At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  When the prologues of Diphilus were unavailable, the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had borrowed the trick from the Middle East, sometimes chilled their drinks with ice and snow. The ice, which was cut in winter from ponds and streams, and the snow, which was carried from mountaintops, were stored underground in straw-lined pits. If the pits were sufficiently well insulated, their contents could remain frozen throughout the summer.

  By the seventeenth century, rich Florentines were so addicted to cold drinks that, in a poem called “Bacco in Toscano,” Francesco Redi called snow “the fifth element”:

  He is mad who without snow

  Thinks to receive a satisfied guest.

  Bring then from Vallombrosa

  Snow in God’s plenty.…

  And bring me ice

  From the grotto under the Boboli hill.

  With long picks

  With great poles

  Shatter

  crush

  crunch

  crack, chip

  Until all resolves

  In finest iciest powder…

  Redi also mentioned something called pappina, a semisolid dessert made from snow beaten with fruit juices or other flavorings. However, as the late British food writer Elizabeth David observed in Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices, “Ice-diluted and ice-cooled sherbets do not… equate with frozen sherbets any more than putting a few pieces of ice into a glass of drinking water turns that water into ice, or than the milk half-frozen in the bottle on your doorstep on an icy morning has become ice-cream.”

  It has long been believed that real sherbets and ice creams—desserts that were artificially frozen by submerging their containers in icy brine or other refrigerants—were introduced to France in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henry II, who brought the recipes from Italy. In 1861, Isabella Beeton, the author of a British domestic bible called The Book of Household Management, declared this contribution to French cuisine so invaluable that Catherine should be forgiven the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Elizabeth David pooh-poohs the Catherine story. She thinks the Italians did not figure out how to make ice cream until the seventeenth century and that the first French ices were made around 1660 by a distiller named Audiger. This is Audiger’s recipe for strawberry sorbet:

  For [32 oz.] of water crush one pound of strawberries in the said water, add eight to ten ounces of sugar, and then the juice of a lemon.… When the sugar has melted, and all is well incorporated, filter the mixture through a sieve, and cool it.… Put three, four, or six containers or other vessels according to their size in a tub, at one finger’s distance each from the other, then you take the ice, which you pound well, and salt it when it is pounded, and promptly put it in the tub all round your boxes.… When all is thus arranged you leave it for half an hour, or three quarters.… Then you move the ice covering your boxes and stir the liquor with a spoon so that it freezes into a snow.

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italians were believed to make the best frozen desserts. (Many people still hold this opinion, including a friend of mine who, on a recent visit to Sicily, was told by some local friends that they wished him to experience a “traditional Catania breakfast.” He had lugubrious visions of pasta heaped with eggplant. However, the breakfast, served at an elegant café, turned out to be granita di caffé con panna: an espresso-flavored quasi-sherbet topped with whipped cream.) In 1778, a Benedictine monk in Apulia published recipes for ices and ice creams flavored with coffee, chocolate, cinnamon, candied eggs, chestnuts, pistachios, almonds, fennel seeds, violets, jasmine, oranges, lemons, strawberries, peaches, pears, apricots, bitter cherries, melons, watermelons, pomegranates, and muscatel grapes. In Victorian Britain, the duke of Beaufort employed a Neapolitan confectioner who invented a new sorbetto (the flavor, unfortunately, is not recorded), a feat so momentous that it warranted waking His Grace in the middle of the night to tell him the good news.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, the earliest record of ice cream dates to 1744. The man who ate it, at the home of the governor of Maryland, said it went down “Deliciously.” His tastes were shared by George Washington, who owned two pewter ice cream pots, and Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own eighteen-step recipe. It was not until after James Madison became president in 1809, however, that ice cream realized its full ceremonial potential. A White House guest wrote:

  Mrs. Madison always entertains with Grace and Charm, but last night there was a sparkle in her eye that set astir an Air of Expectancy among her Guests. When finally the brilliant Assemblage—America’s best—entered the dining room, they beheld a Table set with French china and English silver, laden with good things to eat, and in the Centre high on a silver platter, a large, shining dome of pink Ice Cream.

  After that historic moment, it seems inevitable that in 1921, the commissioner of Ellis Island would decree that all newly arrived immigrants be served ice cream as part of their first American meal.

