Tour de Creme of Franklin County (July 14, 2007)
Confession: My favorite food is ice cream. So when the idea of touring Franklin County’s ice cream emporia was suggested, I was on it like hot fudge and whipped cream, no questions asked. But I needed a guide, so as a ‘twist,’ I picked a 13-year-old (at the time) friend who’s not only a frozen treat aficionado, but a blue-ribbon raconteur par none. The ‘cherry on top’ was that my buddy, Ethan Schweitzer-Gaslin of Montague, agreed to be photographed doing an ice cream dance. PS: Today, he’s a professional ballet dancer.)
‘Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’ — Wallace Stevens
When my editor gave me this assignment, he said “Find the best ice cream in Franklin County.”
Was he kidding? I thought I’d died and gone to heaven — which, given my heart condition, could just happen. Maybe I would have to double my Lipitor, just in case.
Besides, “best” sometimes is a matter of what’s handy, and what you’re up for.
To help, I enlisted Ethan Schweitzer-Gaslin — a 13-year-old buddy who I knew would delight in spending his first week of summer vacation as the Emperor of Ice Cream.
So we fastened our seat belts and loosened our belts for the Tour de Creme, a two-day exploration of 15 different establishments.
Day 1: Take off!
There are so many ice cream places, as one woman who’d recently moved here from eastern Massachusetts volunteered along the way — from Harper’s Package Store, Brad’s Place and Pete’s Fish Market in Greenfield to Jerry’s Place in South Deerfield — that it was hard to know where to begin. But Ethan started off by confessing, “I love cream . ice cream almost as much as flying in an airplane.”
So, what better take-off point than across from Turners Falls Airport, at The Country Creemee? The choices there, like most places, seemed staggering: vanilla and pistachio frozen yogurt, and watermelon as the special soft-serve flavor, as well as seven snow cone flavors, including bubble gum and grape.
We started simply, with soft vanilla ice cream in a dish.
My precocious partner in creme immediately enthused, “This is fabulous! You can almost taste the flavor of fresh cream in there. It’s not too sugary, but it’s satisfying if you have a sweet tooth.”
“Wow,” I thought, more bowled over by Ethan’s five-star critique than by the soft-serve we’d sampled.
Ethan, who’s just finished seventh grade at Greenfield Center School, was still chattering away as we drove off: “It was a simple, pure ice cream that had that innocent taste of a summer day, when you’re sitting around eating that little bite “
With my loquacious friend, dressed in near white shorts, sandals and a blue Amherst Ballet T-shirt, we continued prowling for our just desserts by heading toward Yelena’s Soft Serve on Turners Falls Road.
The simple white-block building has over 30 flavors of soft-serve and maybe 20-plus flavors of hard ice cream. We were suddenly so lost in a sea of choices that the patient man at the window wondered if we were ever going to settle on something.
‘Like, a gazillion flavors!’
“There’s, like, a gazillion flavors!” said Ethan. “I suppose in some ways, it will keep you coming back for more.” We settled in for a German chocolate soft-serve cone, bypassing the month’s special flavors: bubble gum, eggnog, cotton candy, apple pie, pineapple and custard.
Ethan, who visited Germany last year with his parents, said, “This doesn’t taste like the chocolate I had in Germany, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the intention. It’s very coffee-y, but has a much more dense flavor.”
He told me this was reminiscent of chocolate he ate in Bavaria, but that it had a “sleek, chic” flavor. Meanwhile, brown goop began dripping as we waited for our photographer. “This isn’t going to be fit to photograph,” Ethan announced.
Then, before you could say “hot fudge,” we headed off to the Shady Glen, where we chose chocolate chip from a half-dozen flavors of Snow’s Ice Cream — the first of many stops where we would find the hard, Greenfield-made brand and its upscale sister, Bart’s.
Chocolate chip is a favorite of mine and I awaited my sidekick’s verdict.
“This is a very grainy ice cream,” he said, after swirling a mouthful around like vintage Merlot. “At the same time, I feel like every individual gain in this ice cream is like an exploding pocket of flavor that just bursts in your mouth. It changes from second to second. Or probably doesn’t, but it seems to.
