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Frozen Treats

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I have always loved popsicles.  I ate so many as a small child that I got lots of cavities in my teeth. My early favorites were the blue raspberry ones. Ice cream bars were never a favorite,  not until I spent a month in the summer after Grade 11 in Saltillo, Mexico studying Spanish. It was hot there in July, and I discovered a world of wonderful frozen confections. My favorite were strawberry ice cream bars with a ripe strawberry at the base. I looked for them in vain in the grocery store back home, but never found them again. I stopped eating popsickles and ice cream bars over the years.   My frozen treat consumption had dwindled to mainly bowls of vanilla  ice cream.

Just the other day I was wheeling my cart past the frozen treat section at Walmart when I spied some interesting looking frozen treats with a lot of Spanish words on the boxes. I bought some ice cream ones and some fruity ones that had the slightest hint of hot chili. They were all wonderful, and the strawberry  ones were very much like the Saltillo strawberry bars. I am in Heaven!

What were your favorite summer treats as a child? What do you like now?

 

76 thoughts on “Frozen Treats”

  1. We were lucky enough to inherit the popsicle molds of my childhood when the s&h was a toddler. During the heatwave, I got them out to make the far-healthier -than-the kool-aid/jello-recipe of my childhood.

    My childhood favorites were ice cream sandwiches and the rare root beer popsicles. I also recall the extreme fanciness of Good Humor bars- my memory was that they came in both a chocolate and strawberry version.

    Today i’m a dreamsicle or fudgicle girl, but mostly, we use the ancestral Tupperware molds to “concoct”… or just lazily throw in leftover breakfast smooth that didn’t fit in the glass.

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        1. Sorry to hear that, mig. Hope the worst of it is over. Is s&h distance learning this coming semester? I can imagine that this pandemic has caused a severe disruption of his running, and that that may have affected other things. Truly difficult times.

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    2. Funny you should mention root beer popsicles. Those are the ones I remember most clearly. Eating them, or any popsicles, we would suck on them until we had sucked out the flavor, leaving just the white ice at the top. Strangely, I am reminded of the taste of root beer popsicles whenever I chew a leaf off my tarragon plant. I had in mind that popsicles were only a nickle, but that can’t be right. That was their price during the Depression. They must have been ten or fifteen cents.

      As alternatives to root beer popsicles, I was going to also mention fudgesicles and dreamsicles. Apparently, there are dreamsicles and creamsicles and both are vanilla wrapped in orange but creamsicles have ice cream at the center and dreamsicles have ice milk. I only remember dreamsicles from my youth.

      I haven’t eaten any sort of frozen dessert product for decades.

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      1. I remember thinking the idea of orange popsicle + vanilla ice cream was kind of vile as a child (pick one already!)

        Yet I adored root beer floats (and still do).

        But then I also did not much care for the fresh tomatoes that were in abundance then either.

        Today I am eying the first almost-but-not-yet- perfectly-ripe Mortgage Lifter trying to decide if I should wait one more day.

        With age comes wisdom.

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  2. Since I can’t get to a grocery store, my purchasing agent does that for me. She has recently found a product I love: Deebee’s Organics Superfruit Freezie. These are a sort of “freezer pop” thing with fruit juice in a plastic tube. You snip off the top and skoosh them up from the bottom. These aren’t traditional popsicles. They don’t drip. And, hey, they are a health food, USDA Organic, so there’s no guilt!

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  3. Gosh, I had forgotten about root beer popsicles. Mmm! I rarely eat popsicles anymore and when I do it’s either cherry or grape. I have never cared for chocolate ice cream but I used to love fudgsicles. Go figure. Another favorite treat in my childhood was the Dilly Bar from Dairy Queen – chocolate covered was good but the cherry flavored one was even better. These days I usually only eat frozen treats during hot weather and they are pretty much limited to Fruit ‘n Juice bars or the occasional ice cream sandwich. By the way, are double stick popsicles that you could break in half still around? I only see single ones in the store.

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    1. Those double stick popsicles were an abomination. Too often breaking along the stick, not the middle, so you had to eat it with s spoon in a dish while your little brother got the part still on a stick (not that I harbor resentful memories of this or anything.

