Monday, December 11, 2006
Silver Spoons
It’s not that often that I get the yen for ice cream, honestly. I usually prefer something less cream-based. The ice is fine, I’m fine with the ice. But the cream usually winds up feeling kind of heavy to me, and leaves me feeling overdense. It’s delicious, sure, and feels great while I’m eating it - but all things being equal, I’d go for a nice bread pudding or a fruit tart.
I know that this admission probably amazes, or even shocks, you - indeed, you may not even be comfortable reading any further. Let me reassure you: I’m not a hater. There is room in my heart for all the desserts, and this here is all about loving the ice cream experience. Optimizing it. In fact, I’ve been optimizing my ass off for two days straight now, and I never want to stop. The key was the sundae straw.
I learned of the sundae straw at age 8 or 10 or so at Nana’s place in Ohio. Not grandpa’s place, Nana’s: the kitchen. She had this drawer full of wonderful old kitchen toys, and among them was this set of long thin silver straws with little leaf-like spoons at the bottom. If you got some really cold root beer on a really hot day - and damn but Lima Ohio had both of those in abundance in the summertime - and you plopped in some ice cream that wasn’t totally frozen solid, you’d get a killer float. Little ice crystals would grow on the yielding spheres of ice cream, creating food in a fugue state between solid and liquid, just melting into itself as the root beer goes thick with dense foam and creamy butterfat.... Oh man, it’s a good way to have ice cream. And then you had the refined slender aperture of the straw, and the sweet little spoon that’s so tiny you need lots of spoonfuls to finish the job, and when you lick it clean it’s got those little scalloped edges and etched veins, and those impenetrable imprints on the back, and the straw itself so cold and weighty in your fingers....
I remember the childhood visit to the grandparents’ place on which I discovered the straws, and then, a year or two later, a trip back to visit the straws again. Then, nothing. I didn’t see them for years - so many years that they slipped from my recollection. I rarely thought of the sundae straws, and when they came to mind I misrecalled where I’d found them. A friend’s house? Antique shop? England? They were moving into the realm of legend for me.
So anyway, I lost track of the sundae straws - till I got a box of Nana’s things after she passed. I got a bunch of cool stuff, some stuff that may once have been cool but no longer was, and some stuff that goes way beyond cool: the chrome deco menorah, the jumbo yellow-glass martini set, and one sundae straw. In my hands again. God, it felt good. Just exactly as I recalled - slender, strong, delicate, ingenious. We’d finally found each other. It had finally come home to me.
That was about two years ago. We use most everything we still keep from Nana - goblets and fancy plates and lots of handy little items. But I somehow completely failed to utilize the sundae straw. It wasn’t that I wanted to protect it or save it - that would imply, at least, some conscious agency, the quashing of an active desire. Rather, it just didn’t occur to me to use the damn thing. It sat in a drawer and I never thought to myself, “I’ll make a root beer float and whip out my straw and break that bad boy in.” I had no such thoughts at all. I’m just not a big ice cream eater. I’m sorry.
But the first step to recovery is admitting the problem, and somehow I seem to have leapt that hurdle. A few nights ago I’d been a bit more helpful around the house than usual, so Kel asked what she could do for me in return. Myriad excellent responses chased each other around inside my head, but the one that popped out, almost without my even thinking, was, “Stuff for a root beer float.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Cold root beer and good vanilla ice cream.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. See you when the baby’s down.” Then she went out shopping while I went in to strip, bathe, dry, lotion, and diaper the baby, clothe him in pajamas, read him a few small books and fed him a cup of milk, and then finally stuff him in his crib. Easy as pie. Ice cream pie.
By the time I emerged from the child’s sleeping chamber, all I’d asked for had been produced for me. I pulled down one of the big green goblets and a nice silver scoop, and set about my business - filling a 24-ounce goblet one-third of the way with ice cream. Then I pulled out a nostalgically-shaped plastic bottle of frosty-mug-tasting root beer, cracked it open and filled my dessert tureen on up with soda and velvety foam. I scooped off some foam, ate it from my silver spoon. It was both foamylicious and creamtastic. I finished the pour and took a full-on silverstraw swig of the nectar borne of my efforts. I felt the soda rising in the channel of the straw, felt the silver go cold in my hands as soon as the liquid passed through it. It was just as good as ever. I gulped it down, sipped up some more, and then scooped a dollop of ice cream from a mass that floated brazenly in the foam. The spoon encountered little resistance as it pierced the thin shell of ice crystals that had already formed, crystals that shattered delightfully in my mouth as I wantonly consumed the ice cream, drawing repeatedly on the straw and devouring spoonful after spoonful till I awoke from gluttonous reverie to find an empty goblet in my hands, its moist interior a map of bygone gratification. My ice cream experience had been everything I could have dreamed. I had achieved ice cream actualization.
I’ve done a sundae spoon RBF a couple more times since then. Each time was the same: divine. I don’t eat ice cream often, but now I know that, when I do, I can really maximize the experience. And sure, the Container Store is now selling these fabulous ice cream enhancement devices. I’m sure they work fine. But they can’t possibly hold a candle to Nana’s own silver sundae straws.
