Hate to quote myself, but this made me wonder about other regional ice cream specialties.
An It’s It is two oatmeal cookies with a scoop of ice cream, dipped in chocolate. The true San Francisco treat.
Now that I’m living in the Midwest, I’ve discovered frozen custard at Culver’s.
When I was growing up in Boston they used to have coffee, vanilla, and orange sherbert ice cream. It was in “stripes” like you’ll sometimes see in in choc, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream today.
Sounds weird, but it was really good.
Now I may be wrong, but the first tme I saw “mix in” ice creams was at Steve’s in Boston in the mid-80s. Was that a New England speciality?
There also was little soft serve shop in the way to Concord (en route to Walden’s Pond) that served a “creamsicle”- orange sherbet and vanilla soft serve swirled together. Yum, yum.
How about tiger stripe? It was orange mixed with black licorice.
Ooh. That sounds amazing, adam yax.
Not in my area, but Fudgie the Whale and Cookie Puss are insanely popular ice cream cakes.
When I was growing up we had an ice cream parlor called The High Wheeler which had an eponymous dish. Not exactly a “specialty” I guess since IIRC it consisted simply of a huge number of ice cream scoops arranged in a roughly pennyfarthing shape. I never got one.
Steve’s started the trend, it was not a New England thing before then.
I had my first “it’s it” a month or so ago. It was very meh. Maybe you have to grow up on that. When in college, I used to make my own by using a couple of chocolate chip cookies and putting soft serve in between. Those were much better.
Huckleberry. It’s goooooood.
I have fond memories of Carvel when I was a kid in NJ, which I haven’t ever seen in the Midwest. Here, we’re in Dairy Queen country. Only recently has Culver’s and their frozen custard made inroads into central Iowa - only a few years ago, it was a treat I’d have only when I headed to Wisconsin. Pumpkin shakes with frozen custard… damn.
Lately, the only major changes in ice cream around here has been the slew of overpriced “we beat up your ice cream on a slab and add stuff and then charge you $8” places, like Coldstone and Maggie Moo’s.
Oh, and Neapolitan ice cream is not well known here. In NJ, it was pretty much “standard” flavor when I was growing up. Here, the standard flavor is that yellowish cheap french vanilla stuff, or vanilla soft-serve perhaps.
I’m assuming that Haagen-Daas’s (sp?) Pear sherbet is local to the San Diego area, because since leaving, I haven’t found it anywhere.
It was so delicious it almost made me believe in the miraculous.
They have this one flavour at Kimball Farms in Carlisle that all my high school friends claimed was purely New England. Frozen Pudding.
it’s great.
Wow. I really want to try that.
In Iowa City, there is a local ice cream parlor called Whitey’s that makes something called a Boston. A tall cup is filled about 2/3 of the way up with a milkshake, and then the top 1/3 is a sundae, complete with whipped cream and a cherry.
It’s totally decadent, even sharing with my sister. We like to get either a chocolate marshmallow or chocolate peanut butter milkshake on the bottom, and a hot fudge sundae on the top.
Because of the name, I always wondered if it was really a Boston thing. I lived in Boston for three years, and never encountered it, but I also don’t frequent ice cream parlors much.
Fried ice cream. I’ve only ever seen it at local sushi places.
I’ve never heard of it, nor do I ever remember seeing it in a grocery store. I’ll keep an eye out, though, it sounds divine.
I think you can find it nationally now (I’ve seen it at Whole Foods, for instance), but for awhile I could only find Laloo’s at a couple of the gourmet shops in town, as it’s made a few miles south of here in Petaluma.
Lemon Chiffon, Pumpkin Spice, and Molasses Tipseycake are my favorite flavors so far. They all have a definite goat milk flavor, but it works so well. Really delicious.
Steve’s, which started in Somerville, Mass, was the first place I knew of that had mix-ins, was thwe very first place I know of that had “mix-ins”. Back when he had only the one staore (near Tufts, back in the mid-1970s), there used to be long lines at the store to get in. The chain expanded wildly in the next decade, and I was amazed to see a store out in Salt Lake City (which I went to frequently). Sadly, it closed within a couple of years, as did all the other stores. Even the original Somerville location (which I believe he retained owenership of, unlike the rest of the chain). There aren’t any Steve’s around anymiore. Sniff. Although I believe thast other chains, like Cold Stone Creamery, still do the mix-ins.
As for “Creamsicles”, they’re not regional – we had commercial, packages Creamsicles and Dreamsicles on a stick in New Jersey in my youth in the 1960s. I hated them – but that’s just me. My sisdter l;oved them.
I’ve seen it at about every Mexican restaurant I’ve been to.