The Joy of Making Mint Stracciatella Ice Cream in My Mother’s Sacred Kitchen

What I can do for now is to give back in ways that may seem extraneous, but bring delight to the recipient. So, I make frozen desserts.

This is Slow Churn, a monthly column from Pooja Makhijani on bringing three generations of family together even in times of turmoil—by making ice cream.

I can’t eat ice cream—or at least too much ice cream. It makes me incredibly sick; I just don’t produce enough lactase.

But for forty glorious weeks in 2011, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I could.

I lived in Singapore at the time, and heat-busting ice cream can be found everywhere on the tropical island nation, from roadside vendors that hawk ice cream sandwiches—rectangular blocks sliced off a large slab of ice cream and wrapped in thick slices of pandan-flavored bread—to the artisanal ice cream parlor in the strip mall a short walk from my apartment, where I spent many afternoons eating scoops of the most delicate vanilla bean, potent Mao Shan Wang durian, and tart soursop ice creams. Call it a pregnancy craving, if you must; I also had many food aversions at the time (hummus, saag). Eating ice cream made me happy, almost giddy. I had a newfound, albeit temporary, magical power: the power to digest ice cream, and I found so much comfort in its cold sweetness.

I gave birth, and I could no longer eat ice cream. But when my daughter began to toddle, we returned to the parlor that I had spent so many pregnant days, so she could. “Eat it quickly!” I told her and shoveled spoonfuls of sweet cream into her eager, open mouth, before it inevitably melted into a sweet, sticky, milky puddle under the equatorial sun.

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It’s an irony, then, that I’ve chosen to teach myself how to make ice cream this summer. Yet, as with my other culinary pursuits, the joy isn’t in consuming the products of my labor, but in the process and in the making of food for others.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve obsessed over a digital copy of L’art de bien faire les glaces d’office (The Art of Making Ices for the Confectionery Kitchen), a renowned 1796 cookbook, the first dedicated entirely to ice cream, by M. Emy, a perfectionist chef known only by his last name. My French is decent enough to decipher his hundreds of recipes—from Parmesan and Gruyère to rye bread to rose, variations on his three-page master recipe. His notes on freezing techniques and equipment and seasonality are pointed and opinionated. Emy thought it imprudent to serve ice cream year-round, believing they should only be eaten in the spring and summer months; confections made only six months a year would taste better because of the anticipation for them, he wrote.

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Summer-like weather arrived in New Jersey long before the solstice. Now, it’s hot and humid on most days. My mother spends long evenings in the community garden, harvesting kale and peas, and nurturing soon-to-be-ready peppers and eggplants and heirloom tomatoes. The mint in her backyard kitchen garden has arrived, as has dill and cilantro. She has re-planted roses from containers into the ground, and relocated her Meyer lemon tree onto the deck.

When my daughter and I repatriated from Singapore in 2016 after I separated from her father and moved in with my parents, my mother began to feed me, with both physical and emotional nourishment, largely from bounty from her gardens. I returned to the United States, sick, having neglected myself for some time and relapsed into anxiety-induced disordered eating habits. No parent expects their adult child to show up on their doorstep after two decades away, and I’m sure she and my father had other plans for their retirement that didn’t include helping to raise a young child again. But, no questions asked, they opened the door and made space for me to rebuild my life.

Since, I’ve slowly, sometimes tentatively, claimed parts of their home. Thousands of my books fill the basement; bundt pans and mini cheesecake tins sit helter-skelter in cabinets; an entire pantry shelf holds flours, sugars, and extracts. My mother’s kitchen is sacred, but I’ve made my mark there as well: she was mildly amused when I fussed with her samosa recipe and she won’t let me attempt her butter chicken, even though I’ve asked to do so many times, but she’s finally relinquished bread-making to me—from loaves of sandwich breads to roti and paratha and naan. I’ve also attempted to shift our current balance of caregiving—towards me providing sustenance of all sorts; they are still reluctant to cede what they consider their responsibilities to me and my daughter.

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What I can do for now is to give back in ways that may seem extraneous, but bring delight to the recipient. So, I make frozen desserts, mostly for my mother (from whom I didn’t inherit my lactose intolerance). She will decline pies and cakes and cookies—even ones made by me—but will never say no to a scoop of rich, cool, creamy ice cream.

In her garden, spearmint (Mentha spicata), a hardy perennial, is sending “runners” across the yard and spreading vigorously. It’s a rambunctious herb, and is known to become invasive, yet she has a knack for pruning it periodically so it stays contained. There is such an abundance of mint that I experiment using it in various ways, scanning Emy’s book for inspiration but failing to find much herb-related. When I chance upon a photograph of my parents’ first trip to Italy, just weeks after I was married, I decide to make tub of mint stracciatella with a bar of dark chocolate stashed on my father’s shelf of the pantry.

I serve a bowlful to my mother, and a place a scoop for my daughter in a cone. She has an unfortunate habit of putting too much ice cream onto a sugar or waffle cone, taking a handful of licks, and, in a rush to get to the cone—her real desire and destination—depositing the ice cream into a bowl for someone else to eat. This person is invariably her grandmother. She does the same on this day. The sweet, subtly grassy scent is intoxicating, and the irregular, delicate shards of chocolate dissolve on the tongue, or so they tell me. I watch contentedly, looking out on the garden, and thinking of what I might make next.