22 June 2021
Now that we’ve made it to the summer solstice, my thoughts have turned to those lazy summer days as a kid in Mississippi. One thing stands out (more than the lack of air conditioning) and that was homemade ice cream. It comes pretty close to being a religious experience in my mind. Or at least Nirvana.
I most often remember making homemade ice cream at Aunt Buleah and Uncle Milton’s house in Forest, Mississippi, eight miles to the east of Morton where I mostly grew up in between moves to other places in the state. Mother and Dad made it on occasion but it was pretty much an every Sunday thing with Aunt Buleah and Uncle Milton.
Forest was a bigger town than Morton, a little over double in size. Morton was the poor cousin to Forest. Forest had a public swimming pool. It had more than one restaurant, it had a classier movie theater than Morton. It also had a larger school system with, often times, the better football team. Morton’s year would be made whenever the football team beat Forest.
Both Forest and Morton were big in the chicken industry (feeding, raising, and slaughtering chickens) so whoever won the football game (always the last game of the season) was presented the golden chicken (rooster) trophy for the year. Although smaller and with less of a student population to draw from, Morton Panthers more than held its own against the Forest Bearcats.
Aunt Buleah was my grandmother Ruby’s sister. She and Uncle Milton had three daughters: Hilda, the oldest, Sandra, the middle and Ann the youngest. All three were older than me but I was closest to Ann. Ann took a shine to me and would ride me around Forest where she would flirt with boys of her age – I guess I was the chaperone. The big deal was to go to the Forest drive-in on the edge of town (already in iffy territory) and order cherry cokes – like they were something illicit. It was actually nerve-wracking to even order one.
She would fill me in on who was dating who in Forest, who was a snob, and who got to first base, second base, and who hit a home run.
For a while, all three daughters were around and Ruby and I would go over for the day after church and in the late afternoon, we would crank out the homemade ice cream.
If you’ve never seen the old ice cream makers, they were interesting in their design. The container that held the potential ice cream was a metal column. Inside that fit the wooden paddles that would scrape up against the side of the metal to scrape the frozen ice cream to the interior. A metal lid fit on top of that and a square piece of metal from the paddle would fit up through the metal lid. A hand crank locked into place over the square piece of metal from the paddles and when you turned the crank, both the metal column and the wooden paddles would rotate but in opposite directions.
There was a hole in the wooden bucket to allow water from the melted ice to escape. Once you filled the metal column a few inches from the top with your ice cream mixture – never to the top – ice expands – and put everything into place, you filled the wooden bucket with ice from the ice house (at first you had to chip it from a single block of ice but modern times soon provided ice in bags from the local fast food store). As you layered the ice into the bucket, you salted each layer with ice cream salt which was simply larger crystals of salt. Salt lowers the freezing point of water and as a consequence, as you turned the handle, the ice would melt.
Every so often you would carefully tip the wooden bucket to allow water to drain out. You had to be careful because if you tipped it too far, then the liquid ice cream would also spill out.
It seems contradictory to add ice and then make it melt but by having water mixed with the ice, the water and ice temperature were both 32°F. If you didn’t melt the ice, there would be air spaces between pieces of ice and the air temperature would be higher than 32°F and you wouldn’t get ice cream to freeze. With water at 32°F and ice at 32°F, you were in equilibrium and at a constant freezing temperature with no warmer spaces between the ice.
Woe be unto you if you let the drain hole plug up. That meant the salt water level got too high and the salt water would seep into the ice cream mixture and ruin it. I’ve only heard my Aunt Buleah curse once in my life and that was when a batch of ice cream was spoiled by the salt. I was shocked! She took the top off and had a taste of the ice cream and said “shit.” It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard my parents and grandparents use that word before – just not Aunt Buleah.
The reason that was such a big deal was the cost of making homemade ice cream. First, there’s a lot of milk involved – whole milk and condensed milk – which was expensive. Mother’s recipe called for something like a eight eggs. All of this had to be carefully cooked on the stove. If it didn’t cook correctly, you ended up with scrambled eggs. This was one rich mixture for ice cream.
