Hagen - Five

On a 100-plus degree day, you feel the heat in a very particular way. I am grateful it wasn't humid today, but the heat was prodigious nonetheless.

Thus it was, when I went to the ice cream aisle in the grocery store: I wanted something minty. Nothing creamy, nothing even overly sweet. I wanted mint. Cool, frozen mint.

A month or two ago, I tried Hagen Dasz dark chocolate mint, and it was amazing. That was the perfect thing for today: nice quality cocoa flavor, not very sweet, not very strong, but a nice mintiness. Sadly, today - no luck.

I went for Hagen Dasz Five's mint flavor instead. It wasn't chocolate, but I think HD does a good 'scream, so I was up for a try.

The mint, in the end, was actually a hair too minimal for what I meant to be looking for.

But what I found instead was the closest thing I've ever tasted to my dad's homemade ice cream.



Sitting on that block-thick bench we had, out under the oak in the center of the backyard. Cranking, cranking. He'd put us on in shifts, each of us pumping at the old wooden ice cream maker, the steel hardware, the wooden handle smooth against the palm. I suppose he probably didn't leave us on the job all that long individually, but as the ice cream freezes the pumping gets harder to manage. Five minutes of pushing those wooden paddles through the stiffening custard, down inside its canister, down inside the ice and salt in the bucket: it gets to be a long time, in summertime. Particularly when you just want the ice cream. Or, for that matter: the CUSTARD we made it from.

My lawd, that homemade custard. Who needs ice cream ... ?

Well: dad.

Dad LOVED ice cream. The only job he ever wasn't good at was working at an ice cream counter, heh. Custard was fine to be served with mom's homemade blackberry cobbler, after a day when we went out to the farm and stopped on the way home from seeing family, and picked and picked and picked. Virginia blackberries. Mmm.

Oh, but custard - dad's ideal custard - was for pouring into the canister. Paddling. Freezing. Churning.



Father's Day, seven years after his death. Eight years since my last Father's Day with a living dad of my own. I ate ice cream (made with five ingredients - hence the name - milk, cream, eggs, sugar, and - in this case - a touch of mint), and it tasted a bit like daddy used to make. It even melted like that ice cream used to.

I miss you, dad. You were the very, very best.