Ettinger - Sweet spot: an ice cream binge across America

F amily dinners in my house were a death match. My older brothers stabbed food off my plate and tore into the artichoke heart while I was still working my way through the rubbery outer leaves. I was given the tiny wings off a Cornish hen for protein during the Shabbat mealand if I dared complain about the paltry portion, my mom might open up another can of soggy green beans and dump them into a bowl with their juices.

I was vulnerable but also learned to be ferocious, a girl who compensated for her youngest-child status with a pouf of extremely curly hair that added an extra half foot to my tiny frame. Thats because everything had to be larger than life to get noticed in my family. When you are the youngest and also a girl, you learn to shout in a house where everyone is playing a different Beethoven concerto on separate instruments in their own rooms with the doors and windows flung wide-open.

And so I embraced a fierce persona and became a person who had to holler and scream just to register at all. I was the identified patient, waving the red flag of family dysfunction. Compensationseeking redress for slights, making up for my lowly family positionbecame an obsession. But what were my options? How to make up for such indignities? There is so much scheming in any given childhood, and I was outmaneuvered at every turn by my brothers. At the same time, there just was not much money to go aroundnot quite enough to satisfy our needs, let alone our insatiable appetites.

But there was one saving grace: Ice cream truly was a cheap thrill for my family. Dad would buy these immense tubs of generic-brand ice cream, the kind that came in gallon buckets with long, looping plastic handles; you could barely cram such a thing into the icebox, forcing the frozen peas and bags of broccoli into all kinds of contortions.

Ice cream didnt necessarily make misery go away, but it somehow made that misery taste so exquisite. What was better than crying in my room over a boy who didnt like me, with Abbas The Winner Takes It All oozing from the radio as I attacked a container of Jamoca Almond Fudge with a giant spoon?

Ice cream had the ability to add the words So what? to lifes dire circumstances. So what if Dad screamed at his superiors and lost his seventeenth job? So what if he spent the day hunting for treasure with a beeping, stupendously dorky-looking bounty-hunter metal detector, which hed swing back and forth on top of some sandy lawn or beachhead, seeking the million-dollar buried booty that would allow him to buy clothes that actually fit his kids? So what if he insisted that his two sons and little daughter trail right behind him on these woebegone adventures, lest he stumble upon Captain Kidds buried treasure in the sandboxes of Pioneer Park and need their help carrying the sacks of gold doubloons that would allow them to buy a Silicon Valley McMansion?

Dad attempted to make up for his poor abilities as a provider by making oversize sundaes. Each one of them delivered a wallop of sweetness that could knock the sour things out of our lives for a few moments. His balm in those days was the Manhattan cocktail, that heady concoction of rye whiskey, vermouth, and grenadine, but he spared a few of those precious maraschino cherries to place atop his marvelous ice cream creations.

Ice cream snobs would laugh at these sundaes now, but they oozed with pleasure and sent me soaring. I would close my eyes and let the sugar surge through me, along with the sticky syrup. Perhaps thats why I expect so much of my ice cream now. What could compete with such blissful memories? There was something about those enormous tubs, the brilliant, almost iridescent color of those cherries, thanks to the glories of bright red artificial food coloring and the cataracts of Hersheys syrup that my father dumped on the ice cream. When I tucked into my sundae, I was eating a metaphor: heaps of vanilla-flavored hope and comfort rising from a jet-black lakelet of swirling chaos.

The enjoyment I got from those sundaes was far greater than anything I experienced later on even at the finest restaurants. The best work of Mario Batali, the finest examples of ethnic fusion, were pathetic comedowns compared to that cherry-vanilla-chocolate explosion. Part of it had to do with the fact that it was good eating. But it also had to do with the fact that sundaes had become not just a food but a place in my mind where the whole family remained together.

Ice cream is not just a snack but a circumstance and a time of yearfrozen forever in memory. Unstructured summers when I whiled away the hours watching As the World Turns and jumping through the sprinkler were marked by trips with Mom to Fosters Freeze. Mom couldnt bakeeven a dump-and-stir Betty Crocker mix was too much for her. We didnt own a single cake pan, pie tin, or baking dish. Every year on my birthday she bought me a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake that she served on a musical rotating dish (she even outsourced the singing of Happy Birthday).

The author enjoying her annual ice cream birthday cake at her childhood home in Cupertino, California.