The plain truth: We love vanilla
Three giggling and whispering teenage girls study the big signboard covering the back wall of the Ice Creamsmith in Dorchester Lower Mills. Robyn Mabel watches them, amused. ''Girls, I labored over that hand-lettered sign so you could decide," she says. Her mock scolding sets off more giggles.
Mabel piles scoops of cookie dough ice cream and vanilla in a dish and pours on hot fudge sauce. ''The cherry's free," she announces. The girls retreat to a table to share their sundae. It's one of the first hot, sunny days of the summer, and even in early afternoon, the little ice cream shop, opened by proprietors Mabel and her husband, David, in 1976, is busy. ''Bring the baby in," a woman calls out the door to her friend. ''Come get some ice cream."
The lines for cold, creamy treats are beginning, and everyone queues up with a flavor in mind. Mabel doesn't need to check her board of dozens of flavor choices or glance at the specials -- peach, s'mores, and coconut pineapple on this particular day -- in order to know at once what people are ordering. ''Vanilla," she answers immediately. ''We sell vanilla four or five to one."
This is a world of unusual flavors with pleasing names: sweet cream, cookies and cream, toasted walnut fudge, frozen pudding, green tea, black raspberry, even bubblegum. Good old vanilla trumps them all. This is the case in independent shops in Dorchester, Cambridge, Salem, Centerville, and the whole country. With the noise of machines churning in the background, Cape Cod resident Dick Warren took a phone call while keeping one eye on a batch of ice cream he was in the middle of making. His Centerville shop, Four Seas, sells more vanilla than any other flavor. That and chocolate, the second most popular flavor, account for ''40 percent of all ice cream sales" in his shop.
At Christina's in Inman Square, Cambridge, where the listing of ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sorbet flavors -- more than 40 -- stretches across two walls, owner Ray Ford confirms that vanilla is high on many favorite lists. ''We sell a ton of vanilla," he says. People come in and excitedly peruse the exotics -- burnt sugar, inspired by a Brazilian friend's childhood memory; Gina's mocha explosion, popular with Cantabrigians; kulfi, fragrant with cardamom, which sells to Indian restaurants; rose, one of Ford's favorites, made with real rose petals and available only for a few weeks in early summer; and green tea, churned with expensive tea powder from Japan. After looking over these enticing choices, most order something familiar, says Ford.
Whatever the diet trends of current fads, Americans' love of ice cream remains undiminished. According to the International Dairy Foods Association, production of ice cream and related frozen desserts was about 1.6 billion gallons in 2004. That amounts to about 21.5 quarts per person. A national marketing survey in 2003 showed that the top supermarket seller is vanilla, followed by chocolate. Nut and caramel flavors are a distant third. This country leads annual sales of frozen desserts. A survey by market researchers Mintel International Group shows about 90 percent of US households eat these icy treats.
That's no surprise to Arlene Fraser, who, with her three sons and their families, runs Erikson's Dairy in Maynard. The wooden stand has been serving homemade ice cream since 1937. Fraser took it over from her father in 1961, and now her sons, Thomas, Robert, and Scott, all engineers, fit in the ice cream making around their full-time work schedules. ''We've always done the ice cream making ourselves," she says. Her daughters-in-law work at the stand, and the grandchildren are beginning to get involved. ''Vanilla is always the leader," Fraser says. Though she says it's hard to say how much of the creamy white flavor is sold, Erikson's always has 45 to 55 gallon-size cans on hand each week.
The family-run ice creamery is known for seasonal flavors -- strawberry, blueberry, and peach when the local crops comes in; pumpkin and apple pie in the fall. Kids love Oreo flavors, Fraser says, and these days coconut and Almond Joy seem to do well at the stand's seven windows, all manned by local teens.
At the Cape's Four Seas Ice Cream, Warren, who runs the shop with son Doug, is spinning the last native strawberries into his ice cream. Chocolate chip and mocha chip are both big favorites, and, as the summer progresses, black raspberry will gain fans. Caramel has been rising in popularity the last few years, Warren says, emphasizing that ''our caramel is all just caramel," not swirled-in candy.
Warren insists that his flavors don't mask the real taste of ice cream. ''I'm a little bit of a snob about ice cream," he says. ''After all, I've been at it for 50 years. Some of the concoctions these days, I can't taste the ice cream. You're eating candy that's cooled by ice cream."
Months of turning milk, cream, and eggs into summertime's ultimate indulgence takes plenty of dedication and a spark of creativity, whether the result is bitter chocolate chip, maple walnut, lemon verbena, or the fennel pollen that Christina's is churning.
Chuck Puleo, whose family-run Puleo's Dairy in Salem started selling ice cream in the 1940s, says sales have held steady over the years, ''as long as you don't change anything." Recently, he experimented with a new custard base for French vanilla. A customer asked him what had happened to the vanilla, complaining it didn't taste right. ''So," says Puleo, ''I guess we won't change it."
To work in the business, you've got to love ice cream and all its flavors. And you've got to show enthusiasm when the customer orders vanilla.
