Butterscotch Ice Cream In Bangalore
Yesterday, I had a butterscotch ice cream in India.
Or at least, that was what it said on the label.
I took a spoonful and immediately knew something was wrong.
Chocolate chips.
Chocolate chips! In butterscotch ice cream.
Hell, no.
Why would someone mess with a recipe that has been working perfectly well for decades? Why do we always assume that changing something means improving it? That change must somehow equal progress?
Change is not always progress.
Certainly not when somebody has put chocolate chips in my butterscotch ice cream.
Before anyone starts pointing out that perhaps I bought the wrong brand — yes, I know. It wasn’t the brand I grew up eating, and I am entirely prepared to conduct further research in the interests of journalistic accuracy. There may well be another tub waiting for me in another freezer somewhere in Bombay.
But that first spoonful made me realise something.
After all these years away, my tongue still knew exactly what it was looking for.
Butterscotch ice cream, the Indian kind, is difficult to explain to somebody who hasn’t grown up eating it. It is perhaps a distant cousin of dulce de leche, although I would argue that it is better. Obviously.
There is the creamy ice-cream base, caramel and sugar, crunchy pieces of praline, and nuts — often cashews — scattered through it. The joy is in the combination of textures. Cold and smooth, then suddenly crunchy. A piece of caramel sticking briefly to a tooth. A cashew appearing just when you think you’ve finished all the good bits.
For me, though, butterscotch has never been merely an ice-cream flavour.
It tastes of Bangalore.
Every summer vacation when I was growing up, I would visit my grandmother there. Food was a serious business in her house. There was always something being cooked, prepared, stored, offered or planned. Consequently, the freezer was permanently full.
So making ice cream began with logistics.
We had to make space.
Containers would be shifted around and leftovers reassessed until enough room had been created for the ice cream. Then came the actual making of it: the vanilla base, the caramel, the nuts, all that would eventually become the butterscotch I loved.
The most difficult part, as far as I was concerned, was waiting.
I was an impatient child. Once I knew there was homemade ice cream setting in the freezer, I needed regular updates.
Was it ready?
What about now?
Surely now?
I would keep opening the freezer to inspect it, as though my supervision might somehow speed up the freezing process.
Eventually, my grandmother worked out a solution.
Sometimes she simply made the ice cream without telling me.
By the time I discovered its existence, the waiting had already been done.
Perhaps that is one reason the flavour stayed with me. It is wrapped up in those long summer holidays, in my grandmother’s kitchen, in an overstuffed freezer and in the particular impatience of childhood, when waiting a few hours for ice cream was unreasonable.
Years later, after I had moved to the UK, butterscotch meant more.
Homesickness.
There are foods you miss when you live away from the country where you grew up, and then there are foods you become strangely, almost irrationally specific about.
On one trip back to India after a particularly homesick period, I wanted butterscotch ice cream.
Instead, I was offered Cassata.
Now, Cassata is another ice cream deeply associated with India for me: brightly coloured layers of different flavours, often topped with flakes of nuts. It is dramatic and nostalgic and perfectly lovely in its own right.
But it is not butterscotch.
Someone suggested that they were basically the same thing.
I cannot adequately convey the betrayal.
They are absolutely not the same thing.
Cassata is a cheerful jumble of flavours. Butterscotch has purpose. It knows exactly what it is doing.
At another time, I would probably have eaten the Cassata quite happily. But homesickness does strange things to you. When you have travelled thousands of miles wanting the taste you remember, something approximately similar will not do.
You don’t want an ice cream.
You want that ice cream.
Perhaps this is what living away from home does to taste. It makes memory unusually precise.
My search for Indian butterscotch ice cream in the UK has, so far, been largely unsuccessful. The closest readily available flavour I can think of is Häagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche, and even that only really captures part of it. The caramel is there, but where are the nuts? Where are the crunchy pieces? Where are all the glorious interruptions that make butterscotch butterscotch?
Eventually, like many immigrants faced with a food that refuses to travel properly, I improvised.
I buy the dulce de leche ice cream.
Then I caramelise nuts myself and scatter them over it.
And there you have it: diasporic butterscotch ice cream.
Not quite the thing I grew up eating, but close enough to quieten the taste buds for a while. Something borrowed, something adapted, something made to resemble home.
Which is perhaps why yesterday’s chocolate chips annoyed me quite so much.
There is an irony in travelling back to India in search of the flavour you remember, only to discover that the flavour itself has moved on.
Maybe that is inevitable. Recipes change. Companies change. Tastes change. Places change. We change.
But I am not convinced that everything needs improving simply because time has passed.
Sometimes something already works.
Sometimes the original recipe is enough.
And sometimes, after years spent searching for a taste from childhood, you don’t want innovation.
You just want somebody to leave the bloody butterscotch alone.
Written by Snehal Amembal
