There’s a good living in cardamom-ginger ice cream
Gabrielle Carbone remembers when she thought up sweet basil and goat cheese ice cream. It was while she was shopping at a farmer’s market. “I came up with that in about seven seconds,” she says, as she rattles off several other variations.
At one time or another, we’ve all wondered what it would be like to work at an ice cream shop. Would we ever get tired of it? Carbone hasn’t yet, nor has she exhausted the possibilities of flavor combinations, even at 425 and counting.
Her inventiveness – and the uncanny rightness of those combinations – has won national recognition for The Bent Spoon, the ice cream shop she opened in 2004 with Matthew Errico in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s truly artisenal fare, and Carbone speaks of terroir the way oenophiles speak of wine.
“If you can get your hands on a wild berry, do so,” she says. “There is such a difference in flavor.” Supermarket produce, she explains, loses most of its flavor in transit. “Knowing where your food comes from and what’s in it is such an important connection, one I think many people are missing today.”
Every once in a while, her suppliers come into the store. “There they are standing in line with everyone else, and I describe a flavor to a customer. ‘This is made with Cherry Grove rosemary, and hey, turn around, there’s the farmer who grew it.’ It can’t be better than that.”
Carbone and Errico grew up in New Jersey and really do think of it as the Garden State, despite what others might think. “When I was growing up, we got tomatoes from our own garden,” she says. “Fresh local food was one of those things that you just had, and then you got to college and realized there was a need for it.”
She spends much of the week collecting fresh berries, honey, eggs, and cream from local providers, using only what’s in season. Except when midwinter demand forces her to look elsewhere. Currently she supplies fifteen local restaurants in addition to maintaining her own shop.
All this work leaves her little time for inventing new favors – yet somehow they keep coming. A short list includes tomato, avocado, lavender chocolate, split pea, clove, strawberry marscapone, concord grape sorbet, dark chocolate habenero, mint julep, coconut lime, fresh asparagus, tiramisu, creme freche, pumpkin, ricotta, nectarine sorbet, pear rose geranium sorbet, earl grey, bourbon-vanilla swirled with sea salt, and oyster.
Apparently she’s onto something. Max and Mina’s in Queens, New York, offers pilsner beer, lox, grass, and chive blossom ice cream. In Bar Harbor, Maine, you can get butter-flavored ice cream with chunks of real lobster. Capogiro Gelato in Philadelphia makes purple yam, paprika, and sea salt gelato.
How did Carbone get started in this passion? “It’s one of those lifelong things: I got my first ice cream maker when I was fourteen – you either put it in a closet or use it, and I was one of the ones who used it.” After finishing college (with a degree in special education and psychology), she spent a year in Japan teaching English. Her old love sang to her. “You can’t always tell if you want to turn the things you love into a job necessarily, but it was becoming more and more clear that I should really do something with food.”
The typical daydream about running an ice cream shop usually explodes when we realize how much weight we’d gain. Carbone, however, remains amazingly thin. “I eat ice cream every single day,” she admits. “But I have a very fast metabolism.” Or she’s working it off.