      But you have also reminded me of another adult indulgence which is a cherry dip cone at the Whippy Dip in Decorah, IA. I grew up with a mother who prohibited dip cone on the basis of their inherent messiness (she was not wrong about that, it must be admitted), so that is what I ALWAYS get when we pass through Decorah during Whippy Dip season.

      I wonder if I will ever do that again.

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        1. They were mounted on or near the counter in small groceries and convenience stores. They looked sort of like those cone-shaped devices you use to make bias tape only larger and flattened to just fit a twin popsicle. On the front was a hinged lever with a splitter that went into the slot in the front of the holder. I haven’t seen one in decades and I suspect that anyone under 50 would have no idea what they were for.

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        2. I grew up in Iowa where such refinements were unknown.

          But I also don’t ever recall popsicles as being from anywhere but the box in the freezer at home.

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        3. …or maybe it was the holster-like part of the device that moved and the splitter bar was mounted behind it. It’s been a long time, more than half a century, since I last saw one.

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  4. I went through a phase of being obsessed with Snow Cones. I once ate four in an afternoon at the State Fair. I tried to make them at home, with mixed results. The two drinks sugary enough to use that way were Hawaiian Punch and High C Orange drink. I’d put them in a heavy mug in the freezer, then come back over and over to stir them so they didn’t freeze solid. Ultimately, it required more discipline than I had to make my own Snow Cones.

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    1. Husband’s father was famous for his shaved ice. It was a sharp blade that he ran accross a block of ice, the shavings falling into metal container. He put a variety of flavors on the shavings.

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      1. When I was younger my father went through a lot of entrepreneurial stages, trying to make money before his law career took off. One of them was an ice cream truck that he had for about a year. It had a cotton candy machine in it and also a snowcone machine. So while my sister and I were never allowed to have popsicles or ice cream out of the inventory on the truck, we were allowed snowcones. I assume that this is the basis of my current love of Hawaiian shave ice.

        I think I’ve probably mentioned this before but last summer on my last day at the state fair, which was the day I had to cut short to go get YA from the emergency room when she broke her foot, I didn’t go straight back to the bus stop. I zigzagged a little bit so I could get one last Hawaiian shave ice for the season.

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  6. The ice cream bars I remember from the grocery store were called Cheerio bars. They were vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate.

    These days, if I buy something like that, it’s probably going to be a root beer float bar made by Jonny Pops. They really do taste like a root beer float.

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  7. Ice cream is big in my family. We served ice cream at Dads funeral. And mom always makes a point of getting an ice cream treat when we go out for drives.

    I still think about root beer popsicles; those were good! But second best was banana ones. We still get them, but can only find them at the ‘good Food’ type stores. Maybe they’re healthier??

    As a kid, the week of the fair I ate a lot of ice cream drumsticks. Seems like mom wouldn’t buy them for home, but at the fair I was on my own and as long as I had money I was eating them.
    Nowdays I keep a box at home. A couple years ago they switched to plastic wrapped rather than the individual paper bag. I’m still not sure I like that idea…

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    2. Drumsticks used to have a square of paper stuck to the top and the bottom part of the cone wrapped with paper but the upper part of the cone and some of the chocolate covering the top was exposed and that’s the way they were sold. Never seemed particularly sanitary but that never stopped me from eating them.

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  8. A treat nobody has mentioned yet is the sherbet Push Up. Loaded with orange or green sherbet, they were tubular things with a wood stick at the bottom so you could push the sherbet up as you ate from the top. They were pretty good, although your tongue could get sore if you weren’t careful.

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  9. I have to honor the memory of my sainted mother on this topic and mention both the Bridgeman’s and Farrell’s she spoke of with rapture when the subject of ice cream came up.

    These were memories from her days as a newly minted teacher I. St Louis Park in the late 50s, and I always felt my Iowa youth was impoverished by comparison. (There also was no soda fountain of any description to be found in my small town Iowa upbringing like she had).

    Minnesota was always the promised land for me. I can’t say I have been disappointed.

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    1. “Minnesota was always the promised land . . .” That was absolutely true for my Iowa family. Iowa had cornfields; Minnesota had birches and pines. Iowa had muddy creeks: Minnesota had a wealth of gorgeous lakes. Iowa had crows; Minnesota had loons.

      When my dad had a chance to start his life over, it wasn’t really a choice. He could stay in Iowa or he could move to heaven-on-earth. We moved.

