Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

I have long puzzled over the pleasure ice cream gives. It is food no one needs and almost everyone, at some time, longs for.

I love to think about ice cream perhaps as much or even more than I like to eat it.You can toss yourself down on the couch, scuff one hot bare foot against the other, and imagine opening your mouth to fresh banana ice cream or pinky-tip-sized fraises des bois ice cream, or apricot-ginger, or cantaloupe, or lemon custard littered with lemon peel threads.

You can figure up, in your mouth, the bright daytime flavors: the Bing or Royal Anne cherry, the fresh peach or the peach with peach chutney tossed in, the citrus custards veined with citrus peel, the autumn pumpkin or apple pie or poached pear or apple-cranberry, the strawberry-rhubarb, a pale khaki chocolate malt, the endless berry varieties (blackberry, blueberry, red raspberry, black raspberry, marionberry). You can try out the taste of darker, nighttime flavors: the bitter chocolates and stern coffees, coffee hazelnut, cinnamon-nutmeg, blue plum, Mission fig, maple and pecan, the black walnut, the light rum and rum-soaked white raisin, the prune and Armagnac. I’m enamored of something that with tongue in cheek I call “Tropical Pleasures”: a hodgepodge made with crushed pineapple, moist shredded coconut, ripe banana, orange peel, and orange juice. I’ve never tasted bad homemade strawberry; the pale pink dotted with the berry’s “straws” alone makes it lovely.

What in part makes ice cream the very promised land, the El Dorado for reverie, is its genesis in cream. I was fascinated to discover, reading in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, that the word cream comes from the Greek chriein, which means “to anoint,” and which is also the root of Christ, “the anointed one.” The link, writes McGee, “between ancient ritual and rich food is oil, the substance used to anoint the chosen, and the defining element of cream.”

Not only does the hot tongue dissolve cream’s fat and cause that fat to evanesce lubriciously along tongue and cheek walls, but the cream so easily gives passage to flavors. Flavor rides cream. And milk, from which cream comes, is, we hardly dare acknowledge, also mother. By our very biological nature as mammals, McGee writes, we humans take mother’s milk as our first food. The very word “mammal,” McGee notes, emerges from the Latin mamma, meaning “breast.” Milk is our first swallow of the world outside us. Milk is our first desideratum; our most primordial need smells like milk. That need’s satisfaction is the nipple in our mouths and our mouths’ suckling it.

Anne Sexton has left us an odd little poem, “Dreaming the Breasts,” that says more than we perhaps want to know about mothers and milk:

Mother,

strange goddess face above my milk home, that delicate asylum,

I ate you up.

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I have put a padlock on you, Mother, dear dead human, so that your great bells, those dear white ponies,

can go galloping, galloping, wherever you are.

I want to stop here a moment and mention, too, milk’s apparent pure whiteness. That whiteness is also part of ice cream’s pleasure, even when berries or chocolate or pumpkin add their color. I chatted one day with University of California at Davis’s resident expert on milk and ice cream. Dr. John C. Bruhn, Director of U.C. Davis’s Dairy Research and Information Center. Dr. Bruhn, spoken of among ice-cream professionals as “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” in addition to his other duties teaches an annual four-day symposium — The Science of Ice Cream Manufacturing — for commercial ice-cream makers. I asked Dr. Bruhn, “Why is milk white?” “Basically, it’s the protein and milk fat in suspension that scatter light in all directions and don’t allow it to pass through and therefore reflect the light completely.” Homogenization, he added, which evenly disperses fat and protein throughout the liquid, increases milk’s whiteness, causing it to appear both opaque and white. Because skim milk — which in the old days was called, pejoratively, “Blue John,” contains no fat, it appears watery and bluish.

Your bowl of ice cream begins with the cow. Dr. Bruhn said that ice-cream manufacturers have no preference among breeds. It doesn’t matter to the ice cream, he said, whether it’s Guernsey or Jersey. “All cows,” he added, “are equal when it comes to ice cream.”