Yikes. I wanted this young maven to tell it like it was, and I think he’s channeling Ben and Jerry.
‘Enough to keep you interested’
The Dynamic Dairy Duo crossed the mighty Connecticut River for the Wagon Wheel Drive-In Restaurant on Route 2 in Gill. Here, we selected a dish of lemon sorbet from a list of Bart’s Homemade flavors.
“It’s hard to taste much but the lemon,” Ethan told me, “but you can certainly taste that very strongly, and I think it’s a very good thing. I imagine it would be very refreshing on a scorching day or when it’s humid out. It’s not too complicated, but it’s enough to keep you interested, enough to keep your mouth wanting more, to keep your taste buds wanting to explore it.”
We were already halfway through Gill, with Ethan still waxing poetic, and me watching what looked like clouds of vanilla and ominous chocolate overhead. Cows dotted the hillside at Justadream Farm to remind us that, sorbet aside, dairy was what this two-day adventure is all about.
“That makes you want to eat ice cream!” Ethan proclaimed.
We pulled into the Northfield Creamie, where the choices were, once again, daunting (Did we want a purple Barney dip? A green Celtics dip?) We selected a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone.
“The chocolate dip really does it well, sort of like putting on a fancy suit. It adds a nice other element to it: it’s very crisp. In fact, the whole flavor is very crisp and clean, straightforward, if you know what I mean,” Ethan said.
I didn’t, but we drove off toward Bernardston, anyway.
“I thought I could eat ice cream all day, but it’s not at all easy,” Ethan admitted.
At Town Line Creamies — or TLC, a name that amused Ethan — we looked over a list of Gifford’s Ice Cream flavors like Maine Birch Bark, Black Raspberry Bugaboo Fudge and Blue-Ribbon Strawberry. We passed up soft-serve and ordered a hard-chocolate cone.
“It’s refreshingly dry,” Ethan told me. “It’s as close as you can get to the polar opposite of Snow’s.”
I believe our little la leche league was beginning to show signs of ice-cream overdose. But we pressed on, all the way to “West County.”
“This has a lovely old charm!” said Ethan as we entered Baker Pharmacy in Shelburne Falls and sat down at the counter for a dish of Snow’s Chocolate Zig-Zag.
“It’s really quite exceptional. Just one of those things in life that makes you say, Mmmm,'” Ethan told me. “Sort of a little time machine that whisked me right back to the 19th century.”
Across the Iron Bridge at McCusker’s Market, I was under the delusion they still sell OatsCreme, a dairy-free soft-serve product that I figured would be a change of pace. We found it’s long gone, and we were offered Bart’s Three Geeks and a Redhead. Since Ethan doesn’t like coconut, we selected Moose Tracks, instead.
Fruity, light and fairly simple
Ethan told me, “This tastes very similar to Chocolate Zig-Zag, but the chocolate in this is very different. The other one had a very homey, warm comfortable feeling. This one is a very exciting flavor.”
There was one more stop on the Buckland side — Christopher’s (formerly Josie’s), where we got a raspberry soft-serve frozen yogurt cone. Ethan described it as “fruity, light and fairly simple.”
As we headed further west, to the last stop of this first of two days of touring, he told me, “I’m dying to eat as little ice cream as possible for the rest of my life.”
At Curtis Country Store in Charlemont, he announced, a moment after walking in, “It’s amazing in here: It’s the middle of June and it smells like sugaring season.” We ordered a dish of Bart’s Mudpie frozen yogurt with chocolate sprinkles, which Ethan declared had “a very unique flavor, like the opposite of the coffee spectrum from the German chocolate we had.”
My eyes were riveted on a sign announcing that the store sells “Charlemont’s own homemade ice cream” in pints and quarts. And, as I suspected, storeowner John Miller makes it at his nearby Farm at Mine Brook.
Within five minutes, we were at the Mountain Road hideaway. Miller, who is said to scoop his ice cream there, was just about to milk his Jerseys. But, we got to sample some of his Native Blueberry flavor made with berries hand-picked by his mother — as well as Honey Roasted Peanut Butter Swirl.
