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C O L U M N S
High Life
A time of innocence
The intimate, homey ice-cream
has gone.
These days, ice-cream is a big time gourmet food, Michelin
starred chefs make the most unusual savory flavours
(would you believe bacon and egg ice-cream?), gourmet
ice-cream (a trend pioneered by Haagen Daz, an offshoot
of a multinational, not some homely Swedish family-run
company) sells for huge prices, and even inventive Indian
chefs have got in on the act: Vineet Bhatia makes a
butter chicken ice-cream (from the gravy, not from the
dead chicken), a spoonful of which appears as an accompaniment
to main courses at his London restaurant.
All this will take most Indians by surprise. Somehow,
we don’t think of ice-cream as a great gourmet delicacy.
We grew up on it, treated it as a cold comfort food
in the sweltering summer heat, and even now, when we
think of ice-cream, we hark back, almost subconsciously,
to memories of childhood innocence.
In retrospect, of course, much of the ice-cream we grew
up on was disgustingly bad. Usually, it came in one
of three flavours (strawberry, vanilla, or chocolate),
none of which was authentic, and all of which depended
on heavy doses of industrial chemicals for the taste.
Usually, the ice-cream was low in fat content, made
from dodgily sourced milk, and refrigerated for so long
before sale that it had lost its texture.
A few of us (chiefly people who grew up in Western India)
had the good fortune to eat a better quality of ice-cream.
For some reason, Gujaratis have always been very keen
on ice-cream, a great Gujju snack (oh, all right
“snake”) on par with home-mixed bhel and ragda-pattice.
In my grandfather’s house in Ahmedabad, they would pull
out old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice-cream makers, fill
them with reduced milk, some bits of dried fruit, lots
of sugar, a little flavouring (kesar was a particular
favourite), and then crank, crank, crank till a rich,
creamy, ice-cream was ready for lunch.
At other times, the ice-cream would be bought from outside,
but in an era when most of the country ate Kwality or
Joy synthetic vanilla ice-cream, the Gujarati middle
classes tended to buy real ice-cream from local manufacturers
with such names as Havmore. The taste of that ice-cream,
with its little nuggets of kaju flavour, or its intensely
flavoured raisins, still lingers in my memory. For many
years, I attributed my memories of that glorious taste
to childhood nostalgia. Only recently have I learned
what made that artisanal (for want of a better word)
ice-cream so much tastier than the mass market variety.
Part of the secret with any ice-cream is fat content.
If you reduce the fat (as they tend to these days in
America with disgusting low-fat diet flavours), then
the ice-cream has a thin watery taste. Increase the
fat content of the milk, and you get the rich, coat-your-mouth
effect that we associate with good ice-cream. (This
is why French chefs tend to use a proportion of cream
in their ice-cream). And, of course, the artisanal Gujarati
ice-cream was full of fatty buffalo milk boiled and
boiled till it reduced to a rich, thick consistency.
Commercial ice-cream, on the other hand, was always
made from cheaper, low-fat milk.
And part of the trick was the concentration of flavour.
Research conducted in the Seventies and Eighties has
shown us that the tongue responds better to pockets
of flavour than it does to a single uniform taste. As
much as we may like a good chocolate ice-cream, we tend
to get used to the taste after the first few mouthfuls.
But add hazelnuts to the ice-cream and, suddenly, our
taste-buds will be fully engaged. We will first taste
the chocolate, then bite into a hazelnut, detect a new
flavour, and surprise ourselves. By the time we taste
the chocolate again, it will seem fresh, because we
have tried a new flavour in between.
The Gujarati ice-creams of my childhood worked because
its makers intuitively understood this principle even
if food scientists hadn’t yet formulated it. With those
ice-creams, you didn’t just taste a single flavour (say
kesar), but your mouth was constantly bombarded with
new tastes – kaju, pista, raisin, etc.
