I’ve written a ton about ice cream here in relation to various other topics. So today, I’ll talk about making ice cream instead.

When I was a kid, my grandparents had an ice cream maker and every summer that I visited them, we took another stab at making some. We had a lot of texture problems. One year it was chocolate chip ice cream, and my grandmother laughed for years afterward about the “vanilla and BB pellet” result. Next year, we shaved the chocolate and it was much better. Another year we made French vanilla ice cream that had a great taste, but the egg yolks (or something) wound up creating chewy bits that were fairly off-putting. We would eat the ice cream outside and spit out what my grandpa insisted on calling the pith. We stuck with plain vanilla after that.

My mom says we had an ice cream maker at home, too, but it didn’t last long. The story I got about it was that some friend of hers brought their kid over, and the kid threw their banana peel in the machine. When my mom finally noticed several weeks later, the ice cream maker was one big rust bucket and was dumped at the curb the next trash day. My memory of making ice cream at home was generally an adult-free effort; I’d have a friend over, we’d throw some cream, sugar, and vanilla into a bowl, beat it half to death with a pair of old-timey eggbeaters (the kind that inevitably jammed and you had to turn the wheel backward to unjam them), then dump that into a small coffee can. Then we’d put the small coffee can into a bigger coffee can full of ice and salt and spend 20 minutes rolling it across the kitchen floor to (sometimes at) each other. Then we’d open it up and pretty much drink the sightly thicker result.

One of my failings as a parent was not having an ice cream churn on hand at any point to show the kid how much effort goes into it. I’m pretty sure we did have an ice cream maker at one point, but my recollection is that it had a motor and made enough ice cream for maybe 1.5 servings—in other words, why bother?

Traditional ice cream in Illinois has been surprisingly hard to come by. There’s plenty of soft-serve—we have more DQs than you can shake a stick at, plus a couple local chains that also make a mean twisty cone. But the nearest Baskin Robbins is about 40 minutes away; the closest Cold Stone is 20 minutes. A local café on Main Street just got its freezer up and running a couple months ago, and we have stopped in a couple times—it’s good, but the selections are few and it’s not quite the same.

Maybe it’s time to scrounge up a few coffee cans.