As something of an ice cream enthusiast, I’ve led a life of many scoops. Beachside hokey pokey in one of those shitty cones reminiscent of polystyrene. A tiny, pearlescent paddle of amarena gelato in Bologna. A cartoon-swirly real fruit ice cream eaten at the end of a long, long drive. A blushing cup of apricot sorbet. Ice cream is the right thing to eat with a friend; or with a child you’re babysitting; or walking home alone and electric after a concert; or in a new city where all the flavours (halva! black sesame and taro! squishiest fig!) are different; or in the car with your flatmates, the windows down and the music offensively loud; or in any number of other situations teasing the existence of some higher, creamier plane.
Still, among the thousands of ice creams I’ve eaten, I believed yesterday’s was the pinnacle while I was eating it, which might be the definition of delight. It was only a Jelly Tip, but wow, check your snobbery. It had been acquired in precisely the way Jelly Tips should be acquired — as a single from a dairy freezer, shoeless, fresh from a swim. I paid in cash. It was the kind of blue, apple-crisp weather I wait all year for, making this the first ice cream (!) of a new season (!!). I removed the cheery-hideous yellow-and-pink wrapper and put my teeth to the compound chocolate shell, which cracked with the delicate tschink of childhood. The pink jelly half: artificial raspberry; sugar; pure ambrosia. How do they get it so smooth? What’s not smooth is the vanilla ice cream half, which is always scrinkled with tiny ice crystals. But even that part is good, a reminder that imperfection is no impediment to pleasure.
This is not great ice cream. There is no custard base; no infusing, God forbid, of aromatics. It tastes of nothing more than sugar bloomed in milk and, eventually, the cheap astringent wood they make the sticks out of. And yet. There’s something about the lowbrow ice cream, its unpretension. The irresistible waxy core of a coconut-stippled Choc Bar. The too-sweet jam swirls and end-of-cone chocolate nub of a Boysenberry Trumpet. The nursery raspberry-vanilla-and-chocolate of a Jelly Tip. In certain settings — Island Bay beach in the first week of autumn, for instance, the sea so blue it hurts your eyes — such ice creams promise more than any costlier scoop.
This series is inspired by the essayettes in Ross Gay’s collection The Book of Delights.
as you know I share the ice cream delight, the magic of things freezing; all week I have been eating grape sorbet made from the grapes dangling outside church, abundant and deep purple, sharp and cold and exactly what you want to be eating after a day at work.
(also this made me long for island bay quite acutely!)