The story below is an excerpt from our May/June 2018 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
More poignantly than pick-up baseball games or mid-arc exits from a swingset, the memories of childhood ice cream-making live in our hearts and souls.
It was the longest stretch of time, that wait for homemade ice cream. The cranking was tedious and tiring, and our childhood patience was pushed to the limit. When the frosty metal cylinder in the ice cream maker would not turn any more and the kitchen towel was laid on top of the barrel so the ice cream could ripen, the wait was unending, almost unendurable.
In the hour or so it required for a freezer of homemade ice cream to solidify or cure, children like us would abandon their posts at first base or third, run to the adult who had done most of the cranking, and ask, “Is it ready yet?” We interjected the question with the same persistence and frustration that emanated repeatedly from the back seats of station wagons on vacation: “How much farther is it?”
The old hand-cranked ice cream freezer was a shrine back then, the unifying element of summer afternoon backyard picnics. Being chosen to take your turn at the crank meant you had made it, that the strength of your arm now commanded the respect of the elders. Some parents required a minimum number of cranks before you handed the responsibility off to someone else and headed back to the makeshift baseball diamond behind the house. Some children shortened their rite of passage, surreptitiously counting their turns by fives and tens.
The tumbling of store-bought chunks of ice and the grinding and swishing of rock salt were among summer’s most memorable sounds, in those days before the electric freezers took over. We had never heard of carpal tunnel syndrome, and we would never admit to tennis elbow.
Our freezers were spring green and barrel-like, with vertical staves held tight by rusting metal bands. They made the rounds of family reunions, church socials, Fourth of July picnics, ice cream suppers, and Sunday afternoon cookouts on the banks of chilly Horse Creek in Northeast Tennessee and at the foot of Clinch Mountain in Southwest Virginia.
There was never a question about choice of flavor. Homemade ice cream meant vanilla. Period. No debate. Adding strawberries or peaches, much as we treasured them sugared in bowls by themselves, was out of the question. Even cake was an unnecessary and frivolous ornamentation. And to offer toppings of chocolate syrup, maraschino cherries or nuts was sacrilege, as unthinkable as serving commercial ice cream at a birthday party.
Once that towel was whisked off the freezer with a flourish, once the paddle inside the cylinder had been scraped clean of ice cream, pandemonium ensued. Gloves were tossed off and left in the outfield. Children catapulted themselves out of swing sets in mid-arc.
There were no dietary cautions about eating ice cream made with real eggs then. Soft and arctic cold, tongue-tingling homemade ice cream was eaten with abandon. Children stopped only to recover from annoying but temporary brain-freeze headaches.
Nowadays, when ice cream can be produced with a few facile turns of a plastic-handled machine in an air-conditioned kitchen, turned out effortlessly by an electric freezer sitting abandoned on the patio, or purchased in shopping mall ice cream boutiques, we miss the lessons those old hand-cranked machines taught so many generations during sweltering Southern summers. That those things coming to us the quickest and easiest are not always the best. Those wooden, arm-powered ice cream freezers taught us patience, the virtue of waiting for what is good. They helped us realize that honest labor, shared with others, will eventually be rewarded.
Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways of Appalachia and the South from their home in Johnson City, Tennessee.