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Left-handed ice creamEditor's note: Ken Root is at the Iowa State Fair this week. He is too busy to write but not too busy to remember his father with this column from June 2008. Our first memories of life are either happy or disturbing. Mine were happy, as I remember sitting on top of a small ice cream freezer while my father turned the handle and converted the liquid gold into incredibly tasty vanilla ice cream. Homemade ice cream was the centerpiece of summertime gatherings at our farm, with city cousins and rural neighbors coming to enjoy the treat. The activity was perfect for Protestant farm folks because it required work before pleasure. I soon realized that hand cranking an ice cream freezer was not as simple as it looked, especially if some of the participants were left-handed. There were four of us who bore the curse of having the wrong hand dominant and using it to write, bat, shoot and throw. This "handicap" caused my dad to speak ill of it until Mom mentioned that his deceased brother was also left-handed, and then the conversation turned to how good Uncle Ed could throw a baseball and how he almost made it to the majors. The three-quart White Mountain freezer had cost almost $20 and had a sturdy wooden bucket with a shiny metal container and a rough cast crank on top. My mother would concoct the mixture with the finest ingredients we could afford, including cream and milk with sugar and flavoring, which was sometimes bananas but often vanilla. Then she'd bring it outside and we'd carefully set it into the bucket so the bottom fit exactly on the peg in the middle and the shaft on the paddles meshed up with the gears on the rotary crank on top. The lid was kept tightly on the container, above the layers of cracked ice and rock salt that were added to get the ice to melt at a temperature below freezing--thereby chilling and freezing the ice cream inside the bucket. When water started flowing out the weep hole in the side of the wooden bucket, you were in business. But the challenge was which way to turn the crank. A right-handed person would turn clockwise with their right hand as the manufacturer expected, but a lefty would invariably turn the freezer around and crank it backward. This was both a mechanical and social problem, as getting people to sit and crank a freezer of ice cream for up to a half hour was challenging. If you found a volunteer, it was considered rude to tell them how to do their job...unless you were one of us lefties. The paddles were designed to sweep around and scour the frozen product off the side of the cylinder and mix it back into the middle. When you turn it backward, the paddles would ride in and over the frozen edge and the outside would freeze hard while the inside would stay liquid. If the grownups didn't catch this error early in the process, it could not be reversed, so the end product came out as hard chunks floating in a sweet milky liquid. Even done backward, it was delicious, but when done right, it was heavenly. We'd bring out mismatched dishes and spoons and Dad or Mom would dip out as much as possible to serve to older guests first. Then she'd run and get a plate and he'd pull the paddle and give it to one of us to scrape and eat as our serving. I don't know if that ice cream was better, but the honor of getting the paddle was like licking batter off the mixer beaters when she made a cake. I visually learned to turn the freezer the right direction, so I overcame my left-handed tendencies. One of my cousins never accomplished this and we'd have to watch to see if he was doing it correctly and gently steer him in the right direction, lest we lost his help. We'd find an agreeable child and lay a rug over the top of the freezer and plop them down on it as the ice cream thickened and the anticipation built. Sleeves were rolled up and perspiration dripped as the final turns were made, with the strongest person finishing the churn. Times changed and relatives grew up and moved away. Some died, and their children didn't come back very often. One year in late spring, we were invited to the home of a neighbor who brought out an electric ice cream freezer and made a gallon without our help but with great attention from everyone who watched the freezer turn itself in the right direction, while sitting in the kitchen sink. The visiting was good, the dinner was satisfying and the ice cream was cold and sweet, but there was just something missing. Editor's Note: Ken Root is an independent agricultural journalist. He was named the 2009 Farm Broadcaster of the Year and was the 2008 winner of the Oscar in Agriculture. He is an Oklahoma native and an experienced print, radio and television journalist. He has spent the last five years as Lead Farm Broadcaster at WHO Radio in¬ Des Moines, Iowa. He and his wife Gail have two adult children and two grandchildren.
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