Photo by Susie Bauer
I just got home from a brief visit to Milwaukee, where I had the pleasure of tasting frozen custard for the first time, at a charming establishment called Leon’s.
Locals boast that Leon’s makes the world’s best frozen custard, and they proudly recall that Bill Clinton insisted on stopping there whenever the campaign trail brought him through town.
(And all this time I thought cheese and beer were Wisconsin’s big draws…)
Indeed, Milwaukee also seems to be the unofficial “custard capital of the world”.
But from what I can tell, this frozen delight was first concocted on Coney Island in 1919 or thereabouts (though there’s evidence of earlier iterations).
Leon’s has been around for more than 50 years, family owned and operated, its proprietors serving as “consultants to the frozen custard industry since 1942.”
Photo by Susie Bauer
In addition to the standard midwest drive-in fast food fare, Leon’s serves malts, shakes and three frozen custard flavors daily – vanilla, chocolate and butter pecan – and one special feature flavor that changes every day. I ordered a scoop each of vanilla and chocolate, and fell in love at first bite.
(Nice price too, just over $6 for 4 sizeable servings.)
Before long I got to wondering how frozen custard is different from ice cream. Come to find out, its culinary specifications, at least in this country, are stipulated by federal law:
Frozen custard shall contain 1.4 percent egg yolk solids by weight of the finished food: Provided, however, that when bulky flavors are added the egg yolk solids content of frozen custard may be reduced in proportion to the amount by weight of the bulky flavors added, but in no case is the content of egg yolk solids in the finished food less than 1.12 percent.
Can’t you just picture those nerdy federal foodies haggling over egg yolk solid percentage points? (For some reason, in my imagination, they’re wearing hair nets…)
Read on through their fine print (see paragraph f, section 1, “nomenclature”) and one learns that custard is a.k.a. “french ice cream”.
French?!? Interesting… I’ve also tasted something similar in Sienna, Italy.
Regardless of where frozen custard came from, Milwaukeans insist that theirs is some of the world’s finest. I look forward to conducting many taste tests, the world over, to weigh their claims.
This from Ethan’s Uncle Jim, a resident of Milwaukee:
“A recent article gave (gulp) the Chicago Worlds Fair credit for the invention of frozen custard. However, I don’t know if they were referring to the Columbian Exposition in 1893 or the fair in 1933, but I think it was the former. The story was that it was brought back to Milwaukee where it became an institution. I don’t buy the Coney Island connection; 1) NY claims everything and 2) if it was invented there, it would have stayed there. There are now frozen custard places on the East Coat – Obama just took the kids to one in VA operated by a transplanted Wisconsinite, daughter of a former congressman – but, in general, custard refers to soft-serve ice cream (or what we would call ice milk due to the lowered fat content) on the EC.”
Turns out Clinton wasn’t the only Democratic President with affection for frozen custard:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/20/politics/main5100793.shtml