Memories

It has been a long time since I posted anything to the blog. Today I have a round about story to tell. When I was a little girl, it was a tradition in our family to have a dish of ice cream on Sunday evenings. My earliest memories are during World War II. My parents had a General Electric refrigerator with a tiny freezer compartment. It only held two ice cube trays and what was called a frozen dessert tray. We could not store ice cream. Therefore, every Sunday evening we would drive down to North Kansas City to the Crown Drug Store and would have ice cream packed to go at the soda fountain counter. I reached a point where I wanted to buy the ice cream myself. My father would give me the money. I was so small I could barely climb onto a stool at the soda fountain counter. I had convinced my father I could buy the ice cream myself. He sat out in the car where he could keep an eye on me through the drugstore's windows. Sometimes I would sit and wait and wait while the soda jerk ignored me. They thought I was too small to be a serious customer. Anyway my father and I would wait them out. I always got my ice cream.

 

After World War II ended, consumer appliances of all sorts became available. It seemed like Christmas all the time as my parents bought things that were not available during the war. One of their purchases was a chest-type deep freezer. This was very exciting because we could now store ice cream. Ice cream was sold in cartons in the shape of a brick in the grocery store. My father would cut off a slice of ice cream with the butcher knife. I didn't think a slice was nearly as good as the ice cream that had been scooped. I finally convinced my parents we needed a scoop. There was a restaurant supply store in Kansas City. We went there and bought a really deluxe chrome-plated ice scream scoop. It had a spring loaded lever on it. That scoop dished lots of ice cream over the years. At some point when I was in my 30's my mother gave me that scoop. I still have it.

 

Anyway here is the reason that I started thinking about ice cream and the scoop. Since the writers' strike has caused all my favorite TV shows to go into rerun I have been watching the Food Network. I really like Alton Brown's Good Eats show. Last night he had a show on frying chicken. He said the best way to fry chicken was with shortening. He had a number 16 scoop that looked very similar to the old ice cream scoop that he used for the shortening. I wondered if my ice cream scoop had a number. I examined it closely and found stamped on the back of the lever "12 to a quart". My scoop must be a number 12. If there are 12 to a quart that must mean that the scoop holds 2 and 2/3 ounces. That is something I did not know before.