RUM RAISIN, BUTTER PECAN: IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ‘DAD FLAVOURS’ OF ICE CREAM?

Is it possible to spot a dad strictly by the flavor of ice cream he chooses? Does there exist a subset of ice cream that can be dubbed 'Dad Flavours'? A Weekend Post investigation by Jake Edmiston

A DAD FLAVOUR IS BASICALLY AN ICE CREAM BELOVED BY THE FATHER AND DETESTED BY CHILDREN

At his ice cream parlour, Dutch Dreams, in mid- town Toronto, Theo Aben can guess a customer’s mood from their choice of fla- vour. This week, for instance, a gentleman entered and ordered two scoops of cotton candy ice cream. He was feeling excited.

Customers who order plain flavours are often deflated. Cus- tomers preoccupied with work often order something product- ive, like espresso ice cream. And the “joyous” ones look for something decadent, maybe with some brownie chunks.

On the occasion of Father’s Day, the National Post wondered if ice cream has the ability to expose something even deeper. Can you spot a dad from the flavour they choose? Is there a subset of ice cream that could be dubbed the Dad Flavours?

Ice cream purveyors and industry insiders played along with the investigation, con- firming that dad flavours are usually the beige ones: maple walnut, rum raisin, butter pecan and the like. So, the definition of a dad flavour is basically an ice cream beloved by the father and detested by his children.

“Maple walnut? My child and her friends are like, ‘Ew, how can you do that?’” said Natalie Joseph, a marketing manager with Baskin Robbins Canada.

These flavours are obviously not exclusively desirable to dads, but the dads who order them tend to be older — or, as Joseph put it, “mature palate customers.”

“Anything with nuts and maple is a dad flavour,” said Billy Friley, owner of Village Ice Cream in Calgary. “Anything with booze.”

For Friley, the ice cream parlour is one of those rare things that stay constant in this life. Walk into any shop, and it should look about the same as it did when you were a child.

So why not embrace the predictability of it all? “I think part of maintaining that predict- ability,” Friley said, “is ordering the same flavour that you know you’re going to love.”

Alas, this brings us to the great flaw in the dad flavour theory. There are simply too many kinds of dad, all with different backgrounds and palates. The whole approach as- sumes that ice cream flavours are stagnant, like a box of cray- ons, staying the same through- out the ages, with each appealing to a certain kind of person. But the realm of ice cream is much more volatile than one might imagine. For centuries, ice cream has been an oppor- tunity for experimentation.

One of the first cooks to add nuts to ice cream was named Frederick Nutt. He was a 19th- century confectioner who di- vulged the secrets of his trade for home cooks. Published in the early 1800s, his book, The Complete Confectioner, gives recipes for Parmesan ice cream, ginger ice cream, black currant, apricot and pineapple ice cream.

Perhaps the most subversive of all, according to American writer and ice cream historian Jeri Quinzio, is Nutt’s recipe for burnt filbert ice cream. The traditional practice of the era was to steep the nuts in the cream then strain them out. In- stead, Nutt mixed the nuts dir- ectly into the ice cream.

More than two centuries later, Nutt and his contributions in the field are mostly forgotten. So, too, are his contemporaries, like the man known only as Monsieur Emy, who, in 1768, wrote the first book exclusively about ice cream, including one flavoured with orange flower water.

The common misconception, Quinzio said, is that the North American ice cream canon — chocolate, vanilla, strawberry — has always existed.

“Totally wrong,” she said. In fact, vanilla wasn’t a popular flavour until the late 1800s, when vanilla beans became more available.

“From the beginning, people made ice cream in all sorts of flavours. This is not a new thing.”

For Father’s Day on Sunday, Liz Mok’s Moo Shu shop in Ottawa is offering Star Trekthemed ice cream, partly because her dad loved it. “When we would watch Star Trek, I was allowed to stay up late,” Mok said.

One of the Star Trek flavours is “Make it So,” an Earl Grey ice cream with wine and ginger jelly. Jean-Luc Picard famously liked “Earl Grey, hot.” Mok added ginger for the “hot” and wine, because Picard’s family owned a winery.

“It’s so easy to break boundaries with ice cream because once you have a very good base, you can do a lot of things with it,” Mok said.

At Moo Shu, there is no vanilla. The black sesame ice cream is made with a sesame butter imported from Japan. “It’s like a more deeply roasted peanut butter,” she said.

Mok, who grew up in both Hong Kong and Vancouver, started making Hong Kong milk tea ice cream because she couldn’t find any good Hong Kong milk tea in Ottawa.

“One of my pet peeves is people describing our flavours as exotic,” she said. “I feel we are making ice creams that are popular to the North American palate, it’s just that the North American palate has changed — because, perhaps, of the influx of immigration and equality.”

SBYTOVAMN