Of Ice Cream…

Most people like ice cream.  The few who don’t primarily dwell in mental wards.  Okay, not really, but ice cream really is a dessert loved around the world.

Every country has made the dessert their own by adding their own spin.  In Wales, I was surprised to see licorice and black current ice cream, and fell in love with honeycomb ice cream.

In Brazil, some of their different flavors were acai and cupuacu.  None of my family were particularly fond of those flavors, but we did enjoy tapioca ice cream with tapioca beads suspended in its creamy goodness.  That was in an ice cream store in Belem, which was about eight hours from our house.

Closer to home, we relied on the local markets for ice cream (as long as we took an ice chest to keep the ice cream from melting on the long trip home).  The selection of flavors was small.  Vanilla, Chocolate, Neapolitan, Flocos (chocolate shavings in vanilla) and Rum with Raisins.

We ate almost all the flavors, but our favorite was Flocos. 

The one we never tried of our own free will was the Rum and Raisin.

Mind you, I said of our own free will.  We lived in the southern part of Brazil for a year and a half, and were invited over to multiple houses shortly after our arrival. 

One house was a tiny apartment with room at the table for only the oldest four of my family.  My younger sister, Jolie, and I were put at a tiny table in the kitchen. We struggled to get though lunch, Brazilian lasagna.  Far different than its American counterpart, the lasagna was a lot richer than we were accustomed to eating.   

We were excited when we saw that dessert was ice cream and a type of fruit we’d never tasted.  Papaya.  Now, for anyone who has never tried papaya, I would describe the flavor as flowery.  I like the smell of flowers, but found the taste impossible to like. 

Jolie and I looked at each other and dutifully cut into the orange flesh of the papaya.  We would be polite if it killed us.  At least, we consoled ourselves, we had the ice cream to wash it down.

After a few bites of the papaya we rewarded ourselves with a bite of the ice cream.  We looked at each other in horror at our first experience with Rum and Raisin ice cream.

Thankful to be in the kitchen so no one could see our struggle not to laugh, we washed down the flavor of the papaya with the flavor of the ice cream, which we quickly washed away with the flavor of the papaya…and so on until we managed to empty the plates.

I never learned to like papaya.  I do still love ice cream.

Just not Rum and Raisin.