July 9, 2009
“We dare not trust our wit or making our house pleasant to our friends, so we buy ice cream." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, author, poet, philosopher
Serve ice cream if you want to have the perfect picnic, garden party, church social, craft day for kids, or any neighborhood barbecue or get-together. Your event will be a hit, and this luscious treat will send everyone home happy; it is guaranteed.
The upside: you will be considered the perfect host or hostess, a genius at event planning, because nothing soothes the soul and cools the palate quite like ice cream.
The downside: two of life's worst ills may occur--brain freeze, and well, I probably should not mention the other in polite company.
Yes, one serious downside of ice cream consumption is indeed brain freeze, the dreaded painful nerve condition that is created by eating ice cream too fast.
Our grandmothers likely told us when we were kids to quit gulping it. "Slow down and savor ice cream," they would say. "Eat it lovingly with purpose and care, or it will bite you back. It will make you scream!"
I can still hear the warning, which I never heeded, "Take small bites and move the ice cream around in your mouth with your tongue; keep it away from the roof of your mouth before you swallow it."
That didn't work when I was 8, and it does not work now.
Besides, most baby boomers cannot allow cold ice cream to linger in our chops more than a few seconds anyway due to an accumulation of crowns and root canals acquired over the years. I, for one, try to swallow even a particularly yummy flavor of ice cream quickly; otherwise, it will send shooting knives of pain through what is left of the nerves in my teeth.
I'd rather have brain freeze.
Eating ice cream fast is the best I can do no matter how much I would love to eat ice cream as tenderly and lovingly as it is meant to be eaten.
The second downside of eating ice cream that really should not be mentioned, as I said earlier but will anyway, is adult-onset lactose intolerance. This malady can turn the joy of eating sweet, innocent ice cream into a close encounter with a gastric-intestinal devil of another kind.
Case in point. Overhead in our household generally around 9 p.m on more than one lovely summer evening, and I won't say by whom, "If I go to the Dairy Queen for a hot fudge sundae or raid the fridge for some ice cream, somebody stop me, hog tie me. I don't care what you have to do, just stop me. My stomach will pay for it later. So don't let me do it!"
Since eating ice cream is nothing short-of-heaven, not much can be done to stop someone when an ice cream craving takes hold. We acknowledge and assume that fact in our household, and therefore, any confection lover gets his or her own way, despite the gastric consequences.
As Thornton Wilder, author and humorist once quipped, "My advice to you is not to inquire why or whether, but just to enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate -that's my philosophy."
Sort of an "eat-now-pay-later-but-it-is-worth-it" philosophy, I guess one would say.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Butter Pecan, Strawberry, Rocky Road anyone? Yum.
