Mmm?
As I sit down to write this, I have a fresh pint of Ben & Jerry's Coffee Toffee Crunch before me. Dinner was? disappointing, shall we say, so I'm rounding out my diet with a half-cup of butterfat. It will be difficult to type and eat at the same time, but I'll give it a whirl. And if I have to choose, well, you readers aren't melting.
Generally speaking, desserts don't tickle my fancy. A piece of chocolate after a meal is plenty, and most days I have nothing at all. But I do love my ice cream. On occasions when dinner doesn't satisfy, I lie to my body and tell it we're still eating real food. It's not a healthful habit, I know, but I learned it from my mother, and how could Mom be wrong about nutrition?
The seal of approval for the ice cream diet was delivered at the now-defunct Burns drug store, about a mile from the house I grew up in. Burns kept an ice cream fountain, complete with fixed stools at the counter, and had the best malts in the country. (That's not just my opinion; they received credit in a newspaper's national search for the best malt.) They were thick without being lumpy, yet thoroughly mixed, a difficult trick to master ? I never mastered it during a half-year job as a soda jerk in my senior year ? and didn't overdo the syrup. I only vaguely remember my family being out running errands or returning from Grandma & Grandpa Lake's house or something that threw our daily schedule off. Mom suggested we have our lunch at the soda counter, and Dad agreed, and Dan and I suddenly found ourselves having ice cream for lunch! Wow! I think Dan was still too small to finish one himself, but I wasn't.
We instantly underwent Pavlovian conditioning. For months afterwards, when we passed the area around lunchtime on weekends, I would ask if we could have malts for lunch again. Of course not; we had to eat healthy food. But I still like chocolate malts about as well as any ice cream treat.
That's chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream. On the east coast, you have to be careful. Few places serve malts at all, and those that do don't really do them right. Ask without elaboration for a chocolate malt, and you'll get chocolate ice cream, no syrup, if you're lucky enough to get that. All to often, you just get a blank stare. In all my college years in Boston, gourmet ice cream capital of the world, I never found an ice creamery that stocked malt powder, or had even heard of using it in ?frappes,? and I looked. Eileene had never heard of them, either, until she went to U of I. Burns has been gone lo these many years, but if you want a proper malt, I'd still recommend heading for the Great Plains.
Guess I'll just have to content myself with the rest of this pint.