I like to imagine my ice cream cow munching her way through a crimson clover and daisy-dotted meadow. I know that rarely if ever is this any longer true that cows get a chance at clover. America’s dairy cows, stuffed with so many antibiotics and hormones and tranquilizers that they might as well be junkies, nowadays often don’t even walk. Many are so heavy with their hormone-boosted milk that they can’t walk easily. Many are cooped round-the-clock in pens and removed only to be milked. When I think of these cows, all their hardwiring for cowdom ignored, I imagine that the cream for my ice cream in fact begins in torment. I think, “She has never seen a meadow.”

When I eat ice cream, I prefer to imagine the cow in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem:

The friendly cow, all red and white,

I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might,

To eat with apple tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,

And yet she cannot stray,

All in the pleasant open air,

The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass

And wet with all the showers,

She walks among the meadow grass

And eats the meadow flowers.

What, after ice cream’s origins in milk, makes it so desirable a food is its coldness. Fire was central to the kitchen long before ice. Only as recently as the last 50 years have iced foods been a daily any-season commonplace for anyone other than the rich. The late English cookery queen Elizabeth David’s final book is about ice, the ice trade, and the early days of refrigeration. It is from my reading of David’s Harvest of the Cold Months: A Social History of Ice and Ices that I learned that the earliest recorded mention of icehouses to which we have access comes from 2000 B.C. Wealthy Mesopotamians built icehouses along the Euphrates River. They used the ice to chill drinks.

The Old Testament in Proverbs 25:13 refers to this practice: “As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to them that send him: for he refresheth the soul of his masters.” In 1000 B.C., the Chinese were cutting ice and storing it for refrigeration. By 500 B.C., snow was sold in Athens’ markets. In 400 B.C., wealthy Romans were vying with one another to create exotically flavored ices. In China in about 200 B.C., a popular dish was a puddly milk and rice mixture, packed in snow and frozen. The vicious Roman emperor Nero (A.D. 37-68), who had both his wife and mother murdered, sent his slaves to the Apennines to bring back fresh snow; the snow, flavored with fruit juices and honey, must have been something like our snow cones. Fruit ices gradually found their way from Renaissance Italy to 17th-century England. In 1670 Francisco Procopio, a Sicilian, opened a cafe in Paris where he sold sherbets and ices; the

demand for these was such that by 1676, there were at least 250 sherbet and icemakers in the city.

Various confectioners and chefs are credited with creating what today we call ice cream. Before the 16th Century, “a confection made from cream, sugar, and flavoring and chilled to a semisolid consistency,” which is a pretty fair definition of ice cream, is not in evidence in cookery books. One finds milk added to ices, but not cream. By the 1700s, however, a frozen confection close to what we buy now in supermarkets was being made and sold in Italy, France, England, and by the mid-1700s, the United States. In 1744, the colony of Maryland’s governor hosted a banquet at his mansion in Annapolis. A guest from Virginia, Thomas Black, wrote to friends in England: “We had a dessert no less curious; among the Rarities of which it was Compos’d was some fine Ice Cream which, with Strawberries and Milk did eat Most Deliciously.”

Ice cream, like that served in 1744, was made “through an arduous method of beating cream in a pewter pot that was concurrently being shaken in a larger pot of salt and ice,” writes Thomas Mariani in The Dictionary of American Food and Drink. Mariani notes that rudimentary ice-cream machines were for sale by the 1780s. George Washington owned one, as later would Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who had visited France, called his machine a “sorbetiere.” Mariani reprints Jefferson’s ice-cream recipe, which Jefferson brought back from Europe—two bottles of cream, an egg-custard mixture, boiled, stirred, reheated, strained, and put into an ice pail.

When Jefferson became president in 1801, he named James Madison his secretary of state. Madison’s wife Dolley became official White House hostess for Thomas Jefferson, a widower. During Jefferson’s eight years in office and her husband’s eight years as president, Dolley was noted for her extraordinary entertainments and for the ice cream, which she frequently placed on White House menus.

