
Ice cream is a blank slate. Like its old pal cake, ice cream is fine plain but can be adapted endlessly with every flavor and texture you can think of -- and some you can't. Liberated from Western loyalties regarding what "goes with" what, Japan is the weird-ice-cream capital of the world. Japanese ice-cream companies produce: Squid-ink ice cream, charcoal ice cream, cuttlefish ice cream ... and chicken wing, crab, cactus, eel, octopus, shrimp and wasabi ice creams. Not wanting to be outweirded, artisanal ice creameries in the United States now offer jalapeño-pepper and salted-pretzel ice creams. Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco offers ice creams flavored with curry, foie gras, fungus and prosciutto. But is "weird" really the word? Do these ice-cream flavors exist because anyone actually wants to eat them -- or for more ethereal, aesthetical, and/or theoretical reasons? Given ice cream's blank-slate nature, merging its cold smooth sweetness with, say, the ashy bitterness of charcoal, the savory richness of liver or the salty tang of ham is conceivably a form of art. (Sorce Anonymous)
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