By Melissa Houle

Late one summer night when I was six, my mother and I returned home exhausted after hours at the Emergency room, me with my broken left wrist newly immobilized in a plaster cast. Once home, we then collapsed at the kitchen table and ate a dinner which consisted entirely of Eskimo Pies.  This complete suspension of the good nutrition my mother ordinarily insisted upon made it all almost worth it to me. I think that’s why I considered Eskimo Pies the most perfect of all childhood ice cream treats for years afterward. Until my twenties when I discovered that Hagen-Dasz and Dove produced an even more perfect execution  of the crisp dark chocolate shell over  vanilla ice cream concept.

Creamsicles, with their Haz-Mat orange outer layer surrounding the sweet vanilla centers were also big with me, as were ice cream sandwiches, even if the thin chocolate wafer crumbs always coated  my sticky finger tips. I still adore a good ice cream cone and can be talked into one at almost any time of day or night.   I regret that that the delicious chocolate-vanilla-strawberry combination of Neapolitan ice cream, so popular in the 1960's, has all but disappeared, shouldered aside by more trendy or sophisticated flavors.  In my life-long love affair with ice cream, I love them all with the possible exceptions of Spumoni and bubblegum. If you want to make me happy, just turn me loose near a sundae bar somewhere with a bowl and a spoon.

Ben and Jerry?  I want to marry them. Both of them. Anyone who can come up with the flavors Coffee Heath Bar Crunch and Cherry Garcia just gets me.  Throw in a certain Mr. Hagen-Dasz, and I’ll commit trigamy with Mr. Dove Bar as a spare boyfriend seen on the sly. Talk about  Italian gelato, and naturally, we’re discussing ice cream-motivated polyamory that would make the entire FLDS look like a bunch of undersexed feebs.  During my trip to Italy in 2003, I sampled local gelato  every time I had a chance. Sour cherry, peach, chocolate hazelnut, strawberry, pistachio; pomegranate, orange, lemon and raspberry sorbetto—I tasted every one. Italians  had  some other flavors I couldn’t identify or pronounce, but when that situation arose, I could still point and smile.  

Gelato cups are just tiny little things, I would rationalize, walking down the cobblestoned streets unable to stop smiling as each divine taste melted on my tongue, delivered by a tiny, shovel-shaped plastic spoon.  I didn't even care how many Euros it cost each time.  Gelato was the last thing I ate in Rome to bid  my Addio to Italy before heading back to the airport on the train.

  What I could not love were Weight Watcher’s early 1970’s attempts at “diet ice cream.”  I knew it was  just an icy, slushy blob of frozen skim milk,  over-sweetened with  saccharine which had a  horrible, chemical aftertaste. This disgusting and disappointing substitute only emphasized my feelings of being deprived of ice cream in its real and infinitely superior form.  I want the  wonderful, whole nine butterfat yards or nothing.  So, as an adult, my Superego won't allow my Id to indulge in ice cream nearly as often as I want it.  Quite aside from the butterfat, sugar and calorie issues, I no longer digest dairy products as well as I did twenty years ago. But when I do indulge, it’s damned well going to be the genuine article. So I make little bargains with myself to get a taste of ice cream now and then such as:

“Better one ice cream cone eaten out and about on a hot afternoon than a half gallon in my freezer at home.”

“I’d prefer to savor a gelato cup’s worth of something truly exquisite than make myself sick with a huge sundae made with ordinary supermarket ice cream.”

“If we have hundred degree weather for three days in a row, then I can buy some ice cream.”

“I’ll put it in a teacup and eat it with a demitasse spoon….”

“It’s my birthday/Easter/Fourth of July/Labor Day; I’ll exercise every day next week; it’s sweltering hot; my car got totaled; my cat died….” (Sound familiar?)

I don’t own an ice cream maker being wise enough to myself to know my having unsupervised access to one  is a Seriously Bad Idea.™  So despite nostalgic memories of making  hand-cranked ice cream  back at summer camp in my teens, I will not be providing actual ice cream recipes. This is more about my latest idea for a good, fruity summer sundae.

Melissa’s Warm Peach Split Sundae

For me, a good sundae has variety, not only of flavors, but of textures and temperatures as well. I want warm combined with cold, crunchy combined with soft and smooth, tart with sweet.  Size is important, too. I don’t want a ten-ingredient  ginormous extravaganza that leaves my taste buds confused, and me feeling nauseous and ashamed of myself before I even take the first bite. I’d much rather have a moderate-sized six-ingredient sundae, all the flavors of which combine into a pleasing whole and rise from the table feeling satisfied and indulged but not humiliated after having  eaten it. 

