May 23 2004, 04:17 PM The Soft Taste of Sweet Evening

There are sources to seasons, deep wells of memory as far back as youngest childhood. There are hazy recollections of favorite toys, or of places visited when seen from the height of thighs around one. It is claimed that the most sensual experience one might have before the turn of youth to the furrowed brow is one of ice cream. It is evocative stuff, a food of wonders.

We recently attended a new local ice creamery, a place built upon the conceit that they will knead into premises-made ice cream any number of innumerable candies and fruits and syrups, all before your eyes upon chilled stone slabs, the stuff smashed and folded toward mixture by paddles held by learning hands. They sing and dance for tips, too, but we mostly missed that, as they have in the large dispensed with such silly stuff in an effort to get the product out the door faster than the line forms (I ask you; if one were to sing and dance for them, would one get a discount?). It was the complications of the menu board that took me back, though, returning to distant favorite ice creams found in far flung haunts.

If you traveled some years ago to the hamlet of Orleans, Massachusetts, and took from town the road to the Atlantic that swings past the playhouse, across from the farmer's stand (and near the post office in the windmill) sat a little shack of a place named Sundae School. It was a satellite branch of the main store, but the ice cream didn't suffer for it. The won awards for it. They had standard flavors and other flavors, and a surprising one was Sweet Cream and Nuts, which was true to its name: cream, sugar, and nuts. It was clean and light, and perfect for hot days.

If instead you had been on Church Street in Pittston, Pennsylvania some handful of years earlier, at the top of the hill near Mill Street sat Grablick's Dairy. They had a full soda counter, and they would serve chocolate phosphates with a lecture. They made the ice cream on the premises, too, and they had several local variations on regional interpretations of specialty sundaes. The best in my estimation was the dusty road: vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, a dash of malt, a handful of pecans, whipped cream.

Having et, return, then, to Sundae School. This place deserves more mention if only for the New England nomenclature. They would happily serve a Frappe (which elsewhere is thought of as a milk-shake), a milk-shake (which elsewhere has not thought of), or a brown cow (which I refuse to explain). Equally notable was the appearance of Moxie on the menu. But for ice cream, I am somewhat convinced that the best scoop that has thus far crossed my tongue has come from there, a serving of Coffee Oreo ice cream perched atop a sugar cone, melting a little in the thick heat of an August night.

If you attend a mixable ice cream shoppe, have them spin some fragments of that famous cookie into a smear of coffee colored cream for you. I do not think it will disappoint.