Hometown ice cream

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

It is a tedious, muscle-building, hand-numbing process, beating and cracking, icing and salting for hours on end.

That, in brief, is how ice-cream is made the old-fashioned way, from the tradition laid down by the street vendor who went around town pushing a cart and clanging his bell, that Pinoy summer icon, the sound of the bell a childhood symbol of good tidings coming to the neighborhood. We call it “dirty ice-cream”, ice-cream hawked by Mamang Sorbetero. Back in our younger days, almost every town had one sorbetero or two, and children knew them by name. In our town, it was Tiyo Jesus, who wore a hat and shades when he peddled his frozen delight.

Yesterday, in celebration of Mother’s Day, my siblings and I had ice-cream done like this, our way of remembering the woman with whom one of our best memories involved this kind of ice-cream.

Of course, I had another ulterior motive: I wanted to know if the craft of ice-cream making we had when we were small was still thriving, or even if it was still alive. I don’t see Mamang Sorbetero traipsing down the neighborhood streets anymore, not here in the city, definitely. The last time I heard the ice-ream bell clanging down the street, it came from a tricycle selling mass-manufactured popsicles.

Well, Mamang Sorbetero is alive and well in my old hometown, thank you, but he is now, in fact, a high-school teener: 18-year Romy Mojillo who dabbles in ice-cream making during the weekends. He attends high school, and is now on his second year.

Mojillo does not have an ice-cream cart. He has what, literally, can be called an ice-box, a squarish insulated thing that has an inner vacuum which he fills with salt and ice. He’s painted this is the bright yellows and reds reminiscent of the old ice-cream kariton, complete with thoroughly Pinoy writings also found in jeepneys. Here are written the words, “Spirit of 2010,” below the words “Romy’s Delicious Ice-cream.”

Romy said this was the only ice-cream box left from his ice-cream making business; he sold the others when he decided to go back to school. He said he learned the craft from his brother and he started making ice-cream when he was 15.

These days, Romy says, he just serves orders for private parties and celebrations.

His tools are a giant batidor, or beater, and a long-handled spatula, both done with stainless steel. With these, he proceeds to make ice-cream.

The process begins the day before, when he prepares the ice-cream base that involves the uraro. He leaves this overnight and in the morning starts the process of beating and beating and more beating until this base rises, after which he adds the milk, then beats it again and again, while regularly stuffing the vacuum with salted ice.

It’s really the same thing he repeats as he puts in the rest of the ingredients: the skimmed powdered milk, the sugar, and finally, the strips of young coconut; this was buko ice-cream he was making. Oh, he also put coconut milk at the start.

Minus the time he started putting the milk and ice and salt, it took Romy five hours to single-handedly produce the ice-cream, all three-and-half gallons of it. This sounds so simple, of course, but it is not. Like cake-making, I found out, ice-cream production is not just tedious but precise as well.*

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