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        2. I’ve known and worked with so many ex-Iowans over the years it’s hard to believe there’s anyone left in the state.

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  11. I think it reflects that the nerves in the roof of your mouth are numb with cold. If you warm up the roof of your mouth with your tongue, it passes more quickly

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    1. No chili ice cream for me and I have to say that I really don’t like dip and dots. It’s just not the right texture for ice cream.

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  14. I do remember most of the above, but my favorites were Fudgsickles and maybe cherry popsickles, and Drumsticks because they had nuts on them. We did have the homemade maker, it would be fun to have one of those.

    Then later on it was Buster Bar from Dairy Queen (also with peanuts), you can still find them. Nowadays it’s Snickers Ice Cream Bars, of course. Or heck, just throw some peanut butter in with the ice cream…

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    1. I do love the streaks of frozen peanut butter in fancy flavored ice creams.

      The s&h has been making ice cream this summer (he is chief cook right now). I am going to suggest we try this.

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  15. During much of my childhood we didn’t have a refrigerator with a freezer compartment, only an icebox with large blocks of ice, so we never had ice cream or other frozen treats except when we made a trip to the local ice cream store. Later on, during my teens, when we did get a fridge, the freezer compartment was too small to house much, and certainly ice cream or frozen treats were never in the mix. But “Is Flemming,” our local ice cream purveyor, within easy walking distance of our house, had excellent home made ice cream served in freshly made cones with a dollop of whipped cream and strawberry preserve on top. He also had an assortment of commercially made popsicles; I especially loved the red raspberry ones, and the green lime ones.

    I don’t recall where I first encountered “soft-ice” as the Danes called it, but I liked it, and I still do. These days we typically have a half gallon of chocolate ice cream in the freezer because husband loves it. Our local Mexican market sells Mexican Paletas, they are the best. They don’t last long in our freezer if husband is home.

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  16. Soft ice milk was not invented or at least not popular when I was little. I was a teen when those shops began appearing with names like Dairy Whipt, Dairy Cream or Dairy Queen.

    In 1970 we loved a restaurant in the tiny unconsolidated village of Iron River, Wisconsin. After a meal there, you could make your own dairy soft sundae, extruding the stuff from a machine on a little table, vanilla or chocolate. Making your own somehow felt like you were getting away with cheating.

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    1. When Dairy Queen began promoting their product, they had the problem that their frozen concoction didn’t meet the legal definition of ice cream, so they couldn’t call it that. Consequently, they mostly referred to it obliquely as “DQ”.

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      1. Surprisingly, unlike in Wisconsin, frozen custard never seems to have gained much of a foothold in Minnesota. I don’t know if there’s a legal definition for custard or how frozen custard differs from other frozen products but the concept is appealing.

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        2. milwaukee thats where culvers came from
          when i met wife #1 i was living in a hotel in milwaukee. culvers and one other frozen custard were a big deal
          ice cream made with eggs was their claim. i couldnt taste it

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  17. When my dad started his coffee shop, he had soft ice cream machines for the first couple of years and I could have as much as I wanted. I liked the half vanilla half chocolate twist ice cream. He gave up the ice cream to sell 3.2 beer. There was more money in that.

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  22. i was a tin roof sunday kid
    3 scoops on vanilla, lots of chocolate sauce and loads of salted peanuts

    at bridgemans they had a licorace and also a multi colored pepermint chip id go for fudgesicle pushups and at dq wild mountain blackberry malt with monster order of fries bathed in ketsup

    and richards bakery made the best raspberry jelly rolls,

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  23. I grew up in St. Louis and of course we claim “the concrete”. I know there are other places that make things called concretes but the original is from St. Louis at a place called Ted Drewes. It is still open (at least it was last summer) and the lines are not too bad because there’s about 10 windows where you can order. But it is always hopping in the summer.

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  24. I remember the home made popsicles. They were probably Tupperware, right? In the ice cube tray?
    Mom made them a lot. I didn’t like them because I could suck the flavor out pretty quick and then It was just ice. but I didn’t have any options.

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    1. The Joy of Jello has the recipe my mother used, and those were substantial popsicles that spoiled me for the cheap store bought ones you could suck the juice out of.

      And you are absolutely right about them being Tupperware.

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