“I can’t get away from the fact that people want sweet and gooey,” said Miller, who has just begun making his 16-percent butterfat ice cream in small batches and selling it at the store and the farm. He’s also selling a Very Vanilla flavor and has made a Blueberry Cheesecake ice cream with his own chevre, or goat’s cheese, as one of the ingredients.
Miller’s Jersey Maid is a small-batch super-premium ice cream whose 16-percent butterfat creaminess and freshness stand out as “out of this world,” to quote my junior partner.
And as we finished off our first 96-mile tour leg, Ethan was bullish on ice cream, once more.
“This is the perfect topper of the day!” he said. “That just sort of said Western Mass. We saw the guy about to milk the cows. And his mother grows the blueberries and personally hand picks them, and personally brings them to him, and he personally makes the ice cream from the milk from his cows!
In fact, as we headed back toward Greenfield, my creamy companion reflected on “the ideal ice cream experience:
“We sit in the barn with the cows, and maybe sleep with the cows, and wake up in the morning and help the person milk cows, or maybe watch him milk, and make the cream, and churn it with the ice. And we eat it, not even in a bowl, but with a scoop into your mouth.
Mmm, I said, echoing the cows that made this delight possible.
Day 2: I scream: More?
Day 1 was a hard act to follow, so Day 2 began at Snow s Ice Cream Co. on School Street in Greenfield for a quick tour.
Co-owner Gary Schaefer, who’s been making Bart’s Homemade since 1978 and five years later bought Snow’s, led us past the continuous ice-cream freezer workers were using to make Snow’s chocolate ice cream. We headed into the cooler, where 300-gallon bags of mix in plain and chocolate flavor were waiting to be pumped into tanks to be made into ice cream.
(The name “Tommy” is autographed on the vintage 1950s equipment, left there by former ice-cream maker Tommy Snow. Ethan tells me later, “I expected the factory to be big and booming and really industrial. But it’s not; It’s nice and small, and like a family.”)
The chocolate ice cream Schaefer handed Ethan was a sample dish. It resembled more the soft-serve than the hard product it would become and was one of six to nine flavors being made in any given day. The young critic responded, “Mmmm! Oh my goodness! That’s some of the best chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had!”
Schaefer showed off the “jack the rippler” machine, which can twirl in liquid ingredients, and the “big bubba” device, which can add solid candies and nuts. He told us 300 gallons of mix will make 600 gallons of 12-percent butterfat Snow’s or 360 gallons of 16-percent Bart’s ice cream.
After emerging from the 15-degree hardening room, where an overnight stay makes ice cream rock-hard, we got the scoop on Bart’s newest flavors — Mass Mocha, Caramel Moose Trails and Deep Purple Cow — as well as the super-premium soft-serve Frozen Custard he’s just introduced at the Bart’s parlor on Main Street in Greenfield. It has 11-percent butterfat, instead of the 5 to 10 percent for regular soft-serve, along with egg yolks and more milk solids. It’s popular in the Midwest and in New York. Schaefer hopes it will raise eyebrows here, as well.
So, we headed over to the Bart’s parlor on Main Street, where owner Alan Sax proudly held the 1-ounce cone of French vanilla — you buy ice cream by the ounce here — perpendicular to the floor to demonstrate how stable it is. (In addition to a whole lot of Bart’s and Snow’s hard ice creams and sorbets, there’s also Double Dutch Chocolate nonfat frozen yogurt to keep dieters from sinning. But, Sax boasted that the frozen custard is “a glorious thing not known in this area: eggier and more decadent.”)
“Ooooo! That’s a breed of its own,” said Ethan. “I could never get enough of that. My tongue keeps hoping it will be finding more.”
He cleansed his palate with water as we drove to Friendly’s. Here, a request for a Wattamelon Roll cone — a seasonal concoction I remember as having chocolate-chip “seeds” and a lemon lime rind — was met with a blank stare. So we settled for a cup of watermelon sherbet.
“That’s very refreshing,” remarked Ethan. “It reminds me of a late-night club in uptown Manhattan.”
Hmm. I did a double-take, reminding myself that this is a 13-year-old kid from the wilds of Montague. He added, “It’s very light and happy, and it pops in your mouth. And it’s the color of bright hot pink markers you’d find in a classroom.”
