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| A simplistic approach to ice cream. Photo: Sir Mildred Pierce |
It's National Ice Cream month, and who -- the lactose-intolerant aside -- doesn't like ice cream?
Well, Southerners. America's favorite dessert is still a third-tier treat below the Mason-Dixon line, where cakes and puddings have a firm hold on the region's collective sweet tooth. Even in the most sweltering of Southern summers, New Englanders out-gorge their Southern neighbors. (Heck, New Englanders hang onto their ice cream eating edge straight through the winter, when their freezers are sometimes warmer than the air outside.)
Nobody's quite sure why Southerners never took to ice cream, although North Carolina food writer Sheri Castle confirms the phenomenon: "It's just not a big thing," she says. She suspects the relative paucity of milk cows might have contributed to ice cream's historical absence from the local food scene.
But a few serious ice cream makers are bent on tweaking the Southern tradition. Shops such as Ultimate Ice Cream in Asheville, N.C., and Morelli's in Atlanta are now providing a gentle -- and delicious -- introduction to the genre.
Ice cream eaters in the South have long subsisted on cartons of Blue Bell and Mayfield ice creams (although chains such as Cold Stone, which offer customers the chance to blend other sweet things into airy ice creams, have lately been making inroads.)
The region's transition to a boutique ice cream culture was exemplified by the opening of Morelli's last year. "There was a Bruster's here that went out of business, so I was like, 'you know, I always wanted to open up an ice cream shop,'" owner Donald Sargent recalls.
Sargent and his wife Clarissa Morelli endeared themselves to Atlantans by Dixifying their ice creams, rolling out flavors like jalapeño cornbread and sweet potato pie. But with plenty of Southern chefs already spiking their hand-churned ice creams with Cheerwine and bacon, ingredients alone weren't enough to redefine Southern ice cream. Morelli's had to up the ante.
"Basically, we make super premium ice cream here," Sargent says. "It's no holds barred, fat as possible."
Morelli's has already been recognized by -- surprise, surprise -- a bunch of folks elsewhere, including Bon Appetit, which named the shop as one of the nation's 10 best.
"It's funny, I don't know anyone in the South that's really famous for ice cream," Sargent says.
Sargent could change that. If other Southerners start to follow his lead, it could make for a very cool summer.
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