The author’s daughter, around the age of 3, enjoying ice cream in the summer.Caroline Alphonso/Supplied
Within our home, there are two incontrovertible truths about ice cream: I am alone in not caring for it, and our 10-year-old daughter orients her life first around eating it and second around securing more of it.
Neither the flavour nor the calendar matters to her. With mountains of snow lining the streets of our Toronto neighbourhood, she will point out that I’ve promised a visit to her favourite ice cream parlour when it opens for the season.
“Remember, we have to stop in there,” she said sternly this winter on the way back from hockey practice, months before warmer temperatures and the shop’s opening day.
There is a picture of her sitting on our back porch when she was maybe three, attempting to solve the calculus of eating ice cream in the summer. The scoop in her cone is melting faster than she could eat it, and she is very clearly working through her return on investment: Eat the ice cream before it melts, or lick the melting stream before it reaches her hand.
She ate the ice cream. The rest dripped down her chin and hands, and probably down to her toes.
I know she loves me, but I also know standing between her and a tub of chocolate mint is like standing between a grizzly and its cub.
That is probably why she’s dumfounded by the fact that I don’t care for ice cream. I could tell her I’ve been sent to Earth from Mars, and it would make more sense to her than saying I’d like a slice of pie or a chocolate chip cookie instead.
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Ice cream was not something we kept around the house in Mumbai, where I grew up. We treated ourselves to caramel custard or fruit salad with custard, and when visiting family in Goa, we’d eat freshly picked mangoes and bebinca, a traditional sticky layered cake made with coconut milk. When we moved to Canada, I’d eat rocky road ice cream, but mostly just for the chocolate chunks and almonds.
I am ice cream indifferent.
It’s cold. It’s messy. Those are two things I do not like, both in life and in dessert.
We all have our secret comfort foods. Mine is chocolate. In my weaker moments, I’ve been known to quietly crinkle open a bag of chocolate chips meant for baking.
One of the great miracles of life in Toronto, though, is having room for new discoveries. We live within walking distance of multiple ice cream parlours that look like they came straight out of the movies, with pastels and display freezers stocked with all the staples: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.
Our neighbourhood also offers variety. You can find light and fruity sorbet. There is also kulfi, from India, which is a milk-based frozen dessert filled with nuts and spices. And then gelato, known for its intense, creamier flavours.
A few weeks ago, I decided to give ice-cream another try – but in gelato form. We walked over to the local gelato shop, which seems to be always bursting with new flavours – such as apple pie filling, banana, frutti di bosco (a mix of berries), black sesame and fondente.
I settled on a small cup of fondente, a rich dark chocolate gelato, with an Italian wafer perched on top. Our daughter, the expert, loaded up with a minty gelato speckled with bits of chocolate and fondente. Her older brother went for a mix of strawberry and apple pie filling.
We dug in. I got curious.
“Why do you like ice cream so much?” I asked our daughter.
She looked puzzled.
“I just like it,” she said without breaking stride with her spoon.
“I like how it makes me feel,” her brother said.
“Yeah,” she said, still eating, “I like how it makes me feel.” They described a sense of joy as they scooped up spoonfuls.
Families from the neighbourhood drifted into the shop. The cash register chimed. Inside the ice cream parlour, nobody seemed unhappy.
We sat there at the window, eating, lingering. For the first time in a long while, we weren’t rushing off to another hockey practice. There was nowhere else to be and no reason to rush.
We slowed our pace on the walk home. We ate and talked and took our sweet time, which never seems within our grasp through the winter. We were indulging and we were together. In that moment, even for a non-ice-cream lover, everything else just kind of melted away.