Today, multinationals spend millions developing new
flavours, based on the nuggets-of-taste principle. Such
early intuitive successes as Ben and Jerry’s Cherry
Garcia (where the nuggets of flavour came from brandied
cherry pieces) and Cookies and Cream (where the little
pieces of cookie performed the same function as the
cherries in Cherry Garcia), have set the trend for hundreds
of imitators. Today, if a big American chain wants to
introduce a new chocolate flavour, the chances are that
the chocolate will take the form of a swirl or a ribbon
in a vanilla ice-cream, so that you taste two distinct
flavours. Ideally, they will throw in a third flavour
as well with bits of nut, chocolate chip, fruit, cookie
pieces or whatever, as possible constituents.
But, of course, taste is only one part of the ice-cream
experience. Much of it has to do with nostalgia. When
I was growing up in Bombay, the high spot of any excursion
was a visit to Gaylord restaurant on Churchgate Street
where, what I think was, Bombay's first Softy machine
had been installed. We would watch enthralled as the
device spouted sheets of creamy vanilla ice-cream into
a cone. As the cone filled near the brim, the operator
would stylishly swirl it around till the top resembled
a mountain peak (or Woody Woodpecker's hairstyle, depending
on how imaginative a child you were).
I don’t remember the taste of the Softy, of course –
that was never the point. But when they added a second
flavour, and you could have a double Softy – half vanilla
and half chocolate – I thought I had died and gone to
heaven.
You don’t see too many Softy machines around in Delhi
or Bombay these days. I am told they have all been shipped
off to hill stations where they continue to thrill small
children. But I have always thought: why can’t somebody
use a Softy machine to do something inventive? Improve
the quality of the ice-cream and swirl the stuff on
top of tumblers of strong iced coffee, put it on interesting
fruit salads…the possibilities are endless.
The Softy phase was, of course, an aberration. Most
of the time we ate normal ice-cream bars that came stuck
onto flat wooden sticks. Two particular favourites were
the choco-bar, essentially a vanilla bar with a thin
layer of milk chocolate around it (see how the two distinct
flavour and texture theory worked even then – though
we hadn’t realised it); and an orange lolly (made with
water rather than milk, though the distinction eluded
us as kids), which may have had a trade name, but which
we just called an orange bar.
If you bought fancier (that is, the kind grown-ups would
also eat) ice-cream, then your choices were limited
to Tutti-Frutti and Cassata, both Italianist cousins.
A proper Tutti-Frutti used to be a sort of ice-cream
trifle. Served in a tall glass, it had a base of fruit
topped with layers of jelly, cream (or custard) and
ice-cream. Because this was difficult to make, most
places ended up serving three flavours of ice-cream
with a little chopped fruit. The original cassata is
quite a complex Italian dessert made like a layered
cake with many flavours of ice-cream. The Indian version
lacked the complexity but preserved the essence – layers
of ice-cream.
Eventually, the idea of layering different kinds of
ice-cream reached such levels that there was even a
VIBGYOR ice-cream where each layer took on the colours
of the rainbow. You didn’t eat it for the taste, but
for the way it looked.
But no matter how good or bad the commercial Indian
ice-creams of my childhood tasted, I was always conscious
that they were far better than the ones I got in London.
Those tended to look better – the bars were shaped like
space ships and they came in many lurid colours – but
they tasted disgusting. Years later, I discovered the
reason. Most British ice-cream in the Sixties was not
made from milk at all, but from frozen vegetable fat
(don’t ask me why), a trend that Walls eventually brought
to India with relatively little success.
But, of course, by the time I was in my teens, the fancy
British-style bars had arrived in India. The old orange
bar had given way to something called Rocket (yes, that
space ship shape), and a Mango Duet which combined mango
and raspberry flavours (yuck!) had won the hearts of
young girls.
The artisanal ice-cream, alas, had vanished. So had
the hand-cranked ice-cream machines. The multinationals
got in on the act. Levers eventually bought Kwality
and most of the ice-cream you are likely to buy in the
shops today is made by a faceless conglomerate.
I wouldn’t mind so much if it at least tasted good.
But, sadly, ice-cream is all about packaging and marketing
these days. It has none of the taste of my growing up
years. And none of the innocence, either. .
Vir Sanghvi is Editorial Director of the Hindustan
Times.
Courtesy Brunch
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