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What can be determined for sure is that cheap ice cream is half air. It would be airier still if Government regulations allowed it. Expensive ice cream is less than 30% air. Not only is superpremium made with the best cream, fresh fruit, chocolate and liqueurs (a fine French vanilla assays out at 3% egg yolks, twice the minimum specified by the U.S. Government for ice cream that is labeled French), but it contains a great deal more of these ingredients. A gallon of asylum-grade supermarket chocolate ripple weighs about 4½ lbs., and a gallon of Ben & Jerry's ineffable Heath bar or knee-weakening black raspberry weighs 6½ lbs. Haagen-Dazs rum raisin, flavored with fresh-plucked umlauts, weighs about 8 lbs. Not much air.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Vreenfield, high school friends from Long Island, started Ben & Jerry's in Burlington four years ago. Now, at age 30, they tend strongly toward plumpness and prosperity. In place of the traditional seven-year-old boy who must be bribed with dasher-licking rights before he will turn the crank of the hand freezer, they use a reduction gear to make the paddles of the freezer in their wholesale plant turn slowly enough. At their ice-cream parlor, a rowdily redecorated former gas station, an elderly White Mountain Freezer Co. rock-salt-and-ice contraption chunks away serenely in a position of honor. It is powered by a senile electric motor but otherwise, wooden tub and all, it is a 5-gal. enlargement of the traditional hand-turned ecstasy machine. This freezer, which somewhat surprisingly produces enough ice cream for the 1,600 customers who crowd in on a good day, does its magic under the attentive view of the area's kids. If Manager Don Miller is in a good mood, those who are quick on their feet get to lick the dasher that he pulls out when a batch is finished. The rest of the semisolid mass then disappears for a day; it is flash-frozen at —10° F so that large ice crystals do not form, and then it is tempered for a few hours in a freezer 20° warmer. These days Ben and Jerry keep their machine going without letup, but often in the first months of their proprietorship, they were forced to hang up the dreaded international no-more-ice-cream sign: a red circle containing an ice-cream cone with a slash through it.