Just recently my
mother asked me to pick up some vanilla ice cream she wanted to serve
with a pie she had made. I came home with a gallon of 'Pet' vanilla ice
cream. She asked me why, out of all the brands at the grocery store,
would I choose 'Pet?' I told her grocery store ice cream,whether it
be Ben and Jerry's, Hagen Daaz or Pet all tasted the same to me and
that Pet was the cheapest.
When I was growing up, my mother would make homemade ice cream in the summer from the local peaches using a hand-cranked ice cream churn. We would take turns "churning" and adding endless amounts of rock salt for what seemed like hours until it was ready. That is what ice cream is supposed to taste like and if you've never had homemade ice cream, do yourself a favor a buy an ice cream churn. They make electric ones now with no hand crank churning required.
My husband Leo loves ice cream. I like it, but he loves it. For a
wedding present, we received a wooden ice cream maker that like the old
fashioned ones, needed to be filled with ice and rock salt, but unlike
the old fashioned ones, could be plugged in and churned the ice cream
without the 'elbow grease.' Once every few years, we'd pull it out and
impress ourselves by making a batch of lovely vanilla ice cream, but it
was always a big production for the results. About 6 or 7 years ago,
as a birthday gift for my ice cream loving husband who almost always
has a quart of vanilla in the freezer, I bought a double Cuisinart
automatic ice cream machine. It consists of a motorized bottom,
plastic churners and plastic covers with two metal containers which I
keep in the freezer at all times.
In Margate, New Jersey, there is an ice cream shop that time forgot. It
is called Two Cents Plain and it has little white wire chairs with red
and white striped seats, red and white wallpaper festooned with
whimsical line drawings of flappers in long necklaces and gents in
boaters, and a jar on the counter where customers can deposit tip money
for the scoopers’ college funds. It looks just the same today as it did
in 1979, when I had my fifth birthday party there. 
"We all scream for Ice Cream..." but what flavor and from what shop and why? National Ice Cream Month begs the eternal question, "What's YOUR favorite kind?" One for the Table asked some of our favorite scoop fans to reveal their guilty pleasures....