The other reason ruining a batch was bad was the time it took to freeze the ice cream. Someone had to constantly turn the crank and someone had to frequently add ice and salt. As the mixture started to freeze, turning the crank became more and more of an effort. Usually, us small kids were made to either turn the crank early on or as it got more difficult, sit on the top of the churn to hold it down while and adult turned the crank. Even though Aunt Buleah put towels on top of the churn you still got a very chilly ass.
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It must have taken at least one hour or maybe two to get it to the right frozen consistency.
The absolute best of the best of homemade ice cream occurred in peach season. You would search out ripened or over ripened peaches to put in the ice cream mixture. There is absolutely nothing better in the world than homemade peach ice cream on a hot summer day. Somehow I seemed to always end up being assigned to peel the peaches and cut them into small pieces.
Aunt Buleah and Uncle Milton had a large oak tree in the back yard and everyone sat around in the shade of the oak. We often had left over fried chicken to snack on while waiting for the ice cream to freeze.
Kids ran and played in the yard, dogs ran and barked with abandon while the adults sat in the shade and talked politics and gossiped. Trust me, there was plenty of gossip. It’s amazing what you learn when adults don’t think you are listening.
Uncle Milton never held a job for very long. He was always changing jobs for one reason or another but Aunt Buleah worked for many years for the Forest school cafeteria. She was an expert baker. She could pretty much cook anything but she shone when baking pies and cakes and doughnuts. My first ever doughnuts were her homemade doughnuts. She made them a day in advance (yeast dough) and refrigerated them over night. When cooked in oil, she would take them out and immediately dust them with cinnamon and sugar. I figure, over the years, I must have eaten three times my (adult) weight in her doughnuts.
She always, always, always made me a birthday cake. For years, my favorite was caramel cake. It was sugary goodness. Later, my tastes changed and it was German chocolate cake. No one could make caramel cake or German chocolate as good as Aunt Buleah.
When I say she was a good cook, I mean chef quality. I know because of all the Sunday dinners I had over there and can compare to what chefs turn out today. It was from her I learned about hominy. She actually made her own hominy by boiling the corn grains in a lye solution to remove the seed coat and then rinsing, rinsing, rinsing to get rid of the lye. Once the seed coat is removed, the endosperm layer puffs up and out. That’s what makes it hominy. If you dry the hominy and grind it, it becomes grits (thus the name hominy grits – as we redundant Southerns say). If you grind it finer, it becomes corn meal. I’ve never had hominy since Aunt Buleah that tasted as good as hers.
She also made her own sauerkraut. She often had chickens in the yard and for Sunday dinner would go out and kill the chicken. I would help pluck feathers and then she would hold the carcass over the gas stove burner to singe off the pin feathers.
Sunday dinners (what Yankees call lunch) was a table full of food. There was always fried chicken, fried okra, mashed potatoes, roast beef, beets, turnips or collards when in season, green beans, and Aunt Buleah’s home made dinner rolls. There were at least three deserts. Usually she made one cake and two different kinds of pies. Oh, and ice tea so sweet it would give you a toothache. I think I’ve had so much sweet tea over my life that I never had to sweeten tea again. The sugar fix has lasted that long.
It was usually about dusk when the ice cream was ready and Aunt Buleah would pull out a mixed set of bowls and spoons and she would serve it up from the column. By the time it hit your bowl with the summer heat, it was already melting and by the time you got close to finishing it, it was ice cream soup. The you simply tilted the bowl to your mouth and finished it off.
There was Ruby, Aunt Buleah and Uncle Milton, me, sometimes Archie, Hilda, Sandra and Ann, and often a neighbor or two or three or four.
After it was all eaten, Ruby and I would get in her 1956 Buick and head back to Morton with leftovers from dinner – but no ice cream. It was made and eaten in one sitting.