Flavor Philosophy
To the rest of us, it's just ice cream. To Ray Ford, the brains behind flavors like herbal chai spice and goat cheese, it's weird science, and Christina's in Cambridge, the most daring ice cream parlor around, is his laboratory.
Ancho chili ice cream seemed like a perfectly good idea. The ancho, after all, is the sweetest of the dried chilis, a pepper for the faint of heart. Mixed with milk, cream, and sugar, Ray Ford reasoned, it would surely warm the palates of his faithful and curious clientele.
Then he put it on the menu. Nobody liked ancho chili ice cream. Or, Ford stubbornly insists, no one liked the idea of it. "I think if I'd taken `chili' out of the name and called it something else," he says, "it would have done well." Even a full year after he quickly dropped the flavor from the menu board at Christina's Homemade Ice Cream in Cambridge, he remains unrepentant. It was, after all, one of his rare failures.
The 39-year-old English-born ice cream entrepreneur, who blames his rather portly 5-foot-8, 200-pound frame not so much on his diet but on his sedentary lifestyle, continues to venture where other scoop-shop operators don't dare to tread, concocting a menu that seems more befitting of a high-end Mediterranean restaurant or a spice shop than a tiny ice cream parlor in unpretentious Inman Square. But it's that bizarre menu board that has been bringing him formidable lines on steamy summer nights for 11 years, earning Christina's an almost cultlike following. Kaiffer lime leaf, anyone? Lemon verbena? Herbal chai spice? Ford is on ice cream's cutting edge with what might be called his "adult" parlor.
He's in the right place. Although no one can prove it statistically, New England is fertile ice cream territory. Brigham's (1924), Howard Johnson's (1925), and Friendly's (1935) started here. A second wave included Steve's (1973) and Ben & Jerry's (1978). Today's Boston-area ice cream aficionados tout urban and near-urban favorites Toscanini's, Herrell's, and J. P. Licks, while the hinterlands are awash with seasonal and venerable homemade ice cream stands such as Kimball Farm in Westford, Erikson's in Maynard, Crescent Ridge Dairy Bar in Sharon, and Four Seas in Centerville.
Why are we such ice cream junkies? "Because the quality of the product is so high here," contends Bob Bryson, executive director of the 560-member New England Ice Cream Restaurant Association. "It's high because a greater percentage of ice cream shops make their own ice cream. If you travel down south and stop at an ice cream shop, you'll probably eat a commercial product from a local dairy. Not here."
Ford continues this local tradition, but in his singular way. "I could make only so much chocolate ice cream before I'd get very bored," says Ford, a self-professed hard-core foodie who lives in North Cambridge with his wife and twin 3-year-old daughters. (He confesses, however, that flavors such as coffee Oreo and chocolate chip cookie dough pay more of his bills than do the likes of saffron ice cream and lemon hibiscus sorbet.) His employees he has 10 to 20 of them, depending on the season spend much of their time painstakingly scraping the seeds from $170-per-pound Madagascar vanilla beans for vanilla bean ice cream or patiently slicing green apples for green apple sorbet. Between 50 and 60 percent of his product, he estimates, is sold to 200 to 300 local restaurants, and some of the flavors he's cooked up exclusively for those eateries have made his over-the-counter menu look positively mainstream. Consider, for example, the goat cheese ice cream for Hamersley's Bistro in Boston, or the black sesame ice cream for Ginza Japanese Restaurant in Brookline, or the seaweed sake granita for the East Coast Grill next door.
"Ice cream lends itself to a lot of different food items," says Ford, who has access to all the flavors he'll ever need inside his own retail spice and specialty foods store, which adjoins his ice cream shop. "The base -- milk and cream -- doesn't disguise other flavors. You know you'll usually get a pure flavor when you combine something with milk and cream. I mean, if you know the flavor of kaiffer lime leaves, you pretty much know what kaiffer lime leaf ice cream will taste like." What separates Ford from his competition is his willingness, even eagerness, to throw kaiffer lime on his menu and sit back and see what happens.