At Richardson’s Candy Kitchen in Deerfield, which scoops out nine flavors of Herrell’s Ice Cream, we chose a cup of Malted Vanilla and Ethan was beside himself.
“It’s splendid!” he said. “It tastes like you’re eating malted milk balls. That’s so complex, with flavors piled on top of each other. The cream tastes like it’s flowing in your mouth. I wonder what the cows would think of this? It’s like being in an old country store.”
Then, we were off to 5J Creamee at Jim Pasiecnik’s Whately farm stand for a strawberry sundae made with fresh strawberries picked a few hundred feet from the take-out window.
“We’re going to have to eat more than a few bites of this,” Ethan told me. He was overheard by curious bystanders, who were unaware that we’d been sampling nibbles of ice cream for hours.
“That’s fabulous!” he said as he worked his way past the whipped cream and into the sundae.
“The strawberries add a whole other element. The ice cream is the catalyst for the juicy syrup, which provides a cushion on the bottom and enriches the different layers. This is fun, and it’s hard to stop eating!”
But stop we must, and we headed west to the Ashfield Hardware Store.
Co-owner Laura Bessette held a scoop as she stood by a cooler with a few flavors of Snow’s ice cream and a sign that said “In Ice Cream We Trust.” It also announced that cones are just $1, or 50 cents for kids’ sizes. If children bring in two golf balls from across the street, they get a free cone.
“We wanted the spirit of good will and ice cream to prevail. A lot of kids are hard up for cash,” she told us, as she hands Ethan a small Mudpie cone. “We think it’s important they be able to find an affordable treat.”
Make ice cream, not war
On our way out of the store, Bessette showed us a posted photo of happy kids — the annual visit to the store by Ashfield pre-schoolers learning about commerce and community: ice-cream ambassadors.
Ethan told me he liked this Mudpie better than the one we had earlier, and I can’t help but wonder whether it was a reaction to the good vibes here.
Sure enough, he said, “It’s comforting to know that there is still someplace where ice cream still costs 50 cents so kids can come in and have an affordable treat, and that kids can feel really special about getting ice cream. They can collect golf balls and buy ice cream with golf balls. What a novel concept. It’s really nice to know that they’re in it to make people happy, which is how people should behave.”
I was in awe: Into his 13-year-old mouth goes a taste of ice cream and out comes wisdom.
“Instead of having wars, we should eat ice cream together,” he said.
By now, we’re passing Creamery Road, which Ethan points out is “very fitting.” I’m beginning to imagine the cows in the field by the side of the road with signs that say, “Eat more ice cream,” which probably means we’ve both eaten too much of it.
At Baker’s Country Store in Conway, Ethan noted the attractive display of produce outside and I noticed two tables of regulars seated in front of shelves of canned goods. But for a scoop of Snow’s ice cream — we chose coffee flavor — we were led into a side room.
“This is a lovely place,” Ethan told me, as he nibbled some ice cream and we walked along the South River toward the car. “Rural Franklin County is what we’re exploring with this ice-cream tour. This is probably one of the last places where you can still listen to the birds sing and eat a good cone.”
Our final stop was Sugar Loaf Frostee in Sunderland, where you can order everything from hamburgers and fries to “bomb pops” and “flurries.” We ordered a vanilla creamee. Our last.
“It makes you smile,” said Ethan, before correcting himself. “It makes ONE smile when you eat it. It is frosty, but smooth — frosty cream! This isn’t ice cream, this is frosty cream.”
As we wandered off, reflecting on our creme de la creme experience, I asked Ethan what he’s learned from this edible adventure.
“Hmmm that’s a very good question,” he answers. “I learned you really CAN eat too much ice cream. You can, and do, and in our case DID have too much ice cream.”
But then Ethan tops his reply, a la mode: “Sometimes it’s not the ice cream that makes the memory sweet, but the people and places where you had it the atmosphere and the surroundings, and everybody there puts a bit of themselves into the ice cream. It will taste different, because different people loved it in different ways.”
Hail Ethan, Emperor of Ice Cream.
– RICHIE DAVIS