At A Premium -- Ice Cream Returns To Its Roots, In Ever-Smaller Containers

WOULD YOU EAT SLUDGE?

At 1 o'clock in the morning?

Would you eat a whole pint of it?

No?

Well, if it was Seattle Sludge, you might. Not very long ago, on a rainy night in Kenmore, I did.

Seattle Sludge is a premium ice cream made by Danken's Gourmet Ice Cream, 4507 University Way N.E. To make up for eating one entire pint of Seattle Sludge, I ingested nothing else for 48 hours after except massive doses of green tea.

What would lead a usually sane individual to commit so excessive and fanciful an act of blue-chip gluttony?

Let me count the ways: "Fresh Cream, Skim Milk (YAY!), Dark Chocolate, Cane Sugar, Huge Chocolate Chips, Chunks of Fudge, Walnuts, Egg Yolks, and Natural Stabilizers." I guessed the butterfat content at somewhere between 17 and 20 percent. Seattle Sludge.

In addition to the green tea, I consumed an aspirin a day to thin my blood.

Seattle has many such premium pitfalls. Danken's makes them by the dozen. Fratelli's makes them by the carload. And don't forget Donna's with fresh fruit.

At one time, all ice creams were premium. There was no other kind. If you had it at all, it was premium - and if you could afford it, you were probably rich.

In 1600, Marie de Medicis arrived in Paris with her cooks - among them Bernardo Buontalenti, who brought with him a dish called gelati, an iced confection made with cream. Another Italian, Procopio dei Coltelli (known best by his Francified name, Procope), began serving it at his cafe - Paris' first cafe, Le Procope - in 1668.

Essentially, it consisted of heavy cream mixed with flavorings, fruits and liquor, churned in a metal pot over salted ice until it thickened. The French often added egg yolks to the mix - which is why "French" vanilla, to this day, contains egg.

By 1760, a recipe for "iced cream" was printed in Britain ("The Compleat Confectioner," by Hannah Glasse).

George Washington had his own cream machine. Dolley Madison was cheered for her ice-cream specialties at the White House.

Ice cream became accessible to a wider audience with the invention of the hand-cranked churn by an American woman, Nancy Johnson, in 1846.

It was portable and contained a paddle - the dasher - which stirred the freezing cream constantly to prevent the build-up of large ice crystals. It is the size of ice crystals - the smaller the better - that gives ice cream its smoothness. At the same time, the dasher incorporated the necessary amounts of air into the mixture to give the finished dessert a desired lightness as well as the ability to quickly melt on the tongue.

Ice cream became a street food, both in America and Europe. The first American ice-cream cone was invented by a Syrian baker, Ernest A. Hamwi, at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. He took Iranian waffles - zalabia - and rolled them while still warm and malable into a cone, then topped with a ball of ice cream.

All of this was fairly labor intensive and expensive. It wasn't until the industrialization of ice cream, begun in 1851 by Jacob Fussell, a Baltimore milk dealer, that ice cream became a mass-market product. It was a cost-lessening process that would continue for more than a hundred years.

The wide use of refrigeration in America in the first quarter of this century changed the use and storage of ice cream from an occasional treat that had to be consumed as soon as it was made, to a dessert that could be purchased in volume (in bricks) and held.

By the end of the Second World War, Americans were consuming ice cream at the astonishing rate of 20 quarts a year per capita. The big food companies soon dominated the markets; small creameries (and ice-cream parlors) closed by the thousands. The supermarket product was available, uniform and cheap.

All of that began to turn around in 1960 - with a high quality, high butterfat ice cream named Haagen-Dazs.

It was excellent as a product; its Scandinavian origins were a complete fraud. Haagen-Dazs, (REMEMBER THE UMLAUT) despite the map of Denmark and the locale of Copenhagen on the container, was made in the Bronx by Reuben Mattus - who later went geographically somewhat upscale and moved to New Jersey.

What Mattus succeeded in doing, however, was restoring a sense of exotica and real-cream quality to ice cream: hence the small containers, rather than the factory-linked bricks of mass production.

Mattus did on a large scale what mom-and-pop ice creameries had been doing for decades: He minimized the air content (known as overrun), and left out the nonfat milk, corn syrup, whey, cellulose gum, polysorbate 80, carob-bean gum, monoglycerides, diglycerides and assorted "natural" and artificial flavors that factory ice creams contained.

He also boosted the butterfat content. By law, American ice cream must contain 10-percent milk fat. Mattus' (UMLAUT!!) Haagen-Dazs weighed in at 16 percent. H-D as a name may have been pure nonsense (it means absolutely nothing; even the umlaut is fake, since Danish has no umlaut), but as an ice cream it was genuine.

And immediately popular.

Eleven years ago, two Seattle brothers, John and Peter Morse, thought they could do a little better. "I watched the strawberries from the Puyallup Valley being picked, frozen and shipped back to (UMLAUT!) Haagen-Dazs in New Jersey," John said, "and I thought, why don't we keep them here and use them fresh?"

John, who had just completed his M.B.A., got together with Peter, who was working as a stock trader in San Francisco, and started their own ice-cream company. "Morse Brothers Ice Cream didn't have the right ring to it," he recalled, "so, if you remember your Latin, we took the Latin word for brothers, Fratelli's, and put it on our ice cream."

Fratelli's most popular flavor is vanilla (as it is for all ice-cream sales: 33 percent of the American market). Its fresh-fruit ice creams - raspberry and strawberry in particular - are very popular in season. Fratelli's Chocolate Decadence is a year-round favorite, as is Cappucino Chip.

Fratelli's ice creams contain 16-percent milk fat and no more than 20-percent air.

DAN SAMSON, A SEATTLE native who had graduated from Yale, skipped going to law school and started an ice-cream shop instead. "I decided the world had enough lawyers and not enough good ice cream," he said. "And you make people a lot happier with ice cream."

He opened Danken's in the University District in 1984, with a continuous-flow freezer bought at a dairy show in Chicago. "It was big enough to produce in volume," he said, "but small enough so that we could do specialty blends."

Like Seattle Sludge.

Danken's milk-fat content is a minimum of 17 percent and can run up to 20 percent for their Chocolate Decadence. The overrun, incorporated air, is at 10 percent. This can make for an uncommonly dense ice cream, as well as a rich, sometimes sticky texture. It is not always casual eating.

The smallest of Seattle's super-premium ice creameries is Donna's Homemade Ice Cream, 1026 N.E. 64th St., owned and run by Donna and Frank Hanna. They've been in business for a decade in the Roosevelt District, with a steady, loyal following.

The Hannas make 30 flavors, use a low-sugar recipe and no eggs, which makes their vanilla seem less assertive. But they also make all their own flavorings, and their fresh-fruit ice creams in season are spectacular. Donna's best seller is a formidable Almond Mocca Fudge. The milk-fat content is 16 percent.

Pass the green tea.

(Copyright, 1992, John Hinterberger. All rights reserved.)

John Hinterberger's food columns and restaurant reviews appear Sundays in Pacific and Fridays in Tempo. Randee S. Fox a Seattle Times news artist.