We All Scream For Scary Larry

After yesterday's comments I'm off to Boise to track down Scary Larry, the ice cream man. Many thanks to Ms.M for enlightening me as to his existence.
I can't beat that for a creepy name; the best we can do around here is "Mister Whippy" which - sadly - is not an S&M ice cream franchise but merely one of those who peddle that sloppy gunk that looks like wet poo (and hence never comes in chocolate flavour).

About as far from real ice cream as … er … sloppy poo, the stuff is an aerated froth of high fructose corn syrup, water, powdered whey, mono and di-glycerides, calcium sulphate, cellulose, guar gum, polysorbate emulsifiers, a gelling agent made from seaweed (of which I approve), magnesium hydroxide (usually used as a laxative or a deoderant, it is used here to bleach the product), plus a whole lot of stuff from a chemistry set; all of which is excreted (there can be no other word once you've seen it) from a tube. Purportedly a dairy product, very little of it has ever been near a cow's udder and indeed most of it is air or stuff that you would never naturally choose to put in your mouth.

I don't know about the Colonies, but over here the stuff only comes in "white" (neither a flavour nor a colour, merely a chemical bleaching to stop it looking too much like poo) and if you want chocolate, they stick a Cadbury's Flake in it and call it (for reasons beyond the ken of mankind) a "99".

In case Flakes are only sold over here and not across the pond, a "Flake" is history's most pornographic chocolate product.
In the late 60s and 70s they used to advertise them on TV using scantily-clad (and backlit) beautiful young girls - usually in fields for some reason - who would peel back the plastic foreskin and - accompanied by a jingle litigiously akin to the "Aaaaah, aaaaah, aaaaah …" bit from The Beatles "A Day In The Life" - would then proceed to fellate the thing in close-up.
Yum!
Rampant prudery put an end to the adverts, which was a great shame as they were the only easily accessible form of soft porn available to my spotty, adolescent self. They left me with a permanent hankering for as certain shape of lip … Sigh.

When I was a kid, we had Dairyland and Paravani ice cream vans vying for our attention. Mister Softee then invaded and pushed the traditional ice cream sellers out. Foolishly we craved the sloppy gunk that was so addictively sweet it burned our mouths.

As for real ice cream, I do seem to remember a tiny place down on Blyburgate when I was very little. It had a pair of those lovely plaster figurines in the window; half-sized children with rosy cheeks and inappropriate lederhosen who looked for all the world like props from some Hitler Youth propaganda movie.

As far as I can remember, we walked in to someone's tiny living room and sat down and were served real ice cream in a bowl, made in the kitchen by an Italian immigrant family. From cream! I remember strawberry flavour and biscuitty wafers (not the crap you get in ice cream vans) and not much else.
Of course the place is long gone now but perhaps Mum can help me on this one? What was it called? It's on the tip of my tongue, but - like the flavour of the ice cream they made there - I can never quite recall it.

And now I've got Frank Zappa's "Flakes" stuck in my head. Hey ho; at least it's a considerable improvement on yesterday's song …