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.
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