Ice and cream to scream for
Rahul Verma
A tub of ice-cream, brought by a friend, gave us a lot of joy some days ago. Though I am not a great ice-cream lover, I am surrounded by folks who think the best invention of modern times is not toasted bread, but a chocolate cone. As the temperature rises, and I find myself happily digging into the tub, I have been mulling over this dish. What interests me is not the usual ice-cream — chocolate, vanilla, butterscotch and their many cousins — but some extraordinary ones that chefs have been crafting.
Chef Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in the UK showed us, many years ago, how ice-creams can be sweet and savoury at the same time. He prepared an ice-cream by adding bacon to egg custard and freezing it. It became a huge hit. His range of savoury ice-creams included one prepared with mustard grains and crab.
Sweet ice-creams have evolved over the years, too. I remember the first time I had nolen gur ice-cream (prepared with liquid date palm jaggery). It was truly out of this world. The creators of this brand, a father and son I met some 10 years ago, had experimented with various kinds of flavours, including lemon grass, the fragrant ‘gondhoraj’ lemon, and even with wasabi, which was prepared for a Japanese dignitary.
My tryst with ice-creams prompts me to look back at the history of ice in India. Ice was widely available in the West, of course, where pond water routinely froze in winter. Soon, it was being used to preserve food. In India, food historian KT Achaya writes, the Mughals started transporting ice from the mountains to the plains. Then, a young Harvard dropout named Frederick Tudor made history (and money) by shipping ice from the US to India. The first consignment from Boston reached Calcutta on September 6, 1833. The rest, as they say, is history — and chilled food.
These days, I find ice-creams that are gluten free, vegan, sugar free and so on. Some of the most innovative ice-creams now available are of Japanese origin. I was introduced to mochi ice-cream by Delhi chef Varun Tuli, who loves to innovate. Mochi is essentially a Japanese rice cake, prepared with glutinous rice. The sticky rice casing traditionally contains some kind of custard or a red bean paste. But now it comes with ice-creams of various flavours — green tea, coconut and jaggery, and so on.
Chef Joymalya Banerjee, a ‘Grateful Dead’ fan who ran a restaurant called Bohemian in Kolkata, once shared a prawn and cucumber ice-cream recipe with me. For this, he blended a paste of prawns with cream and milk in a saucepan. Once it started to boil, he turned off the heat and set it aside. In a mixing bowl, he whipped egg yolks and sugar, added the milk mix, and let it cook in a double boiler till it thickened. He cooled this and added some salt. In another bowl, he strained salted cucumber puree and then added this gradually to the prawn-milk mixture. This was put in an ice-cream maker and churned till it froze, and then refrigerated. Finally, he scooped out a creamy chunk and served it in a fennel-flavoured cone.
Many may not readily accept such out-of-the-box ice-creams. But once people open their minds, they will be happy to try out these innovative offerings. The first bite or lick, of course, is not always easy. Chef Blumenthal had once prepared a crab ice-cream to accompany a crab risotto. When it was first served, people turned a delicate shade of pink — quite like the crab on the table. The problem, the chef later realised, was that people associated the colour pink with something sweet. Once it was explained to the diners that it was a savoury ice-cream, they happily embraced it.
Legend has it that the chef created his bacon ice-cream as an April Fools’ joke. But it was such a success that it became a part of his menu. As jokes go, this one was a scream, an ice scream.
Tipsy-fruity ice-cream
Ingredients
Melons and kiwi (cubed) 1 tbsp
Orange segments 1 tbsp (deseeded, peeled and chopped)
Cherries (deseeded) 2
Litchis 2
Cointreau (or orange juice concentrate) 1 tbsp
A large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
Method
Refrigerate a brandy balloon glass (or any wine glass or goblet). When it’s time for dessert, put some of the fruit pieces (barring the cherries) in the glass, and then add the ice-cream. Add the remaining fruit and top it with cherries. Gently drizzle the Cointreau over the ice-cream and the fruit. Chill, and serve with a long spoon.