"MY MAIN EXERCISE is gardening," Ray Ford says. The business attire you'll see him in -- jeans and Red Sox T-shirt, for example -- is as informal as his patrons'. Plop yourself down in one of Christina's three funky wooden booths on a summer evening and look around. You're likely surrounded by several food mavens who have skipped dessert somewhere along Inman Square's eclectic restaurant row, a few college students off the T, and an occasional resident of the ethnically well-stirred neighborhood. Most of the customers are clearly serious about their ice cream, tending to choose cups over cones while taking a pass on the array of wet and dry toppings. They study the more than 40 flavors on the menu on the far wall like earnest handicappers scrutinizing a racetrack tote board. "The flavors reflect our mixed clientele," says Laurie Bishop, Christina's 23-year-old retail manager. "If we were located in Newton, it's unlikely we'd sell ginger or green tea or saffron."
"We're not a children's store," emphasizes Ford, who tried that route once and says he won't again. In the late 1990s, he opened and closed the Blueberry Moose ice cream shop in Brookline Village, shutting down in part because he didn't particularly enjoy catering to kids. "It was all cookies and tutti-frutti," he gripes.
There is no Christina at Christina's, incidentally. The name, like most of the shop's modest decor, was inherited from the former owner, who had christened it after his daughter. Ford, who grew up in southwest England and earned degrees at Liverpool and Cambridge universities before moving to the States in 1989 ("I did not go to ice cream school"), was working in the store during the summers while teaching criminology at Bridgewater State and Lesley colleges. When Christina's came on the market in 1993, his mother-in-law, who owned a nearby restaurant, became his banker. His first winter in business featured a series of snowstorms, climatic events that were not exactly conducive to ice cream sales. "I sat here looking out the window and thinking, `What have I done?'"
Ford didn't have a passion for ice cream -- "I like it, but it's not one of my favorite food items," he says -- but he'd slowly been developing one for food in general. He figured he couldn't afford a restaurant, but why not turn Christina's, which had previously been a traditional ice cream dispenseteria, into something that would reflect his own tastes? Why not become a kind of ice cream chef?
About three-quarters of the ideas for Ford's flavors come tumbling out of his own head. (Most of the rest are suggested by chefs who buy his ice cream for their restaurants, but often these suggestions do not sell well, or even make the menu board, in the retail store.) The notion of toasted-marshmallow ice cream -- the marshmallows are stretched onto cookie sheets, toasted, frozen, and then broken into small pieces -- came to him while he was, naturally enough, roasting marshmallows. Milk-chocolate gianduja ice cream -- 11-pound bars of the hazelnut-flavored chocolate are imported from Belgium for the mix -- is the result of discovering the silky sweet chocolate during a vacation in Italy. And herbal chai spice ice cream -- wherein the South African herb rooibos is blended with cinnamon, cardamom, clove, orange, and vanilla -- is on the board simply because Ford drinks no small amount of herbal chai tea.
"I'm not on a mission," Ford says. "I simply want to do what I want to do, and I hope other people like it."
EXPECT NO NUTTY PROFESSOR laboratory at Christina's, no hallowed chamber where testers approach new flavors with the pomp and pomposity of wine tasters. The business of ice cream making is carried out almost daily in a tightly packed small room at the rear of the spice store, most of it by 34-year-old Salum Abdul, who is from Zanzibar. ("Lots of spices there," he says of his homeland. "Not much ice cream.") Abdul was taught by Ford, whom he calls a "master."
Research and development? This is not Genzyme. Whatever flavoring ingredient Ford has dreamed up is first blended into a small amount of milk. No cream, no sugar. Just milk, sometimes heated and sometimes not. And perhaps some tinkering goes on. "Let's say I'm thinking of making grass ice cream," Ford says. (He's joking, of course, or is he?) "I'd probably take some grass clippings, wrap them in cheesecloth, and place them in the milk for a day or so. I'd taste it occasionally. If I got good flavor, I wouldn't do anything else. But if I didn't, I might put the grass in a blender or a juicer to make it stronger."
Ice cream exotica -- say, bay leaf -- is initially produced in 5-gallon batches. Something more predictable -- coconut Butterfinger, for example -- would be made in a 10-gallon stash. "But once I have the flavor right," Ford says, "the rest is routine."
