More Than a Month of Sundaes is a playful look at a food icon so familiar in the American mind that we take it for granted. Sundaes have a history, however, and this is an an amusing history, a record of the inventive use of one of the most popular desserts anywhere - ice cream.
Sundaes begin with ice cream and Turback begins with the first American gourmet, Thomas Jefferson, who brought ice cream to the United States from France, and his female gourmet counterpart, Dolly Madison, who Turback calls the First Lady of Sundaes. With a wink and a chuckle, Turback traces the all-important development of the hand-cranked ice cream maker and that tool without which there is no sundae - the ice cream scoop, an invention of the African-American Alfred Cralle, a clerk in Markell Brothers' Drug Store in Philadelphia.
With tools and basic ingredient in place, Turback leaves Philadelphia to take us on a delightful jaunt that might be called the road tour of sundaes, a road with the twists and turns of time, food faddism, and of course, the playful spirit that wants to turn a dish of ice cream into something spectacular.
His historical facts are accurate, his prose is witty and light, but best of all, Turback enjoys story-telling. Turback entertains us whether telling us of the origin of sundaes in Ithaca, doing a shuffle off to Buffalo, experiencing sundae heaven in Chicago, going down to the heart of Dixie or north across the border into Toronto.
More Than a Month of Sundaes offers an extensive list of where to find the best sundaes in America as well as great recipes for sundae components and hundreds of ideas for combing them in original sundaes.
About the author: A prize winning restaurateur from upstate New York, Turback is now the author of books on popular dining, most notably A Month of Sundaes, which launched him as TV's sundae king and hot chocolate.
The author has kindly shared these recipes:
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