The line for the ice cream shop snakes out through the door, spills out onto the street, and winds its way around the block. Their simultaneous reactions as they spot the crowd are such pitch-perfect distillations of their personalities that she nearly laughs out loud. “Ugh, let’s skip it,” she groans at the exact same time as he says, “Wow, this place must be good!”—his excitement almost childlike.
His unbridled enthusiasm for the tiniest things in life—taking a cool dip in the pool after a run, a good cup of coffee, a heavyweight flannel shirt—is so pure and clean that it threw her when they first met. No one is that sincere, she thought. And then she corrected herself mentally, thinking, No one this good-looking is that sincere. Because he is really really good-looking: He possesses the sort of tall, clean-cut attractiveness that makes women stop and look twice at him as they walk by. He could easily grace the pages of a J.Crew catalog, or a Brooks Brothers ad. Handsome is the word coined exactly for people like him—she tells him this all the time and he either rolls his eyes or shrugs it off. She’s not sure if he geniunely isn’t aware of the effect his physical appearance has on her, or if he just finds it a minor quality that’s unnecessary to call out, like being able to shuck oysters quickly or having a keen sense of direction.
If ice cream is a love language, it could be theirs. They seek it out wherever they are, each cone or cup or stand a tiny, shared adventure that tethers them closely like a string. One summer they drove for an hour down winding dirt roads to eat maple creamees at a roadside stand outside Middlebury Vermont; the miniature cone—a mere 4 inches tall—looking so comically small in his broad, wide hand that she couldn’t stop laughing long enough to take a lick of hers before it began melting in maple-y rivulets down her arm.
When they first met, they’d sit late at night feeding each other spoonfuls of Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche directly from the pint, half-lying on the couch in the silky darkness, their legs intertwined—giddy with the early flush of romance: tripping over their words in the frenzied rush of having so much to say about nothing at all: where did you go to summer camp, what do you think the best Rolling Stones song is, do you like cheese on your burger, what’s the most interesting place you’ve ever traveled.
A few years ago they took the ferry to Nantucket to stay with friends for a week in July and rode their bikes most evenings into town to the Juice Bar: She introduced him to Grape-Nut ice cream (her favorite growing up, the crunchy cereal infusing the sweet cream base with a nutty flavor). He would order something different each time, always in one of the oversized waffle cones the teenagers made fresh all day in the back, which would still be slightly warm when they’d hand it over: Crantucket (vanilla ice cream with dark chocolate-covered cranberries), the Green Monster (cookie dough folded into mint ice cream), fresh strawberry, rum raisin.
He teases her that she’s constitutionally unable to refrain from mentioning her all-time favorite spot any time they ever eat ice cream, which is a tiny scoop shop in her college town with a tidy white exterior, brightly painted walls, handwritten signs, and locally sourced ingredients. She takes him there a few years after they meet and she smiles so much watching him stoop down to step through the narrow doorway that she thinks her cheeks might hurt for days. Behind the counter, the ice creams and sorbets glow like jewels, and the rosy-cheeked cashier offers any sample they want. He accepts her proffered spoon, tasting nectarine sorbet and Thai basil coconut and even a scoop of buttered sweet pea with a straight face.
Outside on the green, they sit side-by-side at a picnic table and share a cup of whiskey caramel and Meyer lemon mascarpone. Her leg brushes against his and she leans her head against his shoulder, letting him eat the solid center while she spoons up the melted edges.
She tags along on a business trip of his to San Francisco once, and after a full day of work, he meets her outside a sleek wooden building down by the Embarcadero. The restaurant buzzes with noise and the neighborhood feels lit up and happy—full of small wine bars and pretty boutiques. Her breath catches when she sees him turn the corner a block away: He’s tall enough to stand out in most crowds. His crisp white shirt is rumpled a bit and open at the collar—she knows he’s been tugging at his green silk tie on the walk over in a way she finds almost unbearably sexy. She loves seeing him in a suit.
They drink glasses of a crisp Pinot Grigio from the Russian River Valley and eat grilled spot prawns over wild fennel with their hands, licking lemon verbena butter from their fingers. The server has to interrupt politely twice to recite the specials: Sometimes when they’re together, everything else becomes a blur in the background. She recommends the romanesco squash blossom pasta, which they order, and they finish the meal with a plate of dessert that looks like a modernist painting: a tiny square of fig panna cotta, a round peach galette the size of his palm, and two perfect ovals of honeycomb ice cream which hide chunks of the gooey, crunchy candy.
They eat black raspberry chip ice cream at a friend’s wedding on Lake George and blueberry lime cheesecake ice cream at a food truck in Austin before a music festival. Every fall they visit his parents for a week in Seattle, where his mom serves homemade pumpkin ice cream—his favorite growing up. On the boardwalk in the Outer Banks they share a sugar cone piled high with funnel cake soft serve.
They both agree that the fanciest ice cream they’ve ever tried is the rum-vanilla ice cream topped with apricot and miso praline, frozen rum powder, and shards of lemon peel-infused white chocolate that capped an epic dinner at the Michelin-starred Lasarte restaurant in Barcelona—a splurge they’d looked forward to for months as part of three luxurious days to finish a two-week-long backpacking trip in the Pyrenees. They’re split on the best ice cream they’ve had together: She’d say the convenience store Klondike bar that he brought her after she had her wisdom teeth out (a brutal experience as an adult); he’d say the burnt caramel gelato from Toscanini’s in Cambridge that they ate after their third date on the porch of Memorial Church on Harvard’s campus, a spot he’d loved as an undergraduate.
For her birthday every year, he bakes a cake—two flourless chocolate layers, two vanilla chiffon layers, all sandwiched with passion fruit gelato. He puts sparklers on the top and kisses her for so long after they go out that the top layer of cake starts to slide off the melting ice cream beneath.
One gray March day they drive to a dinner party at one of his work colleague’s houses; their host is a dull, bearded man who talks endlessly about environmental legal reform, a topic she finds fascinating but that he manages to make as tiresome as a lecture on Kafka. His wife serves shepherd’s pie and oversteamed green beans and cold slices of baguette. The wine is good, however, and after three glasses of Chianti they both start to make faces at each other across the table, nudging the other with a foot when the conversation takes a particularly pedantic turn.
For dessert, there are two pints of butter pecan ice cream and a plate of store-bought cookies. In the car on the way home, she turns to him and before she can say anything he responds, “Well, if nothing else, that was an extremely eye-opening evening—I always wondered who actually buys butter pecan ice cream and now I know.”
She laughs, but the thing is that she really liked it: every melty, creamy, old-fashioned spoonful. And in their own un-adventurous way, she liked those people too: There was something deeply comforting and steady about both, and sometimes that’s just what you need.
*Recipe note: Half-and-half is a blend of heavy cream and whole milk—in some countries it will be labeled as half cream.
No-Cook Butter Pecan Ice Cream
Makes 2 quarts
3 cups half-and-half
1 1/2 cups chopped toasted pecans
3 tablespoons butter, melted
14 ounces sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon maple extract (or sub 3 tablespoons maple syrup)
Mix all your ingredients together in a large bowl.
Add the mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions. I suggest sticking the finished ice cream in the freezer for at least an hour before serving to harden it even more.