Because my husband, Michael, and I lived in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn before we met, we share memories that go back to our childhoods. We remember when there was a Woolworth’s on Avenue J — it was where I bought candy with my weekly allowance. We remember blackout cake from Ebinger’s and pizza from DiFara, now famous but then the local slice joint. So one recent night, when we were finishing dinner and Michael said, “I was thinking about the ice cream at that restaurant near Coney Island Avenue,” I jumped in and said, “Remember how it always had itsy bits of ice in it!” It was just the point he wanted to make. The ice was always there, but somehow still always unexpected. I liked it.
I liked the snowflake-shaped frost on Good Humor sundaes too. I liked the Grape-Nuts ice cream we had in Maine on our honeymoon. I didn’t like that Michael put chocolate ice cream on his blueberry pie — it looked messy when it melted — but I got over it.
That night, sitting at the kitchen counter, I realized that I probably could mark my life in memories of ice cream. Ice cream with my father somewhere near a broken-down garage in Rockaway, where the car’s flat tire was being repaired. Ice cream at the Prospect Park Zoo — also with my father. After-school scoops with my son, Joshua, at the Häagen-Dazs shop that used to be on Broadway, in Manhattan. Soft-serve eaten in the car when the Dairy Queen near our house in Connecticut finally opened, an event Joshua looked forward to for months. D.Q.’s season was pretty much the same as baseball’s: Sometime after spring training got underway, the store would crank up its machines, and Joshua would get a Blizzard.
Dairy Queen’s closing for the winter never made sense to me. If you love ice cream, you love it always and forever and want it no matter the weather. Which is why, when Michael, Joshua, our daughter-in-law, Linling, and I were sheltering together for a few months in Connecticut, I kept the freezer full of homemade ice cream. I could have bought ice cream from the supermarket, and I often did, but there’s a lusciousness that you can get only from homemade ice cream. There’s a texture that’s particular. And a joy. Even if you never made ice cream as a kid, and I didn’t, and even if you’re using an electric ice cream maker, as I do, those moments spent watching and waiting for a recipe to become a reward capture childish delight.
The ice cream I make has a lovely, almost velvety texture, and a softness that is surprising, since I don’t start with an egg custard. Most ice cream is made with cream and milk, sugar and, if it’s French-style, egg yolks. Considered classic, French ice cream begins as crème anglaise, a pouring custard, and becomes ice cream in the churn. It was only a few years ago that I found a way to make eggless ice cream, better known as Philadelphia-style, seem as rich as custard: I added powdered milk, to provide fullness; honey, more for smoothness than flavor; and vodka — a shot of alcohol lowers the ice cream’s freezing point and makes it easy to scoop.
My new recipe was good for every kind of ice cream, including those with berries. Berries can be ice cream’s nemesis: The juice that makes them delectable in almost any other dessert makes them intractable in ice cream. But the trinity of powdered milk, honey and alcohol, especially the alcohol, changed that. Whether I used fresh or frozen berries, the ice cream’s texture was still luxurious, and for me, so much of ice cream is about texture — about the way it melts. A languorous melt is a perfect one. The slower the melt, the more flavor you get. Because no one can take a lick of ice cream and not take another (except my husband — it’s one of his most enviable, but annoying, traits), it’s nice when the flavor of one spoonful bolsters the flavor of the next.
As confinement continued, and even as D.Q. opened, I kept churning our family’s favorites, most of them involving my latest version of chocolate chips made with that magic shell mixture of dark chocolate melted with a little coconut oil. Just when the ice cream is almost ready, when the rhythm of the churn has slowed and the ice cream starts to fold and ripple as it spins, I drizzle in the melted chocolate, which firms and forms flakes — some small, some slender, some thick. I save the rest of the chocolate to spoon over scoops. Shiny and lavalike at first, the chocolate dulls and hardens, coating and capping the ice cream, so that it shatters with the tap of a spoon. Soft ice cream, snappy shell and the here-and-there crunch and melt of the chocolate flakes. So many good flavors. So many good textures. Everything I’ve always loved about ice cream, minus the itsy bits of ice.
