Fresh fruit and fantasy now turn butterfat into delicious sin
What you must understand at the outset is that Ben & Jerry's, in Burlington, Vt., makes the best ice cream in the world.
That Mayfield's, in Athens, Tenn., is the world's best ice cream. That the absolute best ice cream in the universe, without argument (although the partisans who urge these passionate and contradictory views are happy to argue all night), is stirred and cranked and lovingly scooped by Lickety Split in Denver, by Bob's Famous in Washington, D.C., or by Gelato in San Francisco. Nonsense, says a newcomer to the discussion, which started as a modest watercooler filibuster and has quickly become an anarchic mob scene. If you believe such claims it is because—you poor, butter-fat-starved, crushed-strawberry-and fresh-peach-and Oreo-mint-deficient ignoramous—you have never laid tongue to a rich, chewy, almost dripping sugar-cone full of sinfully delightful ice cream made by the enchanted trolls of Robert's in Southampton, N.Y.
Never mind gin and tonic —well, perhaps a short one —and forget the return of baseball's prodigal sons. We are dealing here with primal matters, with a current in the national psyche far deeper and more powerful than our tropism toward corn on the cob and Japanese cars. Ice cream is our drug of choice, and butterfat—the word itself is dizzyingly lovely and globulous—is the occasion of our guiltiest and most delicious sin. Fourteen percent butterfat. Eighteen percent. Four hundred percent butterfat, some dreamer with glazed-over eyes says and actually seems to believe. The great underground truth of our society—a republic in which three-fourths of the males and every female over the age of nine are chained to the Scarsdale Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet, or perhaps by now a starvation routine concocted in some other overfed suburb whose inhabitants are rumored to be of ectoplasmic skinniness—is that more and more of us are now strung out on heavy cream, egg yolks, pure vanilla and—yes, oh yes—hot fudge topping with whipped cream, jimmies and walnuts.
On a rainy Saturday night in darkest Somerville, Mass.—a time and place suitable for filming the maiden-munching scene of a monster flick—a long line of wet people huddle under the blue-and-white awnings of Steve's. Another 50 sodden citizens wait inside. They are lining up to buy ice cream—carob, perhaps, or banana coffee, since a temporary shortage of fine cinnamon has made the obvious first choice of chocolate-cinnamon-raisin unavailable—at a cost of $1.60 for a large scoop with one mix-in, or $2 for a large scoop with three mix-ins. A mix-in, for those who have not yet followed aerobic eating into its postmodern era, may be butterscotch chips and walnuts, pulverized Reese's peanut butter cups, crushed Oreos, M & Ms or—in some temples of asceticism—granola. Mix-ins are not simply dumped on top of a scoop of ice cream as toppings would be in a conventional sundae; they are kneaded expertly into the very flesh of the scoop—be still, my beating heart!—while the tongue and gullet and gizzard of the sufferer who has waited in line for 45 minutes send out urgent warnings of collapse.