Ice Cream
Note of Approval: Ice Cream
“Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” observed the writer A.S. Byatt, and this fierce irony is at the heart of a conundrum that has puzzled us for as long as we have been eating ice cream: How can something so cold be so pleasing?
Let’s begin with the sweetness. Oh, the sweetness: The touch of sugar on the tongue that promises delight to the whole body from the very first taste. It’s no accident that the sacred texts of religion and literature are full of paeans to honey and sugar; the frequent comparisons to both love and the Lord are an indication of the prize we place on things that are sweet.
Then there is the creaminess: That tactile, elastic mouthfeel that carries comfort through every delicious scoop. Cream signifies fat, and fat is stored in the human body to be converted into energy for future use. Energy makes us go!
Of course, there is also the nostalgia factor: Each ice cream we eat contains within it the memory of every other ice cream we’ve eaten, be it on a hot summer day at camp when we were children or on a dark, rainy night when our heartache was so great that the only balm that could assuage our pain was the pint in the freezer that we stood over the sink and spooned up until it was gone.
What else? Oh, right, the colors. Think about how many different colors there are of ice cream! White for vanilla, brown for chocolate, red for strawberry. Green. Purple, I guess. I’ve seen blue for sure. So many different colors! When you look at them them lined up next to each other, as you do in an ice cream shop, it is like seeing a rainbow you can eat. Who wouldn’t love to eat a rainbow?
Ice cream shops, right, those are another good thing about ice cream. How many happy moments have you spent in your life in an ice cream shop, anticipating the pleasure that is about to occur, reveling in the bounty that almost spoils you for choice? Ice cream shops are awesome. They are like bars that serve sugar and fat.
I almost forgot the toppings! You can put fucking anything on ice cream and it is amazing. When I was a child the choices were either chocolate sprinkles or rainbow sprinkles, but these days they will grab a bag of whatever crazy crap they got from the snack aisle of the grocery store and mash it into the ice cream and it tastes like God jizzed into a cone. Is there anything else you can dump a bunch of shit into and have it come out somehow better than it went in? Fuck no!
And don’t get me started on what they’re doing with cones now. Also booze in ice cream.
To be sure, ice cream is not all pure bliss. Let us not forget the bane of the ice cream eater’s existence. I speak of the dreaded “ice cream headache,” that sharp and stabbing spike that inexorably attacks at your moment of greatest joy. But even that is another miraculous example of ice cream’s power. The blending of pain and pleasure produces a sensation so highly refined that it is been a muse to philosophers and songwriters since time immemorial. Pretty impressive, ice cream!
“The only emperor,” wrote the great Wallace Stevens, “is the emperor of ice-cream.” And he was an insurance guy full time, not just some kind of artsy dreamer. If a businessman in Hartford knew that ice cream is the best thing ever then it is pretty much indisputable that ice cream is as good as it gets. Ice cream is terrific. I highly recommend it.
Photo: Shutterstock.com