I mentioned ice cream last week in conjunction with milk shakes but we sold ice cream in lots of forms. We had a Taylor Twin Serve similar to this one that was recently for sale. It had two tanks at the top for vanilla and chocolate. There are three levers on the front. If you raised the lever in the middle it would dispense both flavors at once and get a twin flavored cone like the one on the left.

This machine was my dad’s baby. He sanitized the machine in the morning before we opened and he sanitized it after we closed for the day. He also made up the ice cream. It would come without any flavor and he would add vanilla or chocolate to make up the desired flavor. Occasionally he would make up some sherbet and save it in a large container in the freezer that would be scoped out.

We had to have a separate manufacturing license for the ice cream machine. An inspector would come every so often and take a sample to count the amount of bacteria. You would have to stop selling ice cream if the count was too large. One winter we failed because there had been so little amount of ice cream sold. Lucky, the inspector came back to check again and we passed.

The machine was very frustrating. Some times you would flip up the lever and it would come out as liquid and you would have to wait for it to harden. My brother got so frustrated once that he threw a bunch of cones on the floor and stomped on them. He got a time out for that. I also got upset over the ice cream machine and got a time out. At least in my case no cones were destroyed.

We made ice cream sandwiches. The cookie part came pre-made. You put some ice cream on a cookie and put another cookie on top and slid it into a paper sleeve. They needed at least a few hours for the ice cream to be soaked into the cookie to get the best taste.

My dad had a novel idea. People could make their own sundae. We would serve the dish with the ice cream and there was an area with various flavored syrups. If you wanted both strawberry and chocolate with peanuts; no problem. I remember that we were getting 35 cents for a self serve sundae. It only lasted about six months. People made a terrible mess and we had to clean up the area many, many times per day.

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