What is your favorite dessert? I envy you if it’s something like kale or chia seeds. For me it’s a toss-up between chocolate chip cookies and brownies. However, for my wife, nothing else comes close to ice cream.

A recent study revealed some interesting facts about ice cream and those addicted to it. They say “consuming an entire pint of ice cream was once an act cloaked in shame, conducted from the privacy of one’s couch . . . Now some, even the waistline conscious, are unabashedly eating a whole pint in one sitting. From the container.”

Apparently half of all Americans have done just this. Well, they may have used bowls and sat somewhere other than their couch, but they have devoured a savory pint in one sitting. Unsurprisingly, forty percent felt guilty afterward. However, only ten percent felt sick.

Although there is little evidence C.S. Lewis was susceptible to the temptations of ice cream, he did enjoy its cousin. In a 1920 letter to his father, he describes some recent walking trips during which he enjoyed some exquisite clotted cream. Clotted cream was especially popular before refrigeration became an everyday luxury.

As you see, we have not yet moved: indeed the weather has not encouraged us to set out, though it has not prevented us from a great deal of walking. . . . You need not have any fears about our cuisine here. Remember we are almost in Devon and the clotted cream of the country is a host in itself: also–shades of Oldie–the real ‘Deevonshire’ cider in every thatched and sanded pub.

A few miles away is a little fishing town called Watchet, which saw at least one interesting scene in its obscure history: it was here that Coleridge and the Wordsworths slept (or ‘lay’ as they would have said) on the first night of their walking tour.

In All My Road Before Me, his diary from the mid-twenties, he mentions several times enjoying another cream-based delight.

We then motored back to town to a civilian club of which W[arnie] is a member, where he had provided a royal feast of the sort we both liked: no nonsense about soup and pudding, but a sole each, cutlets with green peas, a large portion of strawberries and cream, and a tankard of the local beer which is very good.

So we gorged like Roman Emperors in a room to ourselves and had good talk.

While there are few improvements I think can be made to the Narnian tales, I do have one. The White Witch, as we know, presides over a snow-covered world where Mr. Tumnus sadly says “it is always winter, but never Christmas.”

Thus, it seems quite evident Queen Jadis could just as easily have bewitched Edmund with ice cream, as with Turkish delight. (Perhaps she didn’t wish to offer it to him because frozen dairy delicacies were her own secret delight.)

Modern Creamery Temptations

We have noted that some people feel remorseful after eating a “large” portion of ice cream. Marketers attempt to assuage such guilt by offering an increasing array of “low-cal” options. They may be better for us than the real thing, but I’ll leave that to the experts to justify. It seems to me if they taste just as good and are less bad for us, they’re worth considering.

There must be something to this line of thought. The afore-cited article compares the sales growth of regular ice cream companies (single digit) and Halo Top low calorie ice cream (555% from 2016 to 2017).

Most people have only enjoyed ice cream from domesticated cattle. The more adventurous have eaten ice cream prepared from the milk of sheep, goats, and other lactating creatures. There are also non-dairy alternatives, but in a civilized world these should rightly go by other names. PETA praises them, so they may well be worth a taste test (just don’t pretend they are the genuine article).

People have experimented with buffalo, yak, and even human ice cream (promoted in London).

Still, even the most curious people would have to draw the line at using cockroach milk, which isn’t milk proper, but is touted by some as the next “SuperFood Trend.” Speaking for myself—and with confidence, for C.S. Lewis as well—I say, “No, thanks.”

Postscript

While the following excerpt from “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” does not offer any insight into Lewis’ relationship with ice cream, it does reveal something he found distasteful in alternative approaches to writing for children.

I think there are three ways in which those who write for children may approach their work; two good ways and one that is generally a bad way.

I came to know of the bad way quite recently and from two unconscious witnesses. One was a lady who sent me the MS of a story she had written in which a fairy placed at a child’s disposal a wonderful gadget. I say ‘gadget’ because it was not a magic ring or hat or cloak or any such traditional matter.

It was a machine, a thing of taps and handles and buttons you could press. You could press one and get an ice cream, another and get a live puppy, and so forth.

I had to tell the author honestly that I didn’t much care for that sort of thing. She replied “No more do I, it bores me to distraction. But it is what the modern child wants.”

My other bit of evidence was this. In my own first story I had described at length what I thought a rather fine high tea given by a hospitable faun to the little girl who was my heroine. A man, who has children of his own, said, “Ah, I see how you got to that. If you want to please grown-up readers you give them sex, so you thought to yourself, ‘That won’t do for children, what shall I give them instead? I know! The little blighters like plenty of good eating.’”

In reality, however, I myself like eating and drinking. I put in what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still like reading now that I am in my fifties.

The lady in my first example, and the married man in my second, both conceived writing for children as a special department of ‘giving the public what it wants.’

Children are, of course, a special public and you find out what they want and give them that, however little you like it yourself.