Strawberry Ice Cream Day

thebittenword.com / flickr.com / 2008 / CC BY 2.0

The 15th of January is Strawberry Ice Cream Day.

When’s the last time you had strawberry ice cream?

When made properly and honestly, its simplicity can be a wonderful change from the trying-too-hard complexity of today’s ice cream flavours.

Strawberry used to be part of the triumvirate of simple ice cream flavours that ruled supreme — vanilla, chocolate and strawberry — and were so popular that they even appeared together in a North American version of Neapolitan ice cream. Now, though, strawberry ice cream has been relegated to the basement where old flavours get packed away on ice, hauled out only from time to time.

But how wonderful it was! Especially when the strawberry ice cream was a delicate pink and had nice, jammy chunks of real, frozen strawberry in it.

In later years, the flavour was cheapened with artificial strawberry flavour and lurid pink colour to minimize the amount of actual fruit the ice cream producer had to spend money on. It may partly have been this cheapening of the product that led to its decline, but then times and fashions change as well.

Treat yourself to some strawberry ice cream today. Try to find a quality brand with visible real strawberry in it, if only just to remember how good such a simple flavour used to be.

#StrawberryIceCreamDay

History

The first print mention that CooksInfo has been able to find for a Strawberry Ice Cream Day in January was in a newspaper in Maryland in 2013: “January 15 — Strawberry Ice Cream Day, enjoy with lunch.” ^[1]Senior calendar. January Events. Cumberland, Maryland: Cumberland Times. 1 January 2013. Page 4a, col. 1. Prior to that, there are several references in U.S. papers to it occurring in summer months, when strawberries would be in season in the northern hemisphere.

Joy / flickr.com / 2009 / CC BY 2.0 / http://the-cooking-of-joy.blogspot.ca/2009/05/fresh-strawberry-ice-cream.html