“Ice Cream” or “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream” is a popular song, first published in 1927 with words and music by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll and Robert A. King.
After an initial success as a late 1920s novelty song, the tune became a traditional jazz standard while the refrain “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream” has remained a part of popular culture even without the rest of the song. On January 1, 2023, the song went into the public domain.
Making homemade ice cream has been a summertime ritual since I was a youngster. Usually it was plain vanilla (which was fine with me) but sometimes handpicked blackberries or sweet Ruston peaches from North Louisiana were added. Yes, back then we used a hand-cranked ice cream maker, which entailed surrounding the container in the bucket with crushed ice and plenty of ice cream salt, a coarsely ground salt that results in more rapid cooling at lower temperatures than what’s possible with ice alone. (I still have a couple of boxes in my pantry for old time’s sake.)
Now I have a countertop electric ice cream maker that makes it so much easier to use.
