The first hot breath of summer is upon the land, and with it has come a perennially deepening dementia that turns otherwise lucid adults into drooling, lip-smacking lunatics, children into chocolate-mustachioed gluttons and family dogs into insatiable beggars. This year, more than ever before, they all scream for ice cream.
Americans have always been afflicted with ice-creamania. Their per capita consumption, currently at 30 pints a year and still counting, has traditionally led the world. Though the invention of ice cream is usually credited to the Emperor Nero,* it was the U.S....