Vanilla/Chocolate/Strawberry

Vanilla, chocolate & strawberry flavored ice cream

Vanilla/Chocolate/Strawberry

Date Tried - January 15, 2023

Location - Home, standing in the kitchen

Format - Half Gallon

Milkshake It? - Yes

Buy Again? - Yes

“A winning trifecta! This combination is sure to please everyone with Stewart’s original vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream.”

If I counted correctly—and there’s certainly a chance that I didn’t—this is the 25th flavor review. This feels momentous in some way! If you’ve stuck it out from the beginning, I applaud and thank you. Make no mistake, I prepare these newsletters for you who have chosen to hand me your weekly loyalty. But I also do it for me. And I have to admit that the passion for writing comes and goes.

You all get this; sometimes even our hobbies feel like work and that’s neither right nor wrong.

As an effort to shake things up for myself—to keep the light aflame—I decided to approach the Vanilla/Chocolate/Strawberry review in a very different fashion. Instead of my typical musings and assessments, I wrote a 542 word piece of fiction about a mother who serves Neapolitan ice cream at her son’s eighth birthday party. When he refuses it for a more flashy flavor, she has a sudden mental breakdown and reiterates incoherently that it has to be Neapolitan. The final image was the house burning down (from the knocked-over birthday cake/candles) while the mother simultaneously laughs and spoons Neapolitan ice cream into her mouth.

Before these newsletters reach your eyes, they are read aloud to Lisa, usually in our kitchen. She is almost always very gracious. I say “almost always” because she was not a fan of my attempt here to stir the pot. Not inherently— as she will implore you to know—due to the format. But because she thought it could have been written better.

She was likely right, but I still had her read it aloud—another shake of the old sack of tricks. The writing was just OK, but her performance wouldn’t have won any awards either.

So, we both left something to be desired.

Of course, we must address the obvious: for some reason, Stewart’s decided not to use the name “Neapolitan.” I’ve associated this word with ice cream since before I can remember and I imagine that’s the same for many of you. So why the omission? Can the word Neapolitan—akin to “Tuscan” or “Manchurian”—be a trademarked entity? Surely not, but I did a mild search for the answer anyway. All I managed to uncover was an Etsy community forum where user falcieridesigns asks this very question (“Is Neapolitan a tradermark name?”) and received several replies from user Marmalady—replies that can only be described as intermediate “man-splaining”—about the definition of a Protected Geographical Indication and something called a Melton Mowbray Pork Pie.

Look them up, they’re kind of weird and served cold for some reason.

There is something staunchly classy about Vanilla/Chocolate/Strawberry’s design—the straight lines that delineate the individual flavors scream Order and Elegance in a timeless fashion. Yes, swirls can be mesmerizing. But they can also be chaotic. Here, the European sensibility is operative, like a good pair of Pumas.

In addition to my literary efforts, Lisa also took offense to me voting “Yes” in the “Milkshake It?” category. I will admit, this wasn’t a thoughtless choice. Colorwise, it would be a mess. But I’ve had enough distinct spoonfuls where all three flavors were present and I can say without question that it would be delicious.

Come over some time for milkshakes to prove me wrong.

Neapolitans—by which I mean the people of Naples—didn’t create this flavor; Louis Ferdinand Jungius did. He was the head chef of the royal Prussian household and he dedicated the culinary invention to Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau, a renowned landscape gardener. When Neapolitan immigrants began settling in the United States, Americans encountered their spumone gelato and conflated its colorful presentation with this Prussian dessert.

And thus, Neapolitan lives on, incorrectly associated with an entire culture of people. Often, as human beings, we create our own historical truths. Sometimes that goes poorly, and sometimes it goes very, very well.

Whether we realize it or not, maybe we’re just trying to shake things up a bit.