A few weeks ago, the hair on Julie’s cello bow fell off. We found a luthier in San Jose and drove the 25 minutes to an unfamiliar part of town. Seeing the matching address, I pulled forward into street parking directly in front of the shop and the Mexican restaurant next door. The luthier shop itself was a remodeled house built decades ago: violins and viola lined the walls of what once must have been the small living room and dining room.
Altogether, our visit was quick, and we were told to come back in a few days to pick up the repaired bow. Normally, we would have headed straight home, but we saw a vintage-looking Foster’s Freeze on the block on our drive in and decided to treat ourselves to some ice cream.
After we ordered and paid for our ice cream, the owner asked if we wanted “one more for the cello” as he pointed at the case on Julie’s back. We laughed, then took the raspberry cheesecake twister he handed us to sit down and eat.
If you’re unfamiliar with the twister, you’re not. It’s soft serve ice cream with a mix-in flavor, like butterfingers or M&Ms. They’re also known as McDonald’s McFlurry or Dairy Queen’s Blizzard. Whatever you call it or whoever makes it, it’s delicious, thick enough to be turned upside down, and comes in sizes larger than any single person should eat. Somehow, combining soft serve ice cream with chocolate bars is exactly as good as it should be.
Most of my Blizzard consumption came on summer road trips with my family. I can’t tell you where any single Dairy Queen is, but I can guarantee you that I could one by driving on a highway for an hour anywhere in the US between 2 big cities. We never considered getting hot food at DQ: it was always about the ice cream, and the blizzards specifically, at that. There are too many flavors for me t confidently have a favorite, but I was always trying something new and hoping that my sisters got something different as well to try.
Even outside of road trips, ice cream was always important in my family. My grandpa kept ice cream in his basement deep freezer for my weekend visits after doing dim sum. He only had the universally derided wafer cones, but I couldn’t complain about a vehicle for ice cream. Once, he got maple ice cream instead of the usual vanilla: it sounds delicious now but apparently didn’t pass muster for 5 year old Kevin. When I performed the rare act of rejecting ice cream, he ended up eating it himself on the patio while I played in a kiddie pool in the backyard.
My other grandparents were big ice cream fans: they had blocks of Chapman’s ice cream their freezers everywhere they went. We would have defrosted slices of cake with ice cream on top. I think they enjoyed it just as much as I did, and I hope they kept the habit even without grandchildren around. Still, they knew that was an easy way to please and share something with us .
My mom also regularly got us ice cream at the mall. I always got SuperKid ice cream at Laura Secord, and we probably covered the 32 flavors at Baskin-Robbins, too. I can’t remember if she got ice cream, too: I hope so. Even now, we still talk about ice cream. A lot of plans are still up uncertain for when my family comes out to the bay area in a few months, we all agree that the Kitchen Sink is a must.
I don’t know many people without allergies who don’t like ice cream, and given how much children enjoy it, ice cream is an easy love to share between generations. Food is a very common way for families to show how much they care, whether it be that warm chicken noodle soup or those soft chocolate chip cookies. Even within food, however, ice cream has a special place: it stays when generations change ethnic cuisines or health diets or just different preferences. It is shared both in the home kitchen and outside to the local ice cream parlor, or in my case, the Dairy Queen in the middle of nowhere, USA. The diversity of flavors makes it both flexible to tastes and enduring as an idea. And it’s something that we can pretty much always use to return to childhood memories.
Of course, it isn’t always the same thing. Last week, Julie and I went to the mall, and I had Dippin’ Dots for the first time.
I had seen them in malls countless times before and had always been curious. Julie gave a good explanation for why she (and I) didn’t like them: one of the best qualities of ice cream is how smooth and creamy it is. Dippin’ Dots are definitely not smooth and creamy. Even so, I found myself desperately trying to scoop up the last of the melted syrup at the bottom of the cup when I finished. Ice cream is still ice cream and has some essence that can take you back to other serving you have ever had.