I got to thinking last week, when it was 156 degrees by midafternoon, that it was high time the Blansetts made a batch of ice cream.
And so we did. There are few things as good as a bowl of ice cream scooped from the freezer on a hot August day. Especially if your bowl has some of that hard ice cream that flakes off when you scrape the paddles.
And nothing says summertime as eloquently as the cicadas singing in the elm trees while you get brain freezes from homemade ice cream.
Alas, we no longer had all the pieces to our freezer and it turned out that not a lot of people sell ice cream freezers these days. That could have been catastophic, but, thank heavens, Lincoln County Farm Center had one. An electric one, which was important.
You can freeze ice cream harder with a traditional crank freezer, but my joints and lower back would have run away from home if I’d made them crank a freezer.
I long ago navigated that rite of passage. My mother’s family - the Solomons - made ice cream at almost every hot-weather holiday gathering when I was growing up. It was a big family with 26 of us grandkids, so there might be a crowd of 40 or 50 relatives show up for holidays at Grandma’s house at Roff.
That many people could eat a lot of ice cream, so there would be eight or 10 freezers on Grandma’s wrap-around porch. Grandma herself would eat only vanilla because she thought the others tasted “chalky,” but there would be fruit flavors, too. Strawberry, peach, banana. And chocolate.
Roff had an ice dock in those days, so one of my uncles would buy a couple of big blocks of ice. I don’t remember how much they weighed, but it was enough to require ice-picking them into two or three smaller pieces so my uncles and older cousins could horse them around.
On the porch, a couple of people would use ice picks to get the blocks into freezer-sized pieces while the aunts were mixing the batter.
As, say, an eight-year-old, my job was to crank a freezer until it started to get a little resistance, at which point an older pair of shoulders would take on the cranking.
I am glad I have the memories of cranking an old wood-slat freezer, but it’s kind of like hauling hay. Not something I particularly care to do again.
When I was in grade school, we had a Jersey cow named Bossie that my parents milked twice a day. Mom had an efficient pair of milking hands after growing up on a dairy, so she milked in the mornings and Dad in the evenings.
Being a Jersey, Bossie gave milk that seemed like it was half cream. There was always a gallon jug of raw whole milk in the refrigerator, and that’s what Mom used for the ice cream.
Remembering that thick layer of cream on top of Bossie’s milk, I made a mental note to be sure we had plenty of Marak’s milk.
After unpacking our new freezer Friday evening, we discussed what kind of ice cream to make. Vanilla, strawberry, blackberry, banana, peach...
We ended up with none of the above for the first batch. Kindra flipped through a recipe book that came with the freezer and spied one for coffee ice cream.
I had my doubts, but it turned out to be good. Tasted a lot like a Heath candy bar.
That was Friday night, so Kindra went out Saturday morning to buy doughnuts so that we could have coffee (ice cream) and doughnuts for breakfast. That’s how she rolls.
Sunday afternoon we made a batch of Butterfinger, because that was a favorite of Kindra’s family.
It, too, was good. So good that Martin the dog begged me to drop some in a paper plate and then begged for more and more and still more.
We have a sack of peaches on the counter and a firm commitment from Kindra that they will go into the next batch.
After that, who knows? Ice cream made from Big Red pop was a favorite of the locals when we dwelled among the Texans. We might try a batch of it, or maybe lime sherbet. And suddenly grape sherbet sounds pretty good.
It will be an interesting summer for sure.