When it comes to fruit and ice cream, I know the banana split is a classic all over the nation. But, being an anti-banana hardliner, the fastest way to wreck ice cream for me is to stick a big old slab of raw banana into my sundae dish—ew! Give me ripe berries instead, any day! Then I got my brain storm: why not a peach split? A  warm peach split, made with peaches that had been cooked a little?? That would cover the variety in taste, texture and temperature in one.

 I want at least two flavors of ice cream in my sundae, one of which is almost always chocolate  since it pairs well with all my other favorite flavors such as coffee, mint, caramel and fruit based ice creams .  While I am an ardent proponent of the hot fudge sundae, chocolate did not seem to fit well into my peach split idea. I wanted to duplicate the taste of a Peach Melba with peaches, and berries--clear, bright fruit flavors that emphasize the season of both stone fruits and berries.

For my inaugural experiment in making a peach split sundae I decided on the following ingredients:

Ice creams: Ben and Jerry’s Willie Nelson Country Peach Cobbler. (perfect!)

Hagen-Dasz Strawberry. I think theirs is one of the best strawberry ice creams I’ve ever tasted. What you decide on is up to you, of course.

            1 ripe peach per person.

            1/2 pint whipping cream.(More if you're having an ice cream social.)

            1 basket of organic raspberries for raspberry sauce.

 Raspberry Sauce:

            1 basket of raspberries, washed.  Place in a sauce pan with a scant ¼ cup water, and 2 TBs sugar and  1 TB Chambord, if you wish. Heat mixture to a boil, stirring often with a whisk. Taste, and add more sugar if the sauce seems sour, but I like it a little tart to rescue the sundae from cloying sweetness.  The thing I wanted to taste most was the raspberries. I also wanted a nice, runny consistency for drizzling.

Puree the sauce in a blender, then place a sieve over a bowl or jar and pour in the puree.  This will strain out most of the raspberry seeds.

Caramel Ginger Sauce:  I’ve never been a fan of butterscotch. But caramel…now you’re talking!

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup water.

1/4 cup whipping cream. (If you're making this for lots of sundaes, double or even triple these quantities.)

Approximately 1 tsp fresh grated ginger. Measure the  sugar and water into a saucepan and grate the ginger right into it. When caramelizing sugar, it's not a moment for multi-tasking.  Not only because the caramelization happens in the last seconds after several minutes of stirring your hot sugar syrup, but because burns from caramelized sugar hurt like a mo-fo.   But accidents can be avoided if you keep your mind on the job.   You want medium heat, and you want to have a wire whip at hand. Right at the end of this procedure, the sugar will  turn golden brown with amazing speed, and from there, it progresses to burned brown very rapidly which can taste bitter, so pay close attention. For this procedure, it's best not to use any saucepan that is black inside. When the caramel reaches the color you want, add the cream and stir, stir stir until you have a nice, smooth sauce. The sauce will bubble up  when you ad the cream to the hot sugar, so don't be surprised by this.  Add a little more cream if it seems too thick. Store in a canning jar in your fridge, but warm it at least  to room temperature before serving. (It was delicious, and the ginger gave it a subtle, warm je ne sais quoi.)

Peaches:  Bring a pot of water to a boil, and drop in one peach for each sundae you're making. Boil fruit for a minute or two, then immediately drop it in cold water.  Peach skin should slide off easily.  Quarter the peaches, removing the pit, and sprinkle brown sugar over each piece before popping them under a hot broiler.  You want to warm the peach, but not cook it through.

 The ice cream and peaches.

Whipped Cream: Don’t wimp out on this—I have to have whipped cream on my sundae as long as I’m eating it at all.

Nuts: toasted almonds, coarsely chopped. Extra points if they’re still warm.

1 Rainier Cherry, up top.

This would be a good candidate for sundae bar assembly, letting guest make their own from supplied ingredients. For mine, I put one quarter of the peach at the bottom of the bowl on top of a little pool of raspberry sauce, added the two kinds of ice cream and the remaining three  peach pieces on top, then drizzled on some of both the sauces. 

On top of that went a nice mound of whipped cream, the chopped toasted almonds, and more drizzles of both sauces. Then I added a Rainier cherry, to go with the peach and pink color scheme up top:

The Inaugural Warm Split Peach Melba Sundae

It may take some tweaking, but I am pleased with my warm peach split prototypical sundae.  The  serving size, the flavors, and different consistencies and temperatures were all just as harmonious and individually tasty as I hoped they would be.

In fact, I can state with authority  that this late Peach Split Melba Sundae was delicious!

So what if I need to spend the next week or so at a nicely sadistic summer fitness camp? =o)

Copyright Melissa Houle, July 10, 2010

(Keep this, then you can prove you knew me before I was famous.)