Summer delights

The joy of creamsicle custard

I do not like chocolate. It doesn’t do a thing for me. I find it heavy, thick, and unappealing. Normally cookies are irresistible to me, but if they’re chocolate chip, I can walk away. Some time ago, on the wave of dark chocolate health advice, I carefully purchased some very expensive handmade chocolate. I thought: how bad can it be? It’s chocolate. I gave it away.

What I adore is vanilla. I have never understood how anyone could call it boring. It has a deeply nuanced swirling depth of flavors that I envision as the tendrils of roses. At its best, it is magical. I remember once a crême brulée we had years ago at a restaurant in New York that made me see colors. It wasn’t just me in my vanilla madness. My husband had the same experience.

I also love citrus of all kinds: lemon, orange, lime, grapefruit. I gravitate toward citrus drinks, citrus cakes, citrus cookies, citrus soaps, citrus candles….Even the perfume I have shipped to my daughter in France that she carries to me in her luggage has an undertone of lemon. I like the fresh bite of citrus fragrance and of its flavor. It feels clean, crisp, and invigorating.

So, it should not be surprising that I love the combination of vanilla and citrus that is the creamsicle. Wisconsin is famous for its culture of frozen custard, and in the world of frozen custard, there are small family custard stands that are the sine qua nons of the custarddom. Aficianados argue over which is the best, and we all have our favorite. These small stands always have vanilla and chocolate, but they also have flavors of the day, which are scheduled on published calendars so people can make their custard in-related plans.

My favorite stand’s flavor repertoire includes—along with all the uninteresting chocolate variations of which there must be more than a dozen—orange creamsicle. I am pretty sure it is what heaven would taste like if it were a custard flavor, and appears rarely compared to the relentless cruelty of chocolate this and chocolate that. On my way to the grocery store I crane my neck as I drive past to see whether the sign announces the presence of orange creamsicle. I am almost always disappointed. But sometimes on those days when it appears, I wrestle with myself explaining that I should not have orange creamsicle custard this week because I have already had some other fattening thing—or some series of fattening things—which make custard inadvisable.

Lately the custard gods have been smiling, and we have had two sightings of orange creamsicle in the space of two months. On the first occasion I was able to resist, but on the second, I succumbed to a beautiful and delicious dish of orange creamsicle frozen custard. So fragrant, intoxicating, fresh, and delicious. I even went so far as to buy a hand-packed gallon as a gift, and it was appreciated to the extent that now someone else is watching the sign for a sighting in the way some people watch for rare birds.

I should point out that I am not averse to the popsicle version which is available at the grocery store, and I have been known to hand them out to delivery people on hot days. But the custard version is the impossibly delicious, inimitable one, fleeting in its summer appearances like the lightning bugs that speckle the fields.

One of the season’s many delights.

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Eli loves the lake. He does not love bad weather.