  Americans now eat more ice cream per capita than the citizens of any other nation, and I am proud to say that from an early age I have worked hard to do my part for my country. I fixed the starting date of my own ice cream calculus at age eighteen because that marked the beginning of the period when I could consume my favorite food ad libitum. However, a substantial fraction of my pre-adult self was also made up of cream, milk, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla extract, and carrageenan (a natural stabilizer made from Chondrus crispus, a cartilaginous red alga that is harvested with long rakes from intertidal rocks along the North Atlantic).

  Although partial to Toasted Almond Good Humors, I was aware, even as a very young child, that the kingdom of ice cream contains an exquisite haut monde as well as an affable proletariat. On special occasions, my parents would arrive home from New York City bearing a lavender box, swathed in dry ice, from Louis Sherry, in which reposed a frozen confection called Mocha Praliné. (O vanished love! What would I not give for a taste of you now!) Shaped like a birthday cake, Mocha Praliné was made of coffee ice cream decorated with fluted extrusions of whipped cream (frozen whipped cream, which gently resisted the tooth rather than squishing) and embedded with Tootsie Roll–sized logs of hazelnut-impregnated chocolate fudge. The logs were faintly gritty in texture and—there is no other way to describe them—excremental in color and shape. Who knows what regressive satisfactions, what thrillingly broken taboos, were bound up in their consumption?

  When I was in the third grade, we moved to Los Angeles, where Mocha Praliné was unavailable and my brother and I were consequently morose. Our mother, to her everlasting credit, attempted to console us by frequently taking us to lunch at Blum’s. Lunch was a chocolate milkshake. Period. (Although on other occasions she touted the merits of raw carrots and whole wheat bread, she was wise enough to recognize that if you drank an entire milkshake—the contents of the soda glass plus the contents of the metal shaker—you would hardly touch your hamburger anyway, so why order one?) As teenagers, we favored bowls of Baskin-Robbins Chocolate Mint (the color of fly-specked absinthe), which we bought by the half gallon, carried home on our bicycles, and excavated with a spade large enough to dig a grave.

  In the fall of 1974, en route from California to our college in Boston, Kim and I decided to conduct a transcontinental ice cream tasting. We plotted our zigzag journey on a huge map, basing our ports of call on the recommendations of friends, and, after we sampled each shop’s wares, assigned them a rating ranging from one to three ice cream cones. Starting at McConnell’s in Santa Barbara (three cones), we pressed on to Snelgrove in Salt Lake City (two cones); Platte Valley Creamery in Scotts-bluff, Nebraska (two and a half cones); Snowbird Frozen Custard in Indianapolis (one and a half cones); Ohio State University Creamery in Columbus (one and a half cones); and Bailey’s in Cambridge (two cones). As you can see, it was all downhill after McConnell’s, the sanctum sanctorum of ice cream: a shrine so beneficent that it served two kinds of vanilla (with and without specks), two k
inds of chocolate (milk and bittersweet), and two kinds of coffee (smooth and peppered with ground espresso beans, samples of which an undeserving customer once Scotch-taped to a letter that said, “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS STUFF IN MY ICE CREAM?”).

  Fifteen years later, when my husband and I got married, it was a foregone conclusion—at least on my part— that ice cream would play an important role in the ceremonies. At our rehearsal dinner, our New York City loft was filled with the strange grinding noises of three hand-crank ice cream makers, each of which, under Kim’s supervision, produced five quarts: vanilla, coffee, and mint chip. George and I gave the other members of the wedding party engraved silver pens. Kim received an engraved silver ice cream scoop.

  My brother and his scoop now reside in Jackson, Wyoming. Although Kim works as a mountaineering guide, leads kayak expeditions, plays jazz recorder, teaches courses on snow morphology and the aerodynamics of bird flight, takes nature photographs, and manages a small investment fund, I think of him primarily as Wyoming’s Emperor of Ice Cream.

  Every few months, under the auspices of Central Wyoming College, Kim offers a class on the physics and chemistry of ice cream making. Have you ever wondered why homemade ice cream requires a mixture of ice and salt between the tub and the canister? Answer: salt lowers the freezing point of water by pushing apart the crystal lattice of ice, drawing the energy needed for this disruption by stealing heat from the ice cream mix. If there was no salt packed around the canister to cool the melting ice below 32 degrees, the mix, which freezes at around 27 degrees, would remain liquid even if you cranked for a hundred years.

