Cotton Candy
Cotton candy flavored ice cream
Date Tried - September 2, 2023
Location - At the Keene Stewart’s, in the car, and at home in our green chair
Format - Milkshake
Milkshake It? - See above, but No.
Buy Again? - No
Dearest Readers—we have arrived. Cotton Candy is the final flavor!
It is not, as last week’s review may have made it seem, the final newsletter. No, I will be providing you with an ample summary of my experiences, a post that I suspect will take a long time for me to write. ‘I Scream, You Scream’ was always a comedic bit—you knew it and I knew it. Here’s the elephant in the room: I don’t care about Stewart’s ice cream…I have never cared about Stewart’s ice cream. I do eat their ice cream and, more often than not, I enjoy doing so. I do care about writing and, because of this silly device that I concocted, I have been doing plenty of it over the last eleven months. I very much want that to continue when we’ve wrapped things here for good (and I think that it will.)
That said, in the words of Jeff Rosenstock (from Pat Hosken’s deft interview of him on Weekly Neil, essential online reading for all Neil Young fans), I wanted to end on a flavor that “smokes.” That flavor was going to be Cookies ‘N Cream. But those of you who read last week will remember that the final ordering of flavors got knocked out of my control.
Let this be stated here: I know there are more Limited Edition flavors currently on the menu that I haven’t tried. Campfire S’mores is one of them. Cookie Party—a distinct blue-based flavor that looks like you’re eating the actual Cookie Monster—is another. Daily Grind, Philly’s Apple Pie, Pumpkin Pie & Pumpkin To Talk About are currently the others. But it’s almost not worth mentioning them here by name because they could be removed as quickly as they appeared.
In the world of the Limited / There is only entropy.
I could have tried these flavors and reviewed them like I did with all previous 56 flavors. But this task had to end. Since the time that I started this in October of 2022, I finished staining my deck, arranged my first ever septic pumping, traveled to some exotic places (Ecuador, Oregon, Washington, Ithaca and Quebec’s Chic-Choc Mountains to name the heaviest hitters), and hosted a family Thanksgiving. I started playing the drums, learned to downhill ski, saw my first ever curling match, attempted my first (and last) ever ice climb. I operated lights and puppets in a work of original theater, joined a band, began playing live concerts, caught my first lake perch, and became a dog owner.
All the while, there was this newsletter. In five, ten, twenty years I probably won’t look back at 2022/2023 and classify it as the ‘I Scream, You Scream’ year. But I am grateful to have participated in it and look forward to finding out in what way it will impact my future existence.
So, here we are…ending things on Cotton Candy…the worst flavor. There, I said it. It’s the worst. You don’t even have to wait for my final ranking to come to your inbox, I’ll spoil it right here and now. I ordered it as a milkshake because of Ben LeBlanc’s recommendation. He said that, in this format, “it’s not that bad.”
Well, Ben, it is that bad—you were wrong. But I still thank you for your suggestion because it means that once (and only once) did I officially include a milkshake as part of the challenge. I had avoided doing so up until this point because, well, it just seemed wrong. I didn’t want the lovely drinkability of a frozen dessert to impact my pure, raw emotional reaction to the flavor itself. But, because I hate real cotton candy, I knew I was probably going to hate its ice cream equivalent. [Rarely does an imitation of a thing ever beat the real deal.]
I thought that masking it within the shrouds of a milkshake might somehow make it more palatable. What it actually did is liquify an ice cream flavor that already sort of tastes like Pepto Bismol and make the sugary polygons floating around in it take on a jarring, chalky texture.
Each one that came through the straw made feel more sick than the last.
I’d like to mention Percy and Charles Dake. In fact, I should have mentioned them long before now. These two men took over their family farm in Middle Grove, NY in 1917 and began making ice cream under the name “Dake’s Delicious Ice Cream”. This eventually became Saratoga Dairy in the same year that—if you believe Wikipedia—New York dairy farms were required by law to institute pasteurization. Their operation grew and, after World War II, they bought a proper ice cream production facility from a man named Don Stewart. They inherited the name and, thus, the modern Stewart’s was born. Things have grown exponentially since then and the current Stewart’s Shops chain would likely be unrecognizable to Charles and Percy in many ways.
On September 2nd, the night I ordered a Cotton Candy milkshake at the Keene Stewart’s scoop counter, a man was working that none of us had ever seen before. He wasn’t wearing a name tag and, when we entered the line, it was evident that he was enjoying his transactional conversation with the customers ahead of us. Their order took awhile and, I admit, I was feeling a little impatient. When at last we approached, I gave my order and he blurted out, “Didn’t see that one coming!”
