Ice cream

[azziria]

When I was a child there was no such thing as Baskin Robbins or Ben and Jerry's here in the UK. Ice cream came in six flavours: vanilla (very yellow and not really tasting of anything), strawberry (a strange chemical-tasting fluorescent pink substance), chocolate (beige and sweet), coffee (also beige and sweet), rasberry ripple (vanilla with a scant swirl of red syrup in it) and the oh-so-exotic rum n'raisin (beige with lumps). If you felt really daring you could buy a tub of Neapolitan - one tub divided into sections of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. But that was pretty much it.

When I was seventeen I went on a school trip to Rome. In the Piazza Narvona I purchased a chocolate ice cream: a small tub of a very dark brown substance with a swirl of whipped cream on top. The first mouthful was a revelation: an intense hit of almost bitter chocolate, rich and creamy, a world, no, a universe away from that thing we called chocolate ice cream back home. The taste of sophistication, of being in a foreign land, of the fact that food could be exotic and exciting and adventurous.

The taste of growing up, of expanding horizons, of endless possibilities opening up. I've never forgotten it.

(Brought to you tonight courtesy of a tub of particularly fine chocolate ice cream purchased from our village store. Every bit as good as that ice cream in the Piazza Narvona, which shows how the world has changed, but nowhere near as revelatory!)

Comments

[ladyegreen.livejournal.com]

Fantastic entry

[azziria.livejournal.com]

Thank you :)

[jendeana.livejournal.com]

What a poetic description of such a heavenly treat. Now I need some ice cream.

[azziria.livejournal.com]

It's a good memory :)

I went back a few years ago and stood in the Piazza Narvona and ate chocolate ice cream and was seventeen again, just for a few minutes. That was good, too.

[alamo-girl80.livejournal.com]

When my mother was in Rome, she got hooked on gelato, and there are a few specialty shops around here that sell it. But it's not the same as Italian gelato. Which just another reason on my very long list of Reasons to get to Italy before I DIE!

[azziria.livejournal.com]

Yes, you must go. Go to Rome in the Spring, before it gets too hot. Take a train down to Naples (the Italian inter-city trains are excellent) and then the Circumvesuviana railway (rattly and graffitied but also very good) to Sorrento and spend an evening participating in the evening passeggiata and enjoying the view across the Bay of Naples. Go to Pompeii (fabuluous!). Go up north to Umbria and stroll around the backstreets of Perugia and Assissi, where even at the height of the tourist season you can still escape the crowds if you're prepared to take a side street. And eat ice cream, everywhere, see how many flavours you can get through during your trip :)

[alamo-girl80.livejournal.com]

Can you be my tour guide? Seriously, you named pretty much EVERYTHING I wanted to do...

[azziria.livejournal.com]

It's what we did a few years back, and it was pretty much perfect :)

Florence is also nice, from what little I saw on a business trip many moons ago (thanks to an Italian client anxious to show off his home country to best effect, I got to go and see Michaelangelo's David on paid time *g*).

[aguynamedrick.livejournal.com]

I guess I never considered how ice cream might be different. I grew up before Ben and Jerry's. We didn't have Baskin and Robins.

At home, we always had Neapolitan. Probably because my parents couldn't get me and my sisters to agree on a single flavor.

When we went out, we went to Dairy Queen. It had soft ice cream. The vanilla was good. You could also get chocolate or swirl. I didn't care for the chocolate ice cream, so I always went with vanilla. We could get the cones dipped in chocolate, butter scotch or cherry. It cooled to form a hard covering.

[azziria.livejournal.com]

The other sort of ice cream we had was the soft Mr Whippy stuff which came from ice cream vans, but we were never allowed to eat that because you couldn't be sure that all the equipment was properly cleaned. Consequently, of course, as children we coveted that sort of ice cream above all others!