Delicious Dirty Torture

This is the reason why a week ago I stayed in bed on a soup and water (and coffee) diet for six days suffering the longest running flu I had in years: Because after cooking in a very hot kitchen- getting too occupied that I even forgot to take a few sips of water – I went out in the hot urban streets and, with a dry throat and no lunch (I really can’t find the appetite to eat the things I cook- this is a personal psychological confusion too), I pigged out on ice cream. For God’s sake how can you resist ice cream?!

What I had was double Dutch and hazelnut – I forgot – in a shopping center at a hotel basement. That was actually the culprit of my sore throat. Delicious, alright, but I am not going to write about the highly popular commercial ice cream. The manufacturers of that ice cream, by the way, had a case with our culinary school some time ago. One of the students, a Korean, found a shard of hard plastic (we thought it was glass) and she almost swallowed it. Of course we forwarded the complaint to the company authorities and the head of the school… the process, you know. But that company wouldn’t admit that it was their fault. Why! I was expecting them to provide us at least one year supply of ice cream! What if the student swallowed it and had surgery? Oh, business, business… that’s why I sometimes find companies a little ironic- they declare to the world corporate social responsibilities and yet can’t address sensibly small complaints like this.

So I will feature the classic ice cream whose essence carves a poignant experience to people rather than mass- produced slobs contaminated with broken plastic...

In the Philippines, street ice cream (a.k.a. dirty ice cream/ sorbetes) has its own proud identity. Why called dirty ice cream is… you don’t want to know how it’s made – that’s the secret of the makers. This ice cream is consumed in many ways: in a cup, on a cone, and… in a bun.

Many things have been placed in between a split bread – from fried oysters to ground beef to alfalfa sprouts to pickled olives to peanut butter and strawberry jam, but hey, why not try something really different? No, no, not the dainty ice cream sandwich we see on nice photographs – but the ice cream sandwich sorbetero style: The pack of soft buns the ice cream man carries around (that when walking in the streets and hunger gnaws at him, he eats some of them too); the sharp knife (that looks like a steak knife from restaurants) and the ice cream straight from the cart.

Hamburger bun, split into two, then filled with three flavors: coconut, purple yam and mango ice cream- voila! – a no -fancy ice cream sandwich! It’s good!

Bite through the soft buns. Allow the cold creamy texture play on the roof of your tongue, your gums, your saliva melding the three flavors harmoniously. The coolness of the ice cream joins the rush blood through your head… and that’s when you start getting a high. (That feeling also seemed to signal you of what the elders said about the anatomy of a flu: hot against cold make fever). You decide to get lost in that luxury anyway. You cant believe such goodness is found in the streets.
Late that night, your throat is parched. Doesn’t matter. Whether it is ice cream from a blood- sucking multinational or ice cream sandwich from the streets, all fingers point to you. It’s ice cream. Torturing you deliciously. You enjoyed. All is fair