Making “Ais Krim” Wouldn’t be a Piece of Cake By Francis Mola

 Kolar in Southern  Karnataka, where I was a volunteer for two and a half years, had two seasons, the warm season and the warmer season. Because there was no need, there wasn’t a word for ice or snow or any form of precipitation other than rain in Kannada, or any of the other languages of that part of India. Mani my house keeper woke me at dawn one day, excited and eager to show me “snow”.  Snow?  Not quite awake, I put on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and stumbled into my sandals.  We bicycled out to the Madras Road where there was a patch of bristly grass in front of the Traveler’s Bungalow left uneaten by the roaming cows and goats that chewed anything unguarded down to the roots.  “Look Francis “snow” Mani exclaimed with the same enthusiasm I had when I looked out of the window after a winter storm, knowing that school would be canceled because of unplowed roads and stuck busses.  He   was disappointed when I explained that what he called snow, was just a rare occurrence of dew that sparkled silver in the glow of the rising sun, and another example of “lost in translation.”

One of the stray dogs that roamed the village was a regular visitor to our cottage and pressed its snout against our screen door every day at dinner time. We called her “Amma” meaning mother or aunt in Kannada, because by the looks of her belly she always seemed to be suckling a litter of pups. Mani gave her the scraps of caked rice that were left at the bottom of the pot and I was reminded of an old girlfriend’s Golden Retriever. The family named it Hampshire because when she was little she wanted a hamster, a “hampshire” as she mispronounced it, but got a puppy instead. Hamp began unexplainably disappearing every evening. The answer came when a neighbor saw him outside a Mr. Softee Ice Cream stand on the nearby Post Road doing tricks for the customers. He rolled over on his back and then sat pretty with both paws up waiting for his reward. They called him Hamp the Champ after that. My chain of thought led me to that unusual dog and then on to ice cream, and for the remainder of the evening and in the days that followed, ice cream was my obsession. The closest substitute for ice cream was kulfi, sweetened, condensed ice milk that you could order at Koshy’s, one of the better restaurants in Bangalore 50 miles away. It was admittedly tasty but while I was in the claws of the ice cream demon, even by lax standards, I felt that kulfi would just be a placebo and not the real thing. Under the heading “Food You Will Miss,” in the “Peace Corps Volunteer’s Survival Manual,” my diary and personal handbook full of tongue in cheek advice and anecdotes, I had written that, “if you get ice cream cravings they should  be taken seriously.” I had recurring fantasies about, gooey sundaes in boat shaped dishes, floating on rivers of chocolate sauce, smothered in whipped cream, garnished with chopped nuts and adorned with maraschino cherries. I imagined silky double scoops in waffle cones dipped in brightly colored sprinkles, and ice cream sandwiches where the soft vanilla middle had melted to just the right consistency between the thin chocolate biscuits that enfolded it.   When mirages of Rocky Road, Cherry Vanilla and Strawberry Swirl appeared, I knew it was time to act, the only solution being to make a batch. A half-gallon would be a good start, and I added a note to my handbook “making ice cream wasn’t going to be a piece of cake.” 

Mani was an excellent cook and our table was often a gathering place for the other volunteers in the district. He made mostly vegetarian dishes, rice or chapatti with a spicy sambar made from lentils or vegetables, or occasionally a curry made from chicken or mutton. Refrigeration was nonexistent, so he purchased all the ingredients fresh for every meal. Once when I had a craving for peanut butter, probably in part a physiological need to supplement a protein deficiency in my diet, and in part a longing for something familiar, he bought raw peanuts, one of the staple crops of Kolar, shelled them and then roasted them in a pan over a kerosene burner. Good natured Mani, never quite knowing what strange requests to expect, ground them into a thick paste with the granite mortar and pestle that was built into the polished cement floor of the kitchen.  Before I took a spoonful I had to blend the oil that rose to the top because it wasn’t homogenized, but when it was stirred and salted it was excellent; without the preservatives, stabilizers, sweeteners and softeners it was as organic as you could get. However, having no additives and consequently not much of a shelf life, every batch had to be eaten the same day as it was made. When I spread it on a warm chapatti with a slice of fried banana, it was a delicacy. Making peanut butter was relatively easy. Making ice cream wasn’t alchemy either: in fact it was fairly simple if you had cream, eggs and sugar, ice or a freezer. However if you didn’t, and had to go searching for them in an arid landscape in 90 degree heat, the logistics involved would be an exercise in ingenuity, resourcefulness and perseverance. Luckily these were just the qualities that PCV’s were recruited for, and the fulcrums that were the pivot points of our everyday lives.

