How Natural converted me to the religion of ice cream

The first time I tasted strawberries was in an ice cream. This was in the early 2000s, when a Natural Ice Creams outlet, one of the first outside Mumbai, opened in Ahmedabad at Mithakali Six Roads, cheek-by-jowl with a bookstore that my family frequented. Soon, it became our weekend ritual: Buy a new book, then go have an ice cream. I ate a lot of strawberry, of course, as also mango and tender coconut, but the stand-out, for me, was anjeer (dried fig), its taste rich with the dried fruit’s caramel notes and its texture gritty with seeds. This was real ice cream, made with real fruit — a far cry from the cones and candies of my ’90s childhood that tasted, to me, like sweetened cough syrup, and left a sticky coating in the mouth. Natural’s, on the other hand, went down the gullet smoothly, leaving no unpleasant residue, only a feeling of satiation.

The death on Friday of Raghunandan Srinivas Kamath, who founded Natural Ice Cream in Mumbai in 1984, brought back memories of those Sunday book-buying trips which also marked my conversion to the religion of ice cream. Growing up indifferent to ice cream — even actively disliking certain varieties — in a city that is the country’s number one consumer of ice cream, was a lonely experience. It was also baffling: Why, I would sometimes wonder, is this over-sweet confection, which causes sinus headaches to boot, the object of such fanaticism? Part of the reason, of course, is the unforgiving heat of an Ahmedabad summer — ice cream offers sweet relief. Another reason is that small enterprises in Gujarat (not the big brands) have long offered ice cream of a quality that would today be bestowed with the title “artisanal”. Big national and international chains, recognising the Amdavadi passion for ice cream have long since changed the city’s dessert landscape, but back then, after dinner, most families would make a beeline for the hundreds of small shops that dotted the city. Years after I left Ahmedabad, I discovered an even more ritualised devotion to ice cream in Rajkot: Here, after dinner, families would troop out to the Race Course Grounds, lay out picnic blankets and, Hobbit-like, have a second dinner featuring all manner of street food, topped off with ice cream. Waiters from the numerous ice cream parlours nearby would flit back and forth between patrons and shops, with cardboard menus and trays filled with such flavours as kaju-draksh (cashew-raisin), kesar-badam (saffron-almond), rose and even paan. It was like the Royal Ascot, but without the hats and horses, and with way more ice cream.

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My (relatively) late-in-life conversion convinced me, however, that it was not just the sweetness and coldness of the ice cream that lay behind its massive appeal. In the years since that first encounter with an ice cream that not only tasted of actual fruit but was filled with chunks of it, I have come across creations that push the very idea of ice cream to its limits. Putting real fruit into ice cream makes perfect sense, as Kamath, the son of a mango vendor from Mangalore realised, not least because this was a return to its roots — in the sharbats of 13th century West Asia which combined ice with fruit pulp, are the origins of our most popular sweet treat, according to The Science of Ice Cream by “ice cream scientist” Chris Clarke.

But what about the green chilli ice cream made by Bachelorr’s in Mumbai’s Girgaum Chowpatty? Or the pani-puri ice cream, featuring bits of crunchy puri, created by another Mumbai chain, Apsara ice cream? From seaweed to marigold, pav bhaji to paan, ice cream offers a canvas for any number of flavours and flavour combinations. It may, indeed, be the only food that Indians, still notoriously hidebound in matters culinary, have always been open to experimenting with. For expanding our palates, then, a tip of the toque to Raghunandan Kamath and others like him who wondered, “Why not add this to ice cream?”. The tribe of ice cream lovers awaits your next creation.