  Aside from the ingredients, what are the two most important variables in ice cream production? Answer: butterfat, which should be high, and overrun, which should be low. Ice cream must legally have a butterfat content of least 10 percent. Ben & Jerry’s has 15 percent; McConnell’s has 17 percent (and formerly had 22 percent, but too many customers complained that, post-sundae, the roofs of their mouths felt waxy). Overrun is the proportion of air whipped into the mix while it freezes. The cheapest commercial ice cream, which has 100 percent overrun, is half air and has the consistency of frozen shaving cream; McConnell’s has 15 percent overrun and the consistency of ambrosia. Kim likes to reduce the overrun of Breyers Coffee, which he rates excellent in flavor but excessively fluffy in texture, by placing a few scoops in a plastic bag and smashing them with a meat-tenderizing mallet. (“How often do you do this?” I asked. “Always!” he answered. “Why eat all that air when it’s so easy to get it out?”)

  What makes the mix turn into a scoopable mush rather than a greasy ice cube? Answer: the combination of cold and agitation, which can be accomplished in a commercial ice cream freezer, an electric home ice cream maker, a hand-cranker, or the back of a B-17 bomber. According to a 1943 New York Times article Kim is fond of quoting, American airmen stationed in Britain “place prepared ice-cream mixture in a large can and anchor it to the rear gunner’s compartment of a Flying Fortress. It is well shaken up and nicely frozen by flying over enemy territory at high altitudes.”

  Alternatively, you can use liquid nitrogen. Kim’s ice-cream-making technique underwent a revolution a decade ago, after a geology expedition in Yellowstone with two friends—one the daughter of the pâtissier to the king of Denmark, the other a geochronologist from U.C. Berkeley. As they were climbing Dunraven Pass, Kim mentioned—somehow it seemed apropos—that he had never been able to make a perfect homemade ice cream because the mix took about half an hour to freeze, during which time its ice crystals grew, through the process of melt-freeze metamorphosis, to a larger than optimal size. The geochronologist, whose name was Garniss Curtis, commented that a colder refrigerant would freeze the mix faster.

  “I’ve tried dry ice bubbling in alcohol,” said Kim. “It was a mess.”

  “No,” said Professor Curtis. “I mean really cold. Dry ice is only minus 107 Fahrenheit. Liquid nitrogen is minus 320.”

  Kim returned to Jackson and took a large thermos bottle to the local sperm bank, which uses liquid nitrogen to preserve its merchandise. “Young man,” said the director, eyeing the thermos, “that’s quite a contribution.” Kim explained that he wished to make a withdrawal, not a deposit. He took home a liter of liquid nitrogen and became an instant convert.

  In the brave new world of nitro, no ice cream maker, either hand-crank or electric, is necessary. If the mix has been pre-chilled in a kitchen freezer, liquid nitrogen freezes it so fast that one needs only a metal pot and a metal stirring spoon (glass or plastic would shatter). I have frequently witnessed the process, which can justly be described as Macbethian. Because liquid nitrogen boils at 320 degrees below zero, when it comes into contact with warm air and is forced to change from a liquid to a gas, it seethes and steams like water in a spaghetti pot.

  Although Kim has created many more complex recipes, the following ultra-simple one is my favorite. I’m not sure you should try it at home.

  KIM FADIMAN’S COFFEE KAHLÚA LIQUID NITROGEN ICE CREAM

  1. Mix one pint half-and-half and one pint heavy cream.

  2. Stir in several teaspoons good instant coffee, to taste.

  3. Stir in sugar to taste (at least one cup: remember that because cold desensitizes sweet-sensitive taste buds, frozen ice cream will taste less sweet than mix).

  4. Stir in Kahlúa to taste (at least two tablespoons).

  5. Chill mix in kitchen freezer for about forty minutes, until small ice crystals begin to form around periphery.

  6. Pour one inch of mix into large metal kitchen pot with insulated handle.

  7. Ask friend with steady hands and thick gloves to hold handle.

  8. Put on goggles and gloves.

  9. Slowly pour liquid nitrogen from Dewar flask into pot while stirring mix vigorously with metal spoon, continuously scraping freezing mix off interior of pot. Liquid nitrogen will freeze flesh as well as ice cream. Watch where you pour.