I could get two of the three main ingredients in Kolar, sugar and eggs. I would need white refined sugar instead of the indigenous molasses based jaggery and could get it and the eggs at the open-air stalls in the market. Finding a couple of quarts of cream and the ice to freeze it was going to be a challenge and I realized would require a diligent search.  A thin, hump - backed local cow gave 3 or 4 liters of milk a day with a fat content of three percent.   I did some simple math.  In order to make a half gallon of ice cream I’d have to separate the cream from the milk production of twenty cows simultaneously, which meant I would have to scour the nearby villages early in the morning, before it was skimmed to make ghee and the milk sold to chi stalls or fermented into curds to keep it from going sour. It wasn’t plausible to think that I could gather all that cream locally so I contacted Nilgiris, a grocery store on Brigade Road in Bangalore that catered to Westerners and had their own dairy farm outside the city. I also made an approximate, if somewhat generous, calculation as to how much ice we would need and located a supplier. 

Mani and I started out for Bangalore early on a Saturday morning. I borrowed a hand cranked ice cream machine from an American counsel representative who had taken it with him from the U.S. It was still unused for reasons that would become apparent to me, and in its original carton along with a recipe that was torn out of Good House Keeping Magazine. The machine had a metal bucket that you lined with ice and a paddle that you cranked, whipping air into the cream, sugar and egg mixture and freezing it as it came in contact with the ice lined sides.

When we returned to Kolar we churned and churned some more.  The blocks of ice that we carefully packed in straw and then swathed in thick layers of the Deccan Herald early in the morning were melting fast in the steady heat of the late afternoon. We took turns on the machine, but despite our best efforts, we had difficulty getting our mix to freeze and after an hour, and with our shoulders and biceps aching, we gave up. As close as I came to my elixir was a thick, velvety, chilled but not frozen cream, that had the texture of a Mr. Softee,  far from the tempting ambrosia that I remembered glowing seductively in glass fronted ice cream parlor freezers.   The result was good and satisfying, but much more filling than the commercial stuff that was manufactured from a plethora of synthetic flavorings, emulsifiers, stabilizers, bulking agents, aromas and preservatives. It was a letdown that after toiling all day, pure ice-cream turned out to be too rich for my rice and lentil acclimatized digestive system. My imagined ice cream orgy consisted of just a normal portion before my untrained stomach was full, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there was going to be any left over. Not wanting the rest to go to waste in the daunting heat, Mani and I arranged a spontaneous party for his brood of children. The neighborhood kids that always hung around the workshop or our house didn’t need an invitation, or be summoned by the bells of an ice cream vendor: they appeared intuitively as though they had a sixth sense for excitement.   To a chorus of “ais krim, ais krim,” the kids made quick work of what was left and then I chipped off chunks of the remaining ice block with a ballpeen hammer and steel chisel and gave them some, and for a moment was a scruffy kid again myself, chasing after the milkman’s truck in hopes of getting a piece of ice on a hot summer day.

From the vantage point of hindsight, I would say now that Peace Corps Volunteer’s successes or failures should be judged not just in the measurable things he or she accomplished, but instead in the sum of the small ones. I repaired well blasting equipment and my partner and I left a functioning workshop to carry on after us, but it’s wasn’t only the tangible results of my work that left an impression. At least occasionally, I hope that I touched the hearts of the people I met and interacted with. Ice cream was an anomaly in the dusty world of Kolar’s New Extension, but spoke a universal language that every child understood.