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Ice Cream’s Jewish Innovators

Jews have pioneered the premium ice cream craze for 40 years, from Häagen-Dazs to Ben & Jerry’s and beyond

by
Joan Nathan
August 02, 2012

A few weeks ago, roaming the endless aisles of the mammoth Fancy Food show in Washington, D.C., I stopped at the booth for Chozen, a premium ice cream with flavors inspired by the Jewish holidays: matzo crunch, apples and honey, chocolate gelt.

“Who would have the nerve or the chutzpah to put matzo in ice cream?” Chozen co-founder and CEO Meredith Fisher told me. “Jews like to kvetch, but who can kvetch about ice cream?”

It got me thinking about the connection between Jews and ice cream: I’ve reported on Jews in the ice cream business several times during my career as a food writer, without really connecting all the dots. But there are dots to connect. Because while Chozen—founded in 2009 by Meredith Fisher with her mother, Ronne—may be the most obviously Jewish ice cream on the market, it’s hardly the first brand started by Jews. In fact, Jews helped launch the entire craze over premium ice cream four decades ago and have played a key role in its success ever since.

“They are used to catering to a demanding clientele who expect quality, rather than being surprised by it,” explained Ellen Brown, author of Scoop and a food writer for the Providence Journal.

“Jews have always been entrepreneurs and think out of the box,” said Mitch Berliner, a food distributor who has been in the ice cream business for 35 years. “Even about ice cream.”

The notion that ice cream was a luxury product dates back more than a century, to the time when Jewish immigrants were flooding into America and ice cream was something that most people churned themselves at home. “Ice cream is generally regarded by families of limited means as a luxury only to be indulged in on special occasions, when company is expected or for birthdays and high holidays,” a writer in the American Jewess explained in 1896. “The poor children, who never get half enough of this frozen delight, are told that it is very unhealthy, and to partake too freely thereof is fraught with the most disastrous consequences to their little stomachs. This widely diffused belief, and the expensiveness of cream when ordered from a confectioner’s, have relegated the most palatable of dainties to the realm of rarely-to-be-attained desires.”

Ice cream became a much cheaper consumer product decades later, and today giants like Nestlé and Unilever control most of the mass-produced ice cream on supermarket shelves. But in the 1970s, a Jewish immigrant from Poland changed the business forever and made ice cream a luxury product once again.

Reuben Mattus started in the ice cream business in the 1920s as a child of 10 just after he and his widowed mother, Leah, stepped off the boat in America. His uncle was in the Italian lemon-ice business in Brooklyn, and Reuben joined him, helping his mother squeeze lemons for the ices they sold in Brooklyn and then the South Bronx.

Until 1927, when the first refrigerator was manufactured, ice cream was seasonal. “In those days, we bought the ice from the Great Lakes in the winter and buried it with sawdust in pits in the ground until summer,” Mattus told me when I was researching my book Jewish Cooking in America, before he died in 1994. By the late ’20s, the family began making ice pops, and by 1929 chocolate-covered ice-cream bars and sandwiches.

“People wouldn’t buy our ice cream,” Mattus remembered. “I said to myself, ‘Why can’t we make good ice cream so people will buy it?’ Then I got a hold of some books and studied how to make ice cream. The first thing I told my mother was to fire our ice-cream maker.”

Mattus’ new kind of ice cream was so heavy that he had to change his equipment. “The most important thing is to make it taste good,” Mattus said. But the second most important thing was to market it properly. “I prided myself on being a marketing man,” he told me. “If you’re the same like everybody else, you’re lost. The number one thing was to get a foreign sounding name.”

How did a Polish immigrant come up with a name like Häagen-Dazs? He was inspired by Jewish history: “The only country which saved the Jews during World War II was Denmark, so I put together a totally fictitious Danish name and had it registered,” Mattus told me. “Häagen-Dazs doesn’t mean anything. [But] it would attract attention, especially with the umlaut.”

Mattus also made sure to get his product certified kosher: “If I made good ice cream, I wanted my people to get it, so I made it kosher,” he said. Häagen-Dazs—which was later sold to Pillsbury in the 1980s—was first sold in Manhattan’s gourmet shops in pint containers, as a luxury product. “Schrafft’s cost 52 cents a pint. Ours was 75 cents a pint,” he told me. “I didn’t believe in selling it for 59 cents. I made a special ice cream for people who wanted a special taste. That was my attempt and it worked. It sold by word of mouth.”

By 1973, Häagen-Dazs was being distributed nationally. And that same year, another man, married about that time to a Jew who became his business partner, was making ice cream history near Boston: Steve Herrell opened Steve’s in 1973 in a converted dry-cleaning joint in Somerville, Mass. The shop, with its mismatched chairs and tables in wild colors, looked like many other comfortable college hangouts, but it wasn’t.

When Steve’s opened, most ice cream being sold was vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry; even Häagen-Dazs’ most exotic flavors at the time were rum raisin and boysenberry, according to Berliner, Häagen-Dazs’ first distributor outside New York. Herrell decided the time was right to mix things up a bit.

Herrell lived in a co-op at the time, sharing a house in Cambridge with six roommates. “One of my housemates told me that she had been to a place in Miami where they would mix things on a slab, and she said why don’t I try that. We could then say that we had thousands of flavors,” Herrell told me several years ago when I was researching an article for Bon Appetit. “But since that time, I have been unable to find out what this place was in Miami. Then, again, mixing things into food is not new, so generally what my response is that I introduced mixing in to the commercial ice cream trade.”

