Food.com
January 28, 2000, is the day my mother crossed over. I miss her terribly but over the years I've learned to pull up my big girl panties and deal. Good for me! Still I think it's appropriate to remember my Mom, her sister (also passed on) and all the women who took on motherhood and kids like me in the 1950s. This recipe should bring on a memory for those of you who are my age, a chuckle to those who are at least 20 years my senior and a look at a wonderfully innocent time for the younger generation. I don't know if folks did this in other parts of the country (or the world for that matter), but if you didn't live on the east coast of the United States when it snowed, you may have missed out on snow ice cream. If a good Nor'easter blizzard hit, your Mom would wake you up early, stuff you into your galoshes (mine were yellow with metal buckles) and send you outside with a bowl to collect snow. You weren't allowed to cheat. No snow from the ground. You had to sit that bowl in a place where it would fill up with fresh snow. Of course by the time you finished playing in the back yard snow, getting thoroughly soaked through, mittens frozen to your fingers from making snow angels, the bowl was brimming over with the white stuff and your Mom was telling you to come in. If you were fortunate enough to have a mud room, you got to strip there but for those of us whose back door entered directly into the kitchen, you had to drop everything practically down to your bloomers on the newspaper your Mom laid at the doorway. So there you are almost buck naked, the blizzard wind is cold on your butt as you lean back against the cold door trying to get off those galoshes while simultaneously trying not to lose you grip on that bowl of snow. But you didn't care. It was coming! Snow ice cream. Man oh man. Your Mom would make it up right in the bowl you brought it and then pour it into those old metal ice cube trays with the handle and freeze it. But meanwhile you got to lick the bowl. This was before the days we worried about samonella poisoning. Raw eggs in any kind of batter didn't mean cooties. It just meant sweet sticky fingers wiping the bowl clean. So here's a memory folks -- snow ice cream -- the way Moms in the 1950s made it. I also included the recipe at the end for the way nutrionists say is safer -- without eggs. I haven't had it in years, yet the feelings, the smells, the sights, everything came flooding back in when I thought of it. Miss ya, Mom! Love you so much.
