The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
The rocky road from Bourbon Vanilla Bean Truffle through Baseball Nut to Chunky Monkey. I begin with Häagen-Dazs, whose names are inclined to be lists of the ice cream’s principal ingredients, though with some fanciful or food-allusive touches. For instance:
Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel (pretzels might strike you as an unlikely ice cream component, but they provide salty crunch, and they’ll come around again in a little while), Coffee Chocolate Brownie, Honey Salted Caramel Almond, Rum Tres Treches, Dulce De Leche Churro (to which I shout ¡Olé!), and Bourbon Vanilla Bean Truffle (that’s truffle the candy — as in bourbon truffles, which are, by the way, delicious — not truffle the fungus)
On to Baskin-Robbins, famous for having lots of flavors and changing their offerings regularly. Some of the names are evocative of scenes and so of the food and flavors suitable to those scenes (Tropical Treat, Beach Day); many are direct mentions of other foods, and hence allusions to their flavors and textures (Icing on the Cake, Cotton Candy, Daiquiri Ice); and then there’s the pun Baseball Nut:
(#2) [from B-R:] vanilla flavored ice cream and raspberry swirls [which are supposed to resemble the stitching on a baseball] team up with roasted cashews [the nuts] for a home run flavor
Finally, the master namers at Ben & Jerry’s, who are linguistically playful. They’re fond of puns based on some totally food-irrelevant name while incorporating some actually relevant food-component name: Cherry Garcia (honoring Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, while mentioning the crucial cherries), Karamel Sutra (alluding to the Bharat sex manual the Kama Sutra, while mentioning the crucial caramel). Sometimes the linguistic play involves allusive quotation, again with a relevant food item in it: Marshmallow Sky (a complex allusion to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, with its marmalade skies … marshmallow pies, for a marshmallow ice cream). At least once they managed a portmanpun: Impretzingly Fudge (with impretzingly punning on impressively, and with that adverb portmanteaued with the food name pretzel — see, I promised you more pretzels in your ice cream).
And then there’s Chunky Monkey, whose linguistic playfulness begins with its rhyming /ʌŋki/:
(#3) According to B&J’s, Chunky Monkey is banana ice cream with fudge chunks & walnuts: the fudge chunks make the ice cream chunky; and the banana content provides an allusion to monkeys, who are famously fond of the fruit
And that brings us all the way from Bourbon Vanilla Bean Truffle through Baseball Nut to Chunky Monkey.
xx