National Ice Cream Day And A World Of Weird Flavors

It’s National Ice Cream Day on Sunday. Apparently, this little-known holiday goes back to Ronald Reagan, who is perhaps better known as the former US president who had a great fondness for jelly beans.

The Christian Science Monitor said that Reagan declared the entire month of July to be National Ice Cream Month, which is perhaps taking things a tad too far. “National Ice Cream Day…has evolved to the third Sunday in July,” they reported.

If anyone still makes ice cream themselves, they’re welcome to check out some of their recipes. But some of them are pretty unusual. Anyone remember putting a scoop of traditional “black sesame ice cream” on a waffle cone?

The Los Angeles Times has even more recipes, telling the reader to stop right now to put their ice cream maker bowl in the fridge.

But there’s no need to roll your own. There are entire grocery stores and ice cream parlors lined with every flavor of ice cream that you could possibly imagine.

I recently had carrot ice cream. Don’t ask me why — something about a close-out sale. But it was actually pretty good.

A random call-out of the ice cream flavors listed on the Baskin Robbins website will give you an idea of the possibilities that are out there — Lunar Cheesecake™, Made with Snickers™, and OREO® Cookies ‘n Cream are just three of dozens of possibilities.

But I’m still a little traumatized by The Chicago Tribune’s suggestion that Roasted Garlic ice cream is one of the most popular flavors out there. With no evidence or data on my side whatsover, I say this: No way.

And even though it’s called National Ice Cream Day, the most whackadoo flavors I’ve ever heard of come from the Torimi Cafe in Tokyo, Japan. Three pet bird flavored ice creams were created by the cafe for a small pet bird festival — and the flavors were Parakeet, Cockatiel, and Java Sparrow.

I’m not sure how they know what those birds taste like, and I probably don’t want to know. Rocket News 24 had an extensive article on the limited edition ice creams, so I’ll describe just one and let you go there for the rest of the story.

Java Sparrow ice cream is named because its taste represents “the feeling of pressing the breast of a Java Sparrow into your mouth.”

Ho-kay.

Now that I’ve considered all of my choices, I’ll do what I always do and order pralines and cream.

What about you? What’s your choice for National Ice Cream Day?

[bird flavored ice cream photos by Torimi Cafe, Tokyo via Twitter]
[vanilla ice cream with chocolate crust photo credit: Micky** via photopin cc]