In urban America, ice cream soon became commercially available. The first known advertisement for ice cream in America, according to Mariani, appeared on May 12, 1777, in the New York Gazette, placed by confectioner Philip Lenzi, who said he offered ice cream “almost every day.” By the early 1800s ice cream could be bought in almost any American city in winter and in summer. Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1841 in a lecture in Boston, “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice creams.”

Homemade ice cream became possible for the average American after the 1850s, when a compact, hand-cranked wooden bucket ice-cream freezer with rotary paddles, not unlike today’s popular White Mountain freezer, became available. In 1851 in Baltimore, the first wholesale ice cream was manufactured, and with mechanical refrigeration’s increasing sophistication, ice cream became widely distributed. Ice cream parlors opened, and ice cream appeared on menus everywhere. In 1899, 5 million gallons of ice cream were sold in the United States; by 1909, 30 million gallons were sold, by 1919, 150 million gallons. The most recent figures available show that Americans, on average, annually eat 23 quarts of ice cream.

We eat ice cream with a disregard that our forebears likely did not bring to the experience. I imagine that they strode through a gilded dusk to stand near a picnic table. They listened to the wooden ice-cream maker’s paddles churn, ever more laboriously, as the cream hardened. They asked one another how it would taste, and they wondered the same to themselves.

So many pleasures begin long before the actual event. The mind runs ahead toward the future. Anticipation plays and replays the arrival of the first bite — how the ice cream will cool the hot cheeks, what the taste will be, of strawberry or bitter coffee or tropical island banana and coconut and pineapple.

At least half the pleasure of ice cream comes from the entry of iced deliciousness into that hot little closet in your head where you keep teeth and tongue. Your mouth is hot. When you stick in the thermometer and place it under your tongue, the thermometer measures your mouth’s heat. After 60 seconds when you pull out the thermometer, if you don’t have a temperature, the thermometer’s red line stops at 98.6 degrees.

Even when you’re 50, 60, 70, and you’ve eaten ice cream all your life, you never quite get over the first wintry spoonful’s arrival on your 98.6-degree tongue. The spoon passes over your warm bottom lip, your lips tighten around the spoon. You slowly suckle the iced cream away from the spoon’s shallow bowl and deep into your mouth. The chilly cream rests upon the tongue, glides as it melts across the taste buds’ papillae, or “gustatory hairs.” Perhaps you press your tongue up toward the roof of your mouth, creating an ice cream sandwich between palate and tongue. The melting cream coats the epithelial tissue that lines your cheeks’ interiors, drifts in between teeth, eddies down onto the gums. Every spoonful seems to begin in innocence, as if you never have felt in your mouth before such cold, creamy sweetness.

I have long puzzled over the pleasure ice cream gives. It is food no one needs and almost everyone, at some time, longs for. I think that at the bottom of the bowl we find the story of mother. But I am tempted to skirt this business about mother’s milky breasts and our suckling at them. It’s embarrassing. But I do believe that part of the appeal that what we call “comfort food” exerts is that food’s association with mother. This makes an odd kind of sense. Our first experience of need and need’s frustration is hunger. We feel this need and frustration at a time when we are our body, when we are almost entirely flesh. A baby doesn’t “think thoughts,” he “feels feelings”; a suckling infant’s thoughts are all feelings. My belief is that our body never forgets these early hunger pangs and the pangs’ frustrations. I suspect that when we feel unhappy or lost and empty, when we feel thwarted, when we feel caught between a rock and a hard place, that our body is also recalling its earliest hunger and that hunger’s frustrations.

I imagine this recollection as a sad minor-key bass line beneath our soprano sorrows. So that to spoon ice cream past our lips into our mouth is to receive consolation in a part of ourselves that is beyond words.

— Judith Moore

Judith Moore has been a recipient of two NEA Fellowships for literature, most recently in 1996. She is coauthor with Sue Coe of X, published by Raw Books and Graphics and reissued by New Press, and author of The Left Coast of Paradise (Soho Press), which included pieces written initially for the San Diego Reader. Her essay collection, Never Eat Your Heart Out, also including pieces first printed in the Reader, was published early this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.