...my dad's birthday. For years I have been sending my brother a gift card to go eat ice cream on May 31. Encouraging him to go to Dairy Queen, or Chic-fil-A or Wendy's, or any other place he might think of, especially if it meant taking little people with him who would enjoy licking an ice-cream cone. My dad did love ice cream, especially if it was home-made with lots of heavy cream, a thick delicious custard, after simmering on the stove all day long.
I think the recipe came from his mom, so you know there is a lot of bad stuff in it, from a time before any one thought to to give a flip about refined sugar or cholesterol. Whole milk, at least half a dozen eggs, cups and cups of granulated sugar. Put all in a double boiler, and cook on the back burner for hours and hours. The custard gets thicker and thicker as it cooks all day. Take it off, let it cool and add copious amounts of whole/heavy cream, strain into the canister that goes in the ice cream churn.
Chill overnight. Put it in the churn with ice and rock salt and plug the motor in. We are not going to do this by hand, cranking until it feels like your arm might fall off. Even though we might use a recipe that is a hundred years old, we do appreciate modern conveniences. Thankful for electricity, plugging in the motor that turns the dasher in the churn round and round until it is ready to eat.
He really liked it when it was strawberry season and there were ripe berries to put in it, after you put them in the blender to make them easy to stir in. Or fresh Georgia peaches. But was also perfectly happy with vanilla, as long as it was home-made with all those deadly ingredients that resulted in it tasting just like his mom used to make, when you had to crank and crank and crank until you could not crank any more.
No one left to take to get ice cream and reminisce about the man who loved it so. I thought about him all day yesterday and today - remembering how simple things made him so happy. So easy to please and readily delighted by something as easy to enjoy as Plain Old Vanilla.
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