Before I could read, Mom
bought a set of encyclopedias from a traveling salesman. By the time I needed to use them for school,
they were somewhat outdated. But this is
not a story about encyclopedias or traveling salesmen.
Along with that set of
encyclopedias came two sets of story collections. One of my sisters has the two volume set, and
I have the eight volume set missing volume 3.
The books are red, thus my sisters and I called them “The Red Books.” (The correct title for the series is Book Trails. Many nights out bedtime stories were from
those books. We each had our
favorites. One of mine was about ice
cream. The story was written in folktale
form by Frances R. Sterrett, a fiction writer in the early 1900’s.
In a nutshell we learn
that ice cream was invented in the Kingdom of Perhaps (don't you love that name?) where from October 1 to
May 1 the king would only drink very, very hot beverages, and from May 1 to
October 1 he would only drink very, very cold beverages. His favorite summer beverage was cream made
as cold as possible and served with different flavored syrups each day of the
week. The head cook had seven daughters
and changed their names to the names of the syrups – the eldest being named
Strawberry for that was the type of syrup the king used on Sunday.
Strawberry and the ice boy,
Adoniram, were able to make the cream colder than it had ever been in the
past. However the king demanded that it
be made colder and then colder. So on Tuesday,
Vanilla accidentally dumped her syrup into the cream while it was being made
colder. Because they were almost out of
time they rolled the tin can about in the chunks of ice to make it colder. The result was a vanilla tasting cream so thick
it had to be eaten with a spoon.
The King was so pleased
that Strawberry received her 10 promised golden rings which she shared with her
six sisters and Vanilla received five golden rings because she came up with the
idea of putting the syrup directly into the cream. And of course, it’s implied that they live “Happily
Ever After” because everyone loves ice cream, and they invented it.
I could find no reference
to this story on the internet, but I did come up with a site for an ice cream
place near San Francisco named “The King’s Cream.” The books (not mine) are for sale. Here's a link to ebay.
6 comments:
Well, I certainly want to visit The Kingdom of Perhaps! What a splendid tale to share with all of us who are screaming for more ice cream And more stories!
Sue, I think in the Kingdom of Perhaps, we have the opportunity to try things out we are not sure will work, but Perhaps ...
Well, I certainly want to visit The Kingdom of Perhaps! What a splendid tale to share with all of us who are screaming for more ice cream And more stories!
Fun! :-D
So that's (perhaps) how we came to have ice cream ;-)
Perhaps, Mary. That's the fun of the Kingdom of Perhaps!
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