Olivia Potts

How to make proper vanilla ice cream

Illustration: Natasha Lawson 
issue 08 July 2023

I could map out my life geographically and temporally in scoops of ice cream. From the oyster delights handed over in tracing-paper napkins from Minchella’s hatch in South Shields on the beachfront, to the little silver coupe bowls of ice cream we ordered every night on family holiday in France (always the same, one ball of pistachio, one of blackcurrant). The perfect brown-bread ice cream I had at Andrew Edmunds in Soho when I first moved to London. An elder-flower ice cream with a damson swirl that we ordered on honeymoon in the Cotswolds; a strikingly memorable blue-cheese ice cream which was the first thing I ate upon arriving in Bilbao. A red-bean ice bar we were handed as we stepped out of a sweltering day in Georgetown into a cool and calm hotel. A single scoop of a rich, tangy, sticky cream-cheese ice cream that saved an otherwise lacklustre meal. The taste I had of my husband’s ‘Kentucky chocolate’ ice cream in Rome, a mixture of dark chocolate and tobacco, which he was lukewarm on, and I thought was perhaps the best ice cream of my life.

Gelato and sorbets have their places, but a proper custard-based ice cream is a thing of aesthetic and textural beauty

And then there are those I made. There was the summer I squirrelled away every fig leaf I could lay my hands on, and we ate fig-leaf ice cream until Christmas. An unusually autumnal ice cream I made of barely sweetened crème fraîche with dark caramel-golden apple butter swirled through it. A stout ice cream that I can still taste when I think about it. I’ve made ice creams infused with nutmeg, with hot cross buns, with yeast (that one’s an acquired taste). My freezer drawer sometimes resembles a graveyard of the less successful ice creams that I can’t quite bring myself to throw away.

Olivia Potts
Written by
Olivia Potts
Olivia Potts is a former criminal barrister who retrained as a pastry chef. She co-hosts The Spectator’s Table Talk podcast and writes Spectator Life's The Vintage Chef column. A chef and food writer, she was winner of the Fortnum and Mason's debut food book award in 2020 for her memoir A Half Baked Idea.

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