A few days ago I saw an ice cream cart right outside our building complex in Nairobi. One rarely gets to see an ice cream cart nowadays in India, what with the mushrooming of ice cream parlours in the nooks and crannies of cities and even villages. But ice cream carts were common in my childhood and the sight of this one triggered off a spate of ice cream memories.
The love of ice cream runs in my blood, my mother being a phenomenal ice cream eater too and I seem to have bequeathed it to my son! The big difference is that he generously doles out ice cream scoops to everyone including the house help whereas I, given a choice, would begrudge my own children ice cream, lest it reduce my own share!
My earliest memories of eating ice cream, well its Indian version 'Kulfi' actually, are in India's largest state Madhya Pradesh, in the tiny Army town of Mhow. I remember eating deliciously cold Kulfi made by the traditional method of boiling whole milk and sugar for hours and then flavouring it with dry fruits and saffron. It was served in eco friendly bowls made of leaves stitched by hand. Memories of a three year old me scarfing down Kulfi every week are engraved on my mind as clearly as those tiny stitches were etched out on those leaves...
Then the scene in my mind shifts to India's desert state (pun unintended!) Rajasthan. Hot days and cool nights meant we were free to indulge ourselves with ice cream at all odd hours. Here I remember frequenting the factory outlet of a local ice cream brand in the royal city of Jodhpur. Floors that were continuously washed to maintain a high level of hygiene and were always wet as a result, no matter when we visited, stand out in my mind. I remember literally inhaling chocobars almost every week!
As a five year old I was once greedy enough to steal a bite from my three year old sister's bowl, having rapidly finished mine, only to receive a stinging slap from her! Her logic? 'Well, you should have asked me first!' Just goes to show we even get physically violent to protect our share of ice cream and yes, the love of it does run in the family!
Ice cream carts used to stand outside my school there. My mother had forbidden me from having this ice cream as it was a cheap, flavoured water candy and the origins of the water were highly suspect. One day, while counting the coins in my piggy bank, the temptation became too strong to resist. I sneaked a ten paise coin (yes things were cheap in the India of yore) into my pencil box and rushed to the nearest ice cream cart after school the next day. I bit into and slurped up a ghastly yellow candy bar made all the more delicious by the underlying flavour of pure guilt! Then I ran and got into our Army school bus.
A fellow first grader, who was also a neighbour, dropped in to play with me that very evening and let the cat out of the bag to my mother. I was ready to sink through the floor and flavoured candy ice cream is the least favourite one since then! I also came down with jaundice a few days later and turned exactly the same shade as that forbidden candy bar.
Cut to Pune where my Dad subsequently got transferred and my sister and I discovered the joys of digging into ice cream cups with tiny wooden spoons. Kwality ice cream cups came in just two flavours then - Vanilla and Strawberry. Today the plethora of flavours that Kwality, (who later tied up with Walls), offers would make even Baskin '31' Robbins blush a very berry strawberry pink!
Every Saturday morning I would eagerly cycle down to a newly opened shop run by a 'Sindhi' couple and buy our weekly quota of ice cream - two cups of Vanilla and two of strawberry for the two of us. Kwality was running a promotion where they gave away tiny molded plastic animals of myriad hues for each cup bought. Over the next two years we built up quite a collection!
Then came our highlight of the week. We would settle down with the current Enid Blyton books that we would be reading and as the Famous Five and the Five Find Outers (their dogs too!) wolfed down 'ices' on a hot summer's day in faraway England, we would let our own ice cream trickle slowly down our throats, while ensconced comfortably in the shady garden that surrounded our colonial bungalow. Idyllic bliss!
Surprisingly I have no ice cream memories of Guwahati in Assam, where we moved next.Piping hot 'Samosas' seem to dominate my memories of this time. I guess Assam, with its rainy climes, was not conducive, weather wise, to have ice cream and so my parents did not buy enough of it and there is no indelible ice cream mark left on my mind!
Ice cream became my personal comfort food when I moved back to Pune for high school and discovered the temptations offered by ice cream parlours in their newly evolved forms, for they now offered multiple flavours and cup/cone options plus bars in mind boggling flavours! Dinshaw's ice cream became my new favourite and I became a die hard fan of their best selling flavour 'Premium Scotch'! Close friends of mine from this time will remember my Friday evening after school ice cream fix! This was also the time when I had every single ice cream brand advert jingle on the tip of my tongue..India was just entering the post liberalization era and a slew of multi national icecream brands suddenly hit the market. Gone were the days of one brand with just two flavours!
