The Ice Creams Cometh

We’re living through an exotic, globe-trotting age of iced desserts— from booza to paletas, from whipped acai to frozen avocado. Tamar Adler has the scoop.

- Tamar Adler

ANA UHIBB, ANTA TUHIBB, nahnu jami’aan nuhibb al-booza!

Isn’t that what the kids say these days? It should be. (The phrase is Arabic for I scream, you scream, we all scream for booza!) Booza is a Middle Eastern ice cream made with ground orchid root and tree resin, and before I go on about it—which I could for a while—I’d like to point out that booza is just one of a breathtaking variety of iced desserts on offer this summer. Whatever nadirs of democracy we’ve reached, we have ascended a pinnacle of frozen treats. Ours is a sweetened and chilled golden age! It is an ice-cream belle epoque.

Here is kakigori, a featherlight pile of Japanese shaved ice doused in emerald-green matcha syrup. There are Mexican paletas—ice pops—in tantalizing flavors like cinnamon with goat-milk caramel, or mango and chile. And pints of creamy green Cado, an Iowa-made avocado-based concoction, in seven different flavors. Why not sample whipped acai from California? A spoonful of Italian gelato swirled with tangy cheese? Or something delicious and vegan—with a coconut base or almond or cashew—delicately flavored with black sesame?

For far too long we have limited ourselves—out of some perverse culinary myopia—to churned dairy products made of at least 10 percent milk fat, less than 1.4 percent egg yolk, and weighing at least 4.5 pounds per gallon. (That is an abbreviation of the FDA definition of ice cream, which is 2,408 words long and makes the tax code read like Pat the Bunny.) How naive we were! For the record, what we think of as “American ice cream” actually originated in Italy in the seventeenth century and was typically eggless. (Maybe this is why gelato has been embraced here since the 1980s.)