ICECREAM 3: DEVOLUTION / EVOLUTION

That substance a.k.a. SOFT SERV - a gloopy, sweet, coldish substance that 

went under the moniker #ice-cream loomed large in my adolescent life. This 

treat was a favourite in its luxury form; the CHOC 99. A little SOFT SERV was 

squirted into a cone, a FLAKE (pronounced flakey) was wedged in vertically & 

then more SOFTSERV twirled in + up. We ate them on every occasion, we were 

not dieting.

We bought them from the childish bing-bong van . We became habitués, on foot 

or in rich-adolescent-males' cars, of a new drive-in 'restaurant'. Our favourites there 

chicken-in-a-basket + hamburgers. What is new? This followed by CHOC 99.

Years elapsed in an ice-cream drought. Then a visit to Cambridge (the English one)

&  there was ice-cream again. It was the real Italian stuff, sold by Italians from a 

stand back onto the Backs. What had I been missing? Then Paris, more street 

ice-cream, then Italy.......oh heaven of gelato.


I again became obsessed. A sojourn in Los Angeles had me rating (toasted almond-

vanilla in a sugar cone, the benchmark), many an ice-cream. Baskin-Robbins (30-

something flavours), so-so; Swenson's in Santa Monica, both creamier + lighter + 

somehow more 'adult'. The top of my list, the then one-off Clancy Muldoon standing 

corner Hollywood & La Brea. It was a one-off; their ice-cream had more bite, had 

the texture of those cones of vanilla l had loved as a child, was less sweet, more 

adult somehow + the almonds were toasted just right.

Then back in Jozi in the 80s things started to take a different route..........