Ice Cream: They All Scream for It

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These were only the foothills of genius. The Good Humor Corp., with an excess of hubris, made a chili con carne ice-cream bar, which failed. L.L. Bassett, grandson of the founder of the great Philadelphia ice creamery (his daughter Ann took over the company five years ago), made yellow tomato ice cream in the 1930s. No one liked it. Dill-pickle ice cream, intended for pregnant women, was concocted by a shop in Michigan. It succeeded. More than one specialty shop whipped up jelly-bean ice cream in honor of Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, but Washington Lawyer Weiss, perhaps foreseeing litigation, quickly withdrew his from his menu at Bob's Famous. Said he: "It looked like a potential tooth chipper."

If jelly-bean ice cream had existed in the first quarter of the century, soda jerks would have translated it into cocky fountain lingo. Dickson has compiled a marvelous glossary of such wise-guy locutions, including "Hoboken special," which for some reason signified a pineapple soda with chocolate ice cream, and "twist it, choke it and make it cackle" for a chocolate malted with an egg (twist presumably for the twisting of the malted-milk beater, choke for chocolate, and cackle, of course, for the chicken that laid the egg). New scoop shops do not seem to have developed such a memorable language of their own. Carla Seidel, 20, a friendly, blond, Harvard psychology major who scoops the graveyard shift—11 p.m. to 7 a.m.—at Brigham's in Harvard Square, describes the "zeroll" scooping technique (named for the anti-freeze-filled scoop that is used) that Brigham's requires its employees to learn. "The idea is to get maximum surface area but to keep the scoop sort of hollow," she explains. "You get a strip of ice cream that curls around on itself." Scoopers are trained to whip out precisely 4 oz. per small scoop, 5½ oz. for a medium scoop and 7 oz. for a large. But what ends up happening, she notes, is that customers who talk to the scoopers get more ice cream. She and her colleagues fight brain-fade by sizing up customers ("definitely a Swiss orange-chip person") the way soda jerks used to do. "The other day a guy came in and ordered a frappe with vanilla and mocha-chip ice cream, vanilla syrup, marshmallow sauce, hot butterscotch and an egg. That was weird." Her word frappe here is a Frenchified New England term for what Midwesterners call a milkshake.

There are other regional differences in the national passion. The steamy South-Central states consume less than half (10.77 qt. per digestive system per year) as much as the hungriest region, which is New England (21.86 qt.). Marketing men in the dairy industry have a suspicion that forthright Southeasterners will not eat what they cannot pronounce. A superpremium sells there under the no-foolin' name of Rich & Creamy.