Decisions, decisions. Is it one flavour, or a multiple that taste particularly good together? Does it need to be like something familiar or can it be un-ice cream like (ie something you wouldn’t normally associate with cold and creamy tastes)?
Part of me is tempted to say that the perfect ice cream has already been invented – if you go by combination. I had it at the end of a long canoe ride on a quiet German river, with my German penfriend of the time.
Hot day, spot of paddling, and then the reward at the agreed stopping place: ice cream. Three scoops: one lemon, one cinnamon, one marzipan. Bliss.
Now I know that people can be divided as to the merits of marzipan, but we know that nutty flavours and ice cream go together, yes? Lemon, familar, yet a good contrast to the richness of the cream, with sharp acidity. Great when you’ve been paddling for most of the day – on water, yet not much with you to drink.
But the clincher was the cinnamon. Â A bit of heat and warmth to contrast with the chill of the ice cream. I guess these days people would do this with chilli – ice cream flavours have come on a bit in the last couple of decades.
Put all three together, and you have an ice cream experience that I think I am still yet to top. Perhaps because it stands in my memory as the first really good ice cream that I’d eaten – perhaps because it was the perfect thing to eat after a day on the water.
There is one challenger to the memory: a melon ice cream that I had in Florence one time. We’d done our homework, you see, and found out about a particular gelateria which was famous for its ice creams. (Memory now escapes me, but it was close to a reasonably famous church with its own piazza in front.)
I like trying new things when I get the opportunity – and how often do you get to try melon ice cream? Unless you walked round the block and came back to the same place, pretty much never, I’d say.
It was astonishing ice cream – astonishing because melon is such a delicate flavour, and yet they had really captured it. You had a mouthful, and it was clearly melon. And it was refreshing, and creamy, and any other adjective you care to attach to really good Italian ice cream.
I was a fan of strawberry ice cream at a much younger age. A good homemade strawberry ice cream is also high up in the pantheon of ice cream flavours. And I rather fancy a proper homemade raspberry ripple some time, where you make the ice cream and run the raspberry flavour through it.
However, after much deliberation, I think I have come up with something. If it’s possible to get a creme de cassis flavour ice cream, I’d be there in a shot. Blackcurrant does that to you.
You could possibly call it Ribena ice cream – but I’m voting for creme de cassis.
Grownups need their ice cream treats too.