Sometimes after a long day of fishing off the coast of South Florida, my dad would stop at a Dairy Queen somewhere between wherever we had been spending a hot summer day on the water and the southern Miami suburb we lived in. “My dad used to take me here after fishing,” he’d say each time we pulled up into the parking lot of some random Dairy Queen located off the highway. Inside, the walls were covered in Dennis the Menace pictures. The cups were also printed with Dennis the Menace pictures and scenes from the comic strip. For almost 30 years, Dennis the Menace was the symbol of Dairy Queen, an affiliation I never understood other than the supposed nostalgia it evoked in people who had grown up reading the comic strip. While I owned several Dennis the Menace paperbacks as a kid, which I would read on the toilet, I have no memory of Dennis the Menace ever eating ice cream. The only thing Dairy Queen served then was ice cream. Soft serve out of a machine. The ice cream sat in the cup or cone in a complex swirl. Vanilla or chocolate. We’d sit in the car and eat ice cream without talking. Then we pulled the boat back to Kendall where I was yelled at to clean the boat out with the hose.
I used to make ice cream. I have a basic Cuisinart ice cream maker whose bowl sits in the freezer, always ready to be used if the urge to make ice cream ever hits me again. I learned my basic technique from David Lebovitz’s book The Perfect Scoop. I once bought the Jeni’s book to learn a new technique, but she doesn’t use cream, so I abandoned the project. Some flavors I used to make: chocolate, peanut butter chocolate, flourless chocolate cake chocolate, pistachio, lambic vanilla, chocolate stout. “Do you remember when I’d make ice cream,” I ask my kids. “No,” they answer.
Sitting in his favorite recliner, the foot rest propped up, the chair leaning slightly backward, my father would eat ice cream every night. He often bought Breyers three flavors, which really should be called Neapolitan. The strawberry, for some reason, would go uneaten by the family. Often, he took all of the ice cream out of its original packaging and put it in a Tupperware container. Breyers belongs in the family of ice creams with high air content. Blue Bell would be another. Ben and Jerry’s has less air, so it is richer and creamier. Whenever I see those giant tubs of ice cream for about $5 in the Kroger freezer, I shudder. That is not ice cream. That is air and milk. When my father finished his Breyers ice cream, eaten often from a coffee mug and occasionally a bowl, he would put the mug or bowl on the floor and the dog would lick out the rest. The dog would lick from the same bowls and mugs we’d use to eat and drink from.
My late father in law loved ice cream. Once, in the State College creamery located on the Penn State campus, he finished off two enormous scoops in a cone. He briefly excused himself from the table. A few minutes later, he returned with two more enormous scoops in a cone. He was also the type of person to buy a giant Blue Bell tub from the local grocery where he lived in Lincoln, Nebraska. Sometimes I imagine folks in 18th and 19th century America, bound down by heavy wool coats and more undergarments than one should wear, figuring out that salt could cause milk and egg yolk to freeze into a desert if you churned it together quickly enough. The “elite” ice creams of my childhood were Häagen-Dazs and Frusen Gladje, two made up names that were meant to associate the product with Scandinavian culture. Apparently, the Scandinavians were the rhetorical equivalent of elite ice cream product for 1980s America. Today, craft culture serves that purpose. Small batch ice creams with unique flavor combinations made by people with only first names or in Brooklyn and available at your local Whole Foods.
Homemade ice cream includes mostly raw egg yolks. I would use six egg yolks to make the base. The yolks are briefly heated along with milk, dissolved sugar, and heavy cream. Too much heat, however, will turn the yolks into scrambled eggs. The difference between breakfast and desert, it seems, is as little heat for as little time as possible. During the pandemic, I took my kids to Sweet Matriarch Bakery in Georgetown, Kentucky, about a 20 minute drive from my house. People stand in line in order to purchase giant $13 milkshakes served in a jelly jar with several scoops of ice cream and a cupcake on the top. We waited an hour in the hot sun with our masks on, getting sweaty and impatient. Then we sat outside a store front and made a mess of ourselves trying to eat the thing. It felt indulgent during a time period that felt oppressive and overwhelming. It also felt like a great deal more than the supposedly indulgent $5 milkshake in Pulp Fiction.
Ice cream signifies indulgence. As one 1980s Frusen Gladje commercial claims, it also signifies guilt. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have. Why did I eat so much? Narratives of seclusion, heart break, and disappointment are often accompanied by the story of eating an entire pint of ice cream and the ensuing guilt. Guilt and pleasure are twins. They need each other. Milk, eggs, sugar, and cream are considered decadent when juxtaposed and placed in some kind of container. The Frusen Gladje container, as I recall, made it nearly impossible to get the remaining ice cream out once several scoops had been extracted. The tubular shape of the container was poorly designed. Design ignored usage and the potential for indulgence.
