Sure,
artisanal ice cream is all the rage, and I would never pass up a scoop of Brown
Butter Makers Mark Bourbon Ice Cream. But,
in the end, my heart belongs to Carvel. Vanilla. In a coronet sugar cone. It’s hopelessly suburban, and about as
“vanilla” as you can possibly get, but something about soft swirl ice cream
just makes me swoon.
Recently, we
were in America’s heartland for a family wedding, and my brother stopped at a
competing ice cream franchise for a cone.
The guy at the counter said to him, “You have Carvelli back east, don’t
you?”
Um, that
would be CARVEL, please – home of vanilla, chocolate and pistachio cones,
Strawberry Bonnets, Flying Saucers and the Fudgie the Whale ice cream
cake. I don’t think we ever tasted
Fudgie the Whale, (for Father’s Day and a Whale of a Dad) but the name was
legendary.
The roadside
Carvel store was the local ice cream parlor of my youth. In that Mad Men era of
booming commercialized food products, it was actually the McDonalds of ice
cream. Carvel stores dotted Long
Island. While the name lives on in
commercial ice cream products available in grocery stores, there are actually very
few stand-alone stores still around. Sadly, our original family Carvel on Broadway eventually went out of business and the building became a barber shop. I still drive by and find myself craving a cone.
A trip to
Carvel was a special family treat. My
little brother, who’s no longer little, still believes that Memorial Day marks
the start of Carvel season. After dinner, we’d pile in the station wagon and
head for the store. We’d order our cones
at the counter and sometimes sit in the car, or stand in the parking lot and
lick them silly. If you really wanted to
splurge, you’d get a cone with sprinkles (chocolate or multi-colored) but
somehow those sprinkles messed up the perfect spin of swirls that graduated to
that jaunty spit curl of ice cream at the top of the peak.
A Carvel
vanilla cone was that perfect balance of slick, chilly refreshment and
luxurious creamy goodness, with just a touch of a pleasing lactose coma when
the experience was done.
Perhaps it’s
no surprise that when I bought my own home, there happened to be a Carvel store
located less than a mile away. This
holiday weekend, I’ll be celebrating with a cold one!
©2013 T.W.
Barritt All Rights Reserved