I watched as he scooped rounded balls of pink cream into the metal cup and told him that he didn’t need to make it too large because I might not finish it. He eyed me curiously and said, “…We’ve got to follow the Stewart’s standards for every milkshake.” He then proceeded to move the metal cup of milk and ice cream onto a scale, bent at the waist to get an eye level reading, and ensured that the weight of the mixture met the exact requirement specified to workers. We explained to him the nature of my challenge and that he was taking part in a rather momentous moment. He listened politely but didn’t concern himself too much with this banter, just focused on preparing the milkshake precisely. He made my shake—all our shakes—with grace and poise.
As we were leaving, he called out to me.
“Well, how was it?”
“This is a well-made shake. Not my favorite flavor, but a very well-made shake.”
“Not your favorite flavor, huh? Well.”
Why do I tell you all of this? Because I have considered whether or not the man who served me the final Stewart’s flavor as part of the ‘I Scream, You Scream’ challenge was the ghost of either Percy or Charles Dake.
Think about it. His commitment to customer service and product regulation hearken back to a time when such things were arguably more valued in the service sector. His lack of a name tag adds up because, back then, Percy and Charles were Stewart’s—you didn’t need to ask their names. Heck, Cotton Candy is even a pretty old timey flavor. Why wouldn’t a man who started a business during the 15th-ever New York Yankees season be surprised that I am not tickled by cotton candy, a food science miracle in his day?
[To this man who is undoubtedly not a ghost: I apologize in advance if you ever read this, realize who you are, and are offended that I chalked your excellent customer service up to necromancy.]
And, while we’re on the topic of ghosts, let’s wrap this up with something entirely unrelated but also old. In 1927, Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, and Robert A. King published a novelty song that quickly morphed into a jazz standard. The narrative of “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream” is set on a fictional college campus somewhere up north, “up among the Eskimo.” The chorus—the song’s most iconic section—is structured like a university cheer (and makes me think of the scene from Catcher in the Rye when Holden is watching the football game at Pencey Prep from a nearby hill.)
In 1944, the song was re-recorded in New Orleans by William Russell, George Lewis and Jim Robinson and quickly morphed into a Dixieland classic. Then, ten years later, Chris Barber’s band recorded the tune. They only knew the instrumental version, but the label asked them to sing on the record. So trumpeter Pat Halcox wrote lyrics on the spot and his words have become more commonly known than the original lyrics from the 20s.
But, really, nobody remembers either set of lyrics anymore; the song has decidedly fallen out of the public consciousness. I listened an early version recorded by Waring’s Pennsylvanians and can say confidently that its loss is no great tragedy. It’s a strange song, very hokey and probably a bit more than a little racist. Though, the chorus objectively smokes—it’s catchy and more complicated lyrically than it ought to be, just the kind of thing that kids might love and adults might cling onto, like that song “The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley.
This is probably why, sixty five years later—in Season 1 / Episode 21 of the show Barney & Friends— Barney and his friends sing this song. Barney’s lyrics differ from the original composition in that they don’t feel the need to parody a group of indigenous peoples by making the melodic assumption that—because Alaska and/or Siberia are cold—they must…like ice cream? But Barney’s words are still a little wacky, such as this couplet from the fourth and final verse that sounds like it could have been written by Marshall Mathers circa 2009:
Oh, spumoni, oh, tartoni /
And confidentially, oh, no baloney.
It’s weird. But it’s probably why I know the phrase ‘I Scream, You Scream’ at all. I was three years old when Barney’s rendition of the jazz classic aired. I can’t confirm whether or not I watched it (Mom?) but I know that Barney and his friends were a cultural force to be reckoned with in the 90s, one that I almost certainly could not have escaped during my formative years in Brecksville, Ohio.
Thus, perhaps in some way, we have an anthropomorphic foam Tyrannosaurus rex to thank for christening this newsletter with its name thirty years before the project came into existence. Or perhaps not.
In any event, let’s close things as we started: celebrating the time-honored tradition of ice cream! It’s the whole reason we’re here, after all.
And, boy, do I appreciate you being here.
Tuesday, Monday, we all scream for Sundae!
Sis, boom, Aurora borealea, bah!
Boola boola
Sasparoola
We´ve got the chocolate
I´ll take vanoolaI scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!
Your grandma misspelled your name!
I hate cotton candy...thanks for the laughs and the callout
Thank you for a year of many smiles and sometimes even laughing out loud. You have always been delightful, and I do love that about you. I also love that you never watched Barney!