The 'India' ice cream man stood under the huge shady tree with his ice cream cart, in our school premises. A hard day with tough tests would have us scrounging around for hidden emergency money and then we would pool it together to buy some vanilla bars or orange candy for those who preferred it. Another favourite time was when a mother from our particular group came visiting during lunch hours. The poor lady in question was given no choice and was hounded for cash so that all five or six of us could indulge in an unexpected treat of ice cream!
Another favourite memory is when I bet a school friend that I would eat ten ice cream cones at her birthday party. Her smart mother ensured that I ate the main course too and so I landed up eating only six ice creams and losing the bet. I had to treat the winner to, what else, but ice cream in school the very next day!
The state of Punjab in India has its own unique ice cream made from fresh whole milk that is put into an ice cream machine and is then churned out by the gallons. The only flavour that our favourite shop in Jallundhar Cantonment had was Pineapple and every summer each meal was followed by going there and filling up a huge thermos flask with ice cream. Then we enjoyed it at leisure at home. It was the creamiest and freshest ice cream I ever tasted but I could never figure out why the flavour was termed pineapple as it did not taste even remotely of pineapples. The colour was a pretty yellow though!
I believe I inherited my deep love of this frozen dish from my mother's maternal side of the family. They gave up their princely State when India became independent in 1947 but refused to give up their love of ice cream! So all my memories of family get togethers with my mother's uncles and cousins centre around huge ice cream pots. They added milk, sugar and flavouring in the inner pot and ice and salt in the outer one and then we all took turns churning it till the ice cream hardened and set. Then we formed queues and were served huge dollops of ice cream in humongous bowls. Each uncle manned a different flavoured pot and we could take our pick or, as in my case, have all of them! Mango and chocolate were all time favourites and we called these gatherings 'Icecream Parties' as befitted them.
Life as an adult took me to many different countries all around the world. I have tasted some of the best flavours made by top international ice cream brands. But honestly nothing could ever match up to the good old very vanilla and simply strawberry flavoured ice creams of my carefree childhood...
The love of ice cream runs in my blood, my mother being a phenomenal ice cream eater too and I seem to have bequeathed it to my son! The big difference is that he generously doles out ice cream scoops to everyone including the house help whereas I, given a choice, would begrudge my own children ice cream, lest it reduce my own share!
My earliest memories of eating ice cream, well its Indian version 'Kulfi' actually, are in India's largest state Madhya Pradesh, in the tiny Army town of Mhow. I remember eating deliciously cold Kulfi made by the traditional method of boiling whole milk and sugar for hours and then flavouring it with dry fruits and saffron. It was served in eco friendly bowls made of leaves stitched by hand. Memories of a three year old me scarfing down Kulfi every week are engraved on my mind as clearly as those tiny stitches were etched out on those leaves...
Then the scene in my mind shifts to India's desert state (pun unintended!) Rajasthan. Hot days and cool nights meant we were free to indulge ourselves with ice cream at all odd hours. Here I remember frequenting the factory outlet of a local ice cream brand in the royal city of Jodhpur. Floors that were continuously washed to maintain a high level of hygiene and were always wet as a result, no matter when we visited, stand out in my mind. I remember literally inhaling chocobars almost every week!
As a five year old I was once greedy enough to steal a bite from my three year old sister's bowl, having rapidly finished mine, only to receive a stinging slap from her! Her logic? 'Well, you should have asked me first!' Just goes to show we even get physically violent to protect our share of ice cream and yes, the love of it does run in the family!
Ice cream carts used to stand outside my school there. My mother had forbidden me from having this ice cream as it was a cheap, flavoured water candy and the origins of the water were highly suspect. One day, while counting the coins in my piggy bank, the temptation became too strong to resist. I sneaked a ten paise coin (yes things were cheap in the India of yore) into my pencil box and rushed to the nearest ice cream cart after school the next day. I bit into and slurped up a ghastly yellow candy bar made all the more delicious by the underlying flavour of pure guilt! Then I ran and got into our Army school bus.