Indeed. Abdul pours the mix -- basically milk, cream, sugar, and the flavoring ingredients -- into a 10-gallon batch freezer, a cylinder that looks like a clothes dryer. After 15 minutes or so of whipping, which adds air to the mix, the concoction has been frozen to approximately 20 degrees Fahrenheit and has the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. At that point, it's placed in one of four 20-to-40-below-zero blast freezers for about eight hours. If it's been specially ordered by a restaurant, it's out the door within a day of its creation.
(Much is made in ice cream circles of butterfat content, also called milk-fat content. The higher the percentage of butterfat, the richer the ice cream. Federal regulations state that ice cream must have at least 10 percent butterfat, but gourmet ice cream has at least 12 percent and sometimes as much as 16 percent. Ford says all of his ice cream contains 14 percent butterfat, but it's obvious he places more emphasis on flavor than richness.)
If Christina's is ever duplicated, it probably won't be by Ray Ford. He harbors no expansionist dreams. "He's not interested in being another Dunkin' Donuts or even a J. P. Licks," says Bishop. And although his employees characterize him as a tad disorganized, a charge he doesn't deny, he clearly is Christina's. "He wants to keep his hands on everything," Bishop says.
"I'm ambitious," says Ford, who says he makes a "comfortable living" that includes a second home on Cape Cod. "That's why I opened the spice store [in 2002]. But I'm not ambitious in a typical ice cream way. I don't want to be Ben & Jerry's. If I opened another ice cream store, it would hurt the concept. I want this store to remain a special place."
Now if he can just get folks to develop a taste for ancho chili in a cup...
The History of Ice Cream
It started with a Roman emperor sending runners on errands into the mountains, and today it's a $20 billion industry in the United States alone. How did we get here?
AD 54-68 During his rule as Rome's emperor, Nero sends runners to the mountains to bring back snow to be blended with fruit juices and honey.
Circa 1300 Proto-ice cream reaches Europe when Marco Polo reputedly returns from his Asian travels with a recipe that added milk to snow-fruit slush.
1789 Thomas Jefferson brings a vanilla ice cream recipe back from Paris. The handwritten recipe, calling for "2 bottles of good cream" and 5 egg yolks, now resides in the Library of Congress.
1813 Dolley Madison wows Washington with strawberry ice cream at her husband's second inauguration.
1843 Nancy Johnson invents the hand-cranked paddle ice cream freezer, credited for paving the way for large-scale commercial ice cream production.
1851 Milk dealer Jacob Fussell opens the first wholesale ice cream factory, in Baltimore.
1874 Robert M. Green, a Philadelphia soda water concessionaire, creates the first documented ice cream soda.
1877 Street vendors are selling ice cream in Boston, as witnessed in a popular comic song, "I Scream, or Ice Cream," by M. H. Thornton, published in Boston (this is not the familiar ditty; see 1928 entry below).
1903 Wall Street ice cream vendor Italo Marchiony patents molds for making edible waffle cups for serving ice cream. The following year, ice cream cones go national at the St. Louis World's Fair.
1920 Christian Kent Nelson of Onawa, Iowa, invents the Eskimo Pie, the first chocolate-covered ice cream bar, and Ohio candy maker Harry Burt invents the first ice cream on a stick, the Good Humor Bar. He dispatches 12 trucks with bells to sell the novelty door to door, creating the Good Humor Man in a single stroke.
1924 Edward L. Brigham opens an ice cream shop in Newton Highlands that will grow into Brigham's Ice Cream.
1925 Howard Deering Johnson takes over a patent-medicine store with a soda fountain in Wollaston and sets his orange-roofed empire in motion by improving the ice cream quality and expanding flavor choices beyond vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
1928 Tom Stacks records "I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream," written by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, and Robert A. K. King.
1973 Steve Herrell opens his first ice cream shop, Steve's, in Somerville and introduces the concept of "smooshing" crushed candy bars into premium, high-butterfat ice cream.
1978 Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield convert an abandoned gas station in Burlington, Vermont, into a homemade ice cream parlor with an investment of $12,000.
1993 The Chicopee Dairy Queen sets the world record for the largest ice cream dessert concoction by assembling a soft-serve and Oreo cookie dessert weighing 5,316.6 pounds.
2003 Ten percent of annual American milk production is used to create 1.4 billion gallons of ice cream and related frozen desserts -- about 20 quarts per person.
—Patricia Harris and David Lyon
Nathan Cobb is a local freelance writer. 