luis Valdez sold paletas (ice pops) on the streets of Arcelia, in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero — a long way from Kansas and Missouri, where he and his wife, Lucia Fonseca, now run a small ice cream empire. They met in an English-language class in Chicago in 1991. Mr. Valdez spent years in that city, working at high-end French restaurants, saving up to open a Mexican ice-cream shop far from Chicago. “Too much competition,” he said. “And the weather is horrible.”
In 2004 they moved to Kansas City, Kan., where there was a growing Hispanic population but as of yet no paleteria. In the labor-intensive Michoacán style, Mr. Valdez and Ms. Fonseca, assisted by their two daughters, use only fresh, whole fruit and churn slowly, believing that overly smooth ice cream doesn’t taste quite natural.
Churros and pineapple-topped hamburguesas are served alongside ice cream flavors like mamey, which wavers between persimmon and sweet potato, and Mexican Twinkie, strewn with pieces of Gansito, a snack cake with a hidden lode of strawberry jelly. A couple of former employees had dreams, like Mr. Valdez, of managing their own place. Today they are partners in two Paleterias Tropicana shops. “We wanted to give a little back,” Mr. Valdez said. “Give them the opportunity.”
151 South 18th Street, Kansas City, Kan., and four other locations; paleteriastropicana.com.
How Honolulu does sherbet
The specialty at Asato Family Shop, in Honolulu, is technically sherbet (sacrilege!), but so lush that it rivals ice cream. Two years ago, Neale Asato took inspiration from guri-guri (goodie-goodie), a frozen concoction of condensed milk and soda — or so it’s believed; the recipe is secret — invented in the early 1900s by Jokichi Tasaka. It’s still sold today by his great-granddaughters at Tasaka Guri-Guri in Kahului, Maui.
Mr. Asato’s version is denser, with the base recalibrated for each flavor. A week’s rotation might include pickled mango juice; passion-fruit-orange-guava, an ode to POG, a drink that local children sip by the carton; or lemon twanged with li hing mui powder, a salty-sweet-sour dust of dried plums. At first flavors were available by subscription only, delivered by Mr. Asato himself. Last December, he set up shop in downtown Honolulu, dispensing pints on Sundays and Wednesdays. A limited number of preorders are accepted; otherwise you stand and wait. This isn’t stinginess. Mr. Asato doesn’t have the equipment or manpower to make enough sherbet to meet demand.
On Sundays, his wife, Eryn, pitches in, along with their son, Bradyn, 11 — “our cashier,” Mr. Asato said. “He’s faster than us.” Their daughter, Mila, known as Momo, age 4, hands out samples and little treats, and for a moment the line doesn’t seem so long.
1306 Pali Highway, Honolulu; asatofamilyshop.com.
Pakistan meets ’Merica in Mattituck, N.Y.
Once this was a Dairy Queen. Opened here on the North Fork of Long Island in 1966, it was renamed in 1975 after a small rebellion of franchisees; by 2006, it had seen better days. Passing by on a hot summer night, Choudry Ali was startled to see employees locking up early. “A lost opportunity,” he said.
A high-school dropout who came to the United States at 16, Mr. Ali often had to work two jobs: days at a convenience store, nights as a school custodian. He put in years at an electronics warehouse until he realized that, without a diploma, he’d never rise in the ranks. He took over Magic Fountain in early 2007. (“I was lucky to make $20 a day that winter,” he recalled.) His model was the kulfi he had grown up eating in Lahore, Pakistan, made with milk simmered until caramelly, scented by rose water and cardamom and dense with crushed pistachios.
These days, he might lace ice cream with Rooh Afza, an herbal syrup that traditionally yields a curative drink, especially beloved at the end of the long fasting days of Ramadan. Or chop Twinkies for a flavor he calls ’Merica, topped with red, white and blue sprinkles for the Fourth of July. If he runs out of kulfi, “people call and ask what’s going on,” he said. “‘I came from the city,’ they cry. ‘I came from Jersey.’”
9825 Main Road, Mattituck, N.Y.; magicfountainlongisland.com.
Tastes from all over in Durham, N.C.
Shortly after Vanessa Mazuz moved here in 2008, the market crashed and she lost her job as a pastry chef. While her husband, Yoni, continued working toward a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, she picked up odd kitchen gigs, then decided to turn an old school bus into an ice-cream truck. Soon the Ph.D. was abandoned, in favor of experiments with flavors like baklava and labneh, the latter leaning strong into savory, made with thick, slow-moving yogurt, extra-virgin olive oil and mint only half-strained out of the base, leaving green flecks behind. “We weren’t totally sure it would work,” Ms. Mazuz said.
The couple share a nomadic bent. Mr. Mazuz, who was born in Israel and raised in Pennsylvania, has roots in Tunisia and Poland; Ms. Mazuz spent much of her childhood on Saba in the Dutch Antilles, an island with a population of less than 2,000.
Their flavors, which change regularly, observe few borders. But often they weave in the kind of florals found in Middle Eastern cooking: orange blossom, rose petal syrup, jasmine, bergamot. Pomegranate molasses might lend a brooding sweetness. And mint might forgo its classic companion, chocolate chips, and be only itself, tasting of fresh leaves, as if steeped to make tea.
117 Market Street, Durham, N.C.; theparlour.co.