A fellow first grader, who was also a neighbour, dropped in to play with me that very evening and let the cat out of the bag to my mother. I was ready to sink through the floor and flavoured candy ice cream is the least favourite one since then! I also came down with jaundice a few days later and turned exactly the same shade as that forbidden candy bar.
Cut to Pune where my Dad subsequently got transferred and my sister and I discovered the joys of digging into ice cream cups with tiny wooden spoons. Kwality ice cream cups came in just two flavours then - Vanilla and Strawberry. Today the plethora of flavours that Kwality, (who later tied up with Walls), offers would make even Baskin '31' Robbins blush a very berry strawberry pink!
Every Saturday morning I would eagerly cycle down to a newly opened shop run by a 'Sindhi' couple and buy our weekly quota of ice cream - two cups of Vanilla and two of strawberry for the two of us. Kwality was running a promotion where they gave away tiny molded plastic animals of myriad hues for each cup bought. Over the next two years we built up quite a collection!
Then came our highlight of the week. We would settle down with the current Enid Blyton books that we would be reading and as the Famous Five and the Five Find Outers (their dogs too!) wolfed down 'ices' on a hot summer's day in faraway England, we would let our own ice cream trickle slowly down our throats, while ensconced comfortably in the shady garden that surrounded our colonial bungalow. Idyllic bliss!
Surprisingly I have no ice cream memories of Guwahati in Assam, where we moved next.Piping hot 'Samosas' seem to dominate my memories of this time. I guess Assam, with its rainy climes, was not conducive, weather wise, to have ice cream and so my parents did not buy enough of it and there is no indelible ice cream mark left on my mind!
Ice cream became my personal comfort food when I moved back to Pune for high school and discovered the temptations offered by ice cream parlours in their newly evolved forms, for they now offered multiple flavours and cup/cone options plus bars in mind boggling flavours! Dinshaw's ice cream became my new favourite and I became a die hard fan of their best selling flavour 'Premium Scotch'! Close friends of mine from this time will remember my Friday evening after school ice cream fix! This was also the time when I had every single ice cream brand advert jingle on the tip of my tongue..India was just entering the post liberalization era and a slew of multi national icecream brands suddenly hit the market. Gone were the days of one brand with just two flavours!
The 'India' ice cream man stood under the huge shady tree with his ice cream cart, in our school premises. A hard day with tough tests would have us scrounging around for hidden emergency money and then we would pool it together to buy some vanilla bars or orange candy for those who preferred it. Another favourite time was when a mother from our particular group came visiting during lunch hours. The poor lady in question was given no choice and was hounded for cash so that all five or six of us could indulge in an unexpected treat of ice cream!
Another favourite memory is when I bet a school friend that I would eat ten ice cream cones at her birthday party. Her smart mother ensured that I ate the main course too and so I landed up eating only six ice creams and losing the bet. I had to treat the winner to, what else, but ice cream in school the very next day!
The state of Punjab in India has its own unique ice cream made from fresh whole milk that is put into an ice cream machine and is then churned out by the gallons. The only flavour that our favourite shop in Jallundhar Cantonment had was Pineapple and every summer each meal was followed by going there and filling up a huge thermos flask with ice cream. Then we enjoyed it at leisure at home. It was the creamiest and freshest ice cream I ever tasted but I could never figure out why the flavour was termed pineapple as it did not taste even remotely of pineapples. The colour was a pretty yellow though!
I believe I inherited my deep love of this frozen dish from my mother's maternal side of the family. They gave up their princely State when India became independent in 1947 but refused to give up their love of ice cream! So all my memories of family get togethers with my mother's uncles and cousins centre around huge ice cream pots. They added milk, sugar and flavouring in the inner pot and ice and salt in the outer one and then we all took turns churning it till the ice cream hardened and set. Then we formed queues and were served huge dollops of ice cream in humongous bowls. Each uncle manned a different flavoured pot and we could take our pick or, as in my case, have all of them! Mango and chocolate were all time favourites and we called these gatherings 'Icecream Parties' as befitted them.
Life as an adult took me to many different countries all around the world. I have tasted some of the best flavours made by top international ice cream brands. But honestly nothing could ever match up to the good old very vanilla and simply strawberry flavoured ice creams of my carefree childhood...
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