Carvel flying saucer ice cream sandwiches were an indulgence when I was a kid. I often shoved the package of six sandwiches to the very back of the freezer, hoping my father wouldn’t find it. We had enough money to buy as much food as we wanted to, but like some 1920s Depression survivor, I hid the flying saucers. My son eats ice cream almost every night after dinner. He prefers Magnum, often cited as the most popular ice cream in the world and manufactured by the conglomerate Unilever. In China, we often ate the cheap Magnum ice cream bars, pulled from the outdoor freezer at the small shop on the university campus near our apartment. I once asked on Facebook why I enjoy cheap ice creams abroad, but not at home. When traveling, I’ll often pull from bodega and small shop freezers all kinds of cheap ice cream bars by companies I have never heard of and hopefully in flavors I seldom see in America. My love of the different borders on the romantic, the hyperbolic, and the belief that there exists over there — which means not here — something better than what I currently experience and know. Of course, this is the worst attitude possible. Longing for over there always means forgetting what we have right now and here where we currently are. This is how I read my own disappointments in others: they longed for over there and ignored what was right here.
Locally, I eat the craft options of Crank & Boom and Sorella. Buy local, we are told. When we once travelled as a family in what feels like a century ago, a stop at a local ice cream place was typically scheduled. I have thousands of pictures of my children with ice cream dripping down their chins and splashed across their faces from Brooklyn, Madison, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Atlanta. The typical and well circulated parenthood photograph is often of the messy child, whether in a high chair or old enough to sit among the rest of us. The messiness is a celebration of youthful indulgence. Look, we want to say. This kid has no worries. No problems. A bowl of ice cream is the most amazing pleasure he or she can experience. We want that too. It’s over there. It’s with them who lack all nostalgia and memory and only have the pleasure of now. I want it. I want more now.
The only Van Halen song I ever liked was “Ice Cream Man.” Weird Al sang “I Love Rocky Road.” Sarah McLachlan said “Your love is better than ice cream,” which I assume is a compliment. Tom Waits, too, sang about the ice cream man, a ballad sounding tune from the perspective of the ice cream truck peddler who says, “baby I’ll be good to you” and “if you got no change, it can be arranged.” Maybe an innuendo of sexual indulgence. The ice cream truck never came to our suburban neighborhood. We had to settle for whatever could be bought at Publix or Carvel.
In my freezer right now are various ice creams by different brands in various stages of completion. Sometimes an ice cream sits in my freezer in an almost finished state for quite a long time, ice particles forming on top of what was once desirable and making the mix of indulgent ingredients (coffee, pretzels, pistachios, caramel, raspberry swirl, almonds, cheesecake) no longer wanted. Time destroys indulgence. Ice cream ages poorly. Desire fades with time. That Dairy Queen is no longer what it once was. We aren’t really nostalgic, though, for ruined ice cream. We may, instead, be nostalgic for ruined relationships which often took the time to stop in ice cream shops and enjoy what was then a now.
My dad stopped for Dairy Queen because of nostalgia and longing. When my grandfather passed away, my father was only 23. He was still a kid. When I was 23, I was in the army, and still a kid as well. I think my dad spent his whole life longing for his father, his father’s manly presence, his father’s protection, his father’s advice, his father’s love. There always seemed to be the shadow of my long deceased grandfather cast over my father’s life: he took over his father’s business, he employed his mother, he became a father without a father. That shadow prevented him from really enjoying the indulgence of having a family. A family, too, is an indulgent act. One can indulge in the pleasures one’s kids have, living vicariously and alongside their messiness. I don’t know that my father really enjoyed Dairy Queen ice cream in the early 1980s. He enjoyed, I believe, loss. Memories of loss. He lived, to some extent, a life of loss. Many people get through loss only by continuing to remember it or continuing to live within it until it becomes their identity. With or without ice cream as a placeholder for that loss, this is not often a productive feeling as it traps us within and erases who we are and who we are with. I don’t share this nostalgia. My losses are not caught up in nostalgia or food or stops along the highway to remember what I once shared with my father. My losses are elsewhere.
I don’t want food, ice cream or otherwise, to hold my loss. “Look,” I say to my kids one day as I scroll through Instagram. Most of my Instagram feeds are of food. “Look at this ice cream! Shit. Doesn’t that look good!” “Uh huh,” they answer. “Hey, I just read about a new ice cream place in town,” I might say. “Want to go check it out?” “Maybe,” they say. Driving past Manchester Avenue, I might say, “Should we stop at Crank & Boom for ice cream?” “NOOOOO!!!” they shout. I don’t take it personally. I know that they like ice cream as much as I do. I know they share our memories from ice cream and other matters. And I know, as well, if I ever make another batch of ice cream, they’ll be the first to ask for some.