  10. Resist temptation to pour in big slug all at once. This creates spectacular mushroom cloud but freezes ice cream to texture of fossilized Rice Krispies.

  11. When mix is stiff but not brittle, stop pouring. Wait until bubbling and hissing stop. If you eat ice cream before liquid nitrogen turns to vapor, you will suffer frostbite of the throat.

  Kim has never suffered frostbite of the throat, though he did once suffer frostbite of the toes when he splashed a few −320° drops on his bare feet. However, in defense of liquid nitrogen, he hastens to mention that his only ice cream near-fatality occurred in connection with an old-fashioned hand-cranker in his pre-nitro days.

  He was on a river trip in the Grand Canyon. Because he was one of the organizers, he had been able to conceal in the food supplies, without the knowledge of the other paddlers, a five-quart ice cream maker, a large sack of rock salt, and an insulated picnic chest containing several bags of ice and the ingredients for coffee ice cream. On the fifth morning of the trip, with his tent neatly stuffed and his gear stowed, he found himself waiting impatiently on the riverbank for the other expedition members to get ready. After an hour, he threw the ice cream ingredients into his kayak, threaded the rope of his quick-release rescue rig through the drain hole of the ice cream maker, and set off down the Colorado River.

  Paddling alone in the Grand Canyon is a bad idea. Paddling alone in the Grand Canyon with a five-quart ice cream maker strapped to the back deck of your kayak is a very bad idea. In the middle of Nankoweap Rapid, a wave broke over the stern, filled the tub of the ice cream maker, and tipped Kim over. Normally, he would easily have performed an Eskimo roll, a way of bracing the paddle against the water in order to turn an upside-down kayak right side up. However, the weight and drag of the water-filled tub created so much resistance that he was unable to roll.

  Zooming through the rapid upside down, his head underwater, Kim thought, “Ice cream is going to be the death of me.” Finally, with a huge effort, he managed to roll the kayak on his fourth try. He paddled, shivering and panting, to a
nearby sandbar.

  Half an hour later, the rest of the expedition floated around the bend. As one of its members recently recalled, “There sat Kim in the 120-degree sun, as calm as Buddha, cranking the handle of a gigantic ice cream maker.”

  “Were you angry that he’d taken off without the rest of you?” I asked.

  “Not after the first spoonful.”

  NIGHT OWL

  y husband and I sleep in a white wooden bed whose head posts are surmounted by two birds, carved and painted by an artist friend. On George’s side there is a meadowlark, brown of back, yellow of breast, with a black pectoral V as trig and sporty as the neck of a tennis sweater. On my side there is a snowy owl, more muted in coloration, its feathers a frowzy tessellation of white and black. Sturnella magna and Nyctea scandiaca have one thing in common: they are both fast asleep, their eyes shut tight, their beaks resting peacefully on their breasts.

  Alas, the lark and the owl who rest beneath their wooden familiars have a far harder time synchronizing their circadian rhythms. George is an early riser, a firm believer in seizing the day while it is still fresh. I am not fully alive until the sun sets. In the morning, George is quick and energetic, while I blink in the sunlight, move as if through honey, and pour salt in the coffee. When we turn off the light at 11:30—too late for him, too early for me—George falls instantly asleep, while I, mocked by the bird that slumbers above my head, arrange and rearrange the pillows, searching for the elusive cool sides.

  In the fourth century b.c., Androsthenes, a scribe who accompanied Alexander the Great to India, observed that the tamarind tree opened its leaves during the day and folded them at night. He assumed that it was worshiping the sun. Twenty-two centuries later, the great Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus designed a flower clock—a circular garden whose twelve wedge-shaped flower beds, each planted with species whose petals opened at a different hour, told the time from 6:00 A.M. (white water lily) to 6:00 P.M. (evening primrose). In humans, the circadian clock is centered in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a freckle-sized, sickle-shaped cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, but it can be activated by proteins produced by genes all over the body. Scientists at Cornell have successfully reset human biological clocks (though only temporarily) by shining bright lights on the backs of people’s knees, suggesting that the mechanisms for controlling sleeping and waking are embedded in nearly every human cell—as well as in every flower petal, every insect antenna, every bird wing.