Happy National Ice Cream Month!

This piece, from Slashfood.com, made me go "Hmmmmm." A sample:

It's National Ice Cream month, and who -- the lactose-intolerant aside -- doesn't like ice cream?

Well, Southerners. America's favorite dessert is still a third-tier treat below the Mason-Dixon line, where cakes and puddings have a firm hold on the region's collective sweet tooth. Even in the most sweltering of Southern summers, New Englanders out-gorge their Southern neighbors. (Heck, New Englanders hang onto their ice cream eating edge straight through the winter, when their freezers are sometimes warmer than the air outside.)

Nobody's quite sure why Southerners never took to ice cream, although North Carolina food writer Sheri Castle confirms the phenomenon: "It's just not a big thing," she says. She suspects the relative paucity of milk cows might have contributed to ice cream's historical absence from the local food scene.

When I was a kid, I spent a good portion of every summer with my grandparents out in the country. My grandmother was always makin' homemade ice cream (usually plain vanilla, which she served with fresh fruit and assorted store-bought chocolate sauces).

Also, I remember going to a hardware store with my grandfather when I was very small; indeed, I couldn't have been more than 7-years-old at the time. On the sidewalk outside of the store was a large display of ice cream-makin' machines (you know, the ones with the large, sturdy bucket and the mixin' mechanism that clipped on top). I remember seeing that display and thinkin', "Maybe Granny'll get her ice cream-maker out today!"

Southerners don't like ice cream? Pish posh, Slashfood.com! Join me at Bobbie's Dairy Dip sometime and you'll see what I mean ...