Ice Cream

Was Ice Cream an important part of your childhood?  It certainly was an important part of mine.

Growing up on a dairy farm, we had no need of milk delivery.  Daddy would bring several gallons of fresh milk from the barn every day to feed our family of eight.  Every other day the milk man would come to the farm with the big tanker trucks and pump the rest of the milk from the refrigerated tank next to the barn into the tanker truck and deliver it to the dairy down in the city.   The milk was then homogenized, pasteurized, and sold throughout the state in the form of milk, butter, cheese and ice cream.   Yes, the Milk Man came to our farm to take the milk away.  It was the Dairy Man that stopped by our house every week to deliver butter, cheese, and, of course, Ice Cream for our family.

At our house, ice cream was not just for birthdays, or even just for Sundays.  I'm sure that for many weeks of my life I enjoyed ice cream almost every single day.   If there weren't cookies or cake on hand for after school snacks, there was probably ice cream!  The flavors varied from week to week, and we tried them all:   Vanilla, Chocolate, Neopolatin, Maple Nut, Rocky Road, Strawberry, Burnt Almond Fudge, Chocolate Chip, and Mint Chocolate Chip. Fudge Bars, Orange Bars, and Ice Cream Sandwiches.   I don't remember having cookies and cream or bubble gum, or anything with peanut butter or chunks of candy bars.  Those flavors came along after my childhood.

And of course, we also had a hand-crank ice cream maker.  You know, the kind where you mix up the cream and sugar and eggs and vanilla, add some fresh strawberries and/or peaches, pour it into the freezer can, then plop it into the wooden bucket and ad crushed ice and rock salt, and then take turns cranking the old ice cream churn for an hour or so on a hot summer afternoon.   When it gets too hard to turn any longer, it's done enough to pull out the paddle.   Daddy would scrape off most of the ice cream, and someone would get to lick the paddle.   That ice cream didn't ever last very long!