DIARY

The joy (and work) of homemade ice cream

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          Flug asked me what I was doing. He had walked up to my porch where I was turning an ice-cream freezer and had watched me crank for two minutes before he asked this question. This was from a man who grew up in Tilley and who was fully familiar with homemade ice cream. He had cranked his share when he was a kid, just as I had. Any place that had cows or access to their cream was a place that made ice cream, especially when the snow became crystalline, as it was that afternoon about two weeks ago.

          “What am I doing, Flug?” I sneered. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

          “It looks like you’re cranking an ice-cream freezer,” he said. “I mean, why are you doing that while a skunk is standing there on the porch behind you?” Of course it wasn’t a skunk at all; it was my dog Kezman, the Kezmanian Devil, whose falling hair made him look half black and half white - polecatish.

          Naturally Flug had a sore elbow – he couldn’t remember which one – and couldn’t help crank, but there was nothing wrong with his mouth or his butt because he went in and talked and stayed perched on my favourite kitchen chair until the last spoonful of strawberry ice cream was gone. People sure are gluttons and they fight about who gets to ‘eat the dasher’.

          Just to clarify, the dasher is the turning thingamajig inside the freezer can and people have been known to get into fistfights over who gets to ‘eat the dasher’, meaning to scrape all the remaining ice cream off it. I got into a bit of a squabble last year about that very thing and I won. Aunt Fern’s wheelchair got stuck in a crack in the porch but if she’d been a few years younger than 89 and hadn’t had a hip replacement the previous week, she might have made a better fight of it.

          This crank turning has been a sore point for years between me and my spouse, who, like Flug, usually develops a sore elbow or two just about the time cranking starts. It wouldn’t matter if I were in a hospital bed somewhere with both legs and arms in casts, she would get me out and force me to crank that blasted freezer. The equality of the sexes has its limits. She would snowshoe ten miles through a blizzard any time of the day, but cranking that ice cream freezer means Arthritis City, Arizona.

          Also about turning the crank, I won’t mention any names but the kids’ Aunt Fronie breezed by, just in time for ice cream. I asked if she was going to help turn. No answer. Arthritis of the eardrum. My Nephew Egbert walked by – his first visit since just after the war. I asked if he wanted to help crank the ice cream freezer, which by this time was getting quite hard to turn. “I’ll be right back. I gotta change my socks,” he said over his shoulder. He didn’t have any socks here to change into. When next I saw him he was at the kitchen table with his nose in a bowl.

People driving by would look in and suddenly feel the need to come in and talk politics or gardening. “Oh, you have homemade ice cream!” They would of course stay for a bowlful or two.

Here’s the bottom line: I was the last to be served in that hubbub of a kitchen and I may have received an ounce of the ice cream I had cranked on for half an hour. The dog Kezman got a bigger serving than I did, and I had to wash the dishes. My spouse had developed tennis elbow and gout.

I did learn something though. If I am feeling lonely and want to see a whack of people – even for a short time – I just have to go out on the front porch with the ice cream freezer and start cranking. Amazing the number of people who show up – just not to help crank. I think next time I will go on Facebook and announce I am going to make THREE KINDS of ice cream – strawberry, vanilla,  and chocolate. Then, when everybody drives in, I will block the driveway behind them with a World War II tank I recently picked up at a yard sale in Wapske, and announce that nobody gets ice cream unless they have cranked – or piled wood - for at least ten minutes. No more Mister Nice Guy.
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