As the flavors multiplied, Herrell wrote them in different colors on little slats of wood in the shop: malted vanilla, cookie dough, peanut butter swirl, triple chocolate pudding, with mix-ins like Heath Bars and M&M’s. Who’d ever tasted, or for that matter even imagined, such flavors almost 40 years ago? Long lines formed every night for Steve’s ice cream.

By making “mix-ins” big business, Herrell cemented his place in ice cream history. Burned out from 90-hour work weeks, he sold his ice cream shop in 1977. (The store became a chain, was sold again, and finally closed; last year, David Stein, one of Herrell’s former employees from his original shop, revived the brand, producing pints for sale in stores.)

But Herrell didn’t stay out of the business for long: He opened Herrell’s ice cream parlor in Northampton, Mass., in 1980—that’s where I caught up with him, chatting in one of his store’s wooden booths while a scooper behind the counter mixed Heath Bar pieces into malted vanilla ice cream for me.

I asked Herrell how he felt now that his idea for “mix-ins” had spread throughout the country, with little financial benefit to him. “Good,” he told me. “I feel it is very rewarding that people love so much what I have done. I can barely handle this small business with bookkeeping, personnel, and a landlord. Fortunately, it is for me balanced off by seeing and talking to happy customers, seeing people enjoying their sundaes and shakes.”

Herrell also influenced another important Jewish ice cream company: One day in the mid-’70s, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield came to watch Herrell chop up Heath Bars and Oreos and mix them into ice cream. “Steve pioneered the rejuvenation of homemade ice cream and mix-ins,” said Greenfield.

Inspired by what they saw, Cohen and Greenfield opened their first Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor in 1978 in Burlington, Vt., in a converted gas station. “At first we incorporated mix-ins; then we realized that we weren’t very good at it,” said Greenfield. “We muddled through for a while, and then we made flavored mix-ins like Oreo mint and vanilla Heath Bar crunch.”

Brown, the food writer, sees Herrell and Cohen and Greenfield as part of a larger trend: “A lot of ice cream businesses were started by baby boomers,” she said, “back when the baby boomers were young hippies and a lot of their parents helped them get the businesses going.”

Chozen, the latest in the line of Jewish ice cream companies, is also a family affair, only this time the mom stayed involved. “My two daughters were sitting and eating frozen rugelach one night, and one of them said, ‘Wouldn’t that taste good in ice cream?’ ” said Ronne Fisher, co-founder and chief “flavor officer” of Chozen. After a weeklong course at ice cream university to learn the basics, she bought a machine and started making ice cream with rugelach, matzo, halva, babka—all kosher and dairy. “These delicious flavors are typically Jewish and Eastern European,” she said, noting that flavors on the horizon include blueberry blintz and matzo kugel.

The Fishers don’t see themselves as a mass-market producer, though. “I think we are a niche business,” Ronne Fisher continued. “We have no aspiration to be Häagen-Dazs. It’s just the two of us. We love it. We are small. Our hope is to bring smiles to people’s faces.”

Mango Ice Cream Cake

Mango Ice Cream Cake, with ideas from Steve Herrell

The intense flavor of dried mango slices and preserved ginger only enhances the flavor. Whichever ice cream you try, work as quickly as possible when making this cake. Once the ice cream melts, it doesn’t refreeze properly.

3 pints mango ice cream
3 pints vanilla ice cream
1 cup crystallized ginger
1 cup dried mango slices
1 cup blueberry or mango preserves
1 cup fresh blueberries, raspberries, or diced fresh mango

1. Take the mango ice cream out of the freezer to soften slightly. Put a 9-inch spring form cake pan in the freezer to chill.

2. Chop the crystallized ginger and dried mango into small pieces while the mango ice cream softens. When the ice cream is ready to be scooped, take the cake pan out of the freezer. Working quickly, scoop all the mango ice cream into the cake pan and flatten it with your hands using a small spatula. Be careful not to leave any gaps on the side. Sprinkle the dried ginger and mango over the ice cream and press it in. Make sure that each piece is pressed in or you will have trouble with the next layer of ice cream. Return the cake pan to the freezer to harden, for least 20 minutes.

3. When the mango ice cream is stiff again, take out the vanilla ice cream and let it soften slightly. Take the cake pan out of the freezer, scoop the vanilla ice cream into it, and smooth the top. This will be the bottom layer (the cake is inverted) so the top doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth. Return the cake to the freezer for a couple of hours to harden before serving.

4. Fill a bowl wide enough to fit the cake pan with very hot water. Take the cake out of the freezer and carefully submerge the sides of the pan in the hot water. Hold it there for about 15 seconds, then dry the pan off, run a knife around the inside, and invert the cake onto a serving plate. If you are not serving the cake right away, return it to the freezer.

5. When you are ready to serve the cake, spoon the fruit preserves over the top, starting in the center and moving in concentric circles out to the edge. Let the puree or preserves spill over and down the sides of the cake. Scatter the berries or mango over the top of the cake.

Yield: 10–12 slices

The Recipe


Mango Ice Cream Cake

Mango Ice Cream Cake

Joan Nathan is Tablet Magazine’s food columnist and the author of 10 cookbooks including King Solomon’s Table: a Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World.