Ice Cream Sundaes

Sundaes are ice cream topped with sauce, a design for which there are 1000 variations. Some of the most common are a tin roof (topped with chocolate sauce and Spanish peanuts), a hot fudge sundae, a turtle sundae (topped with hot fudge, caramel sauce, and toasted pecans), and a parfait, which might include liqueur and/or fruit in a layered arrangement. There are good sundaes nearly everywhere, but the nation’s sundae mother lode is Buffalo, New York, where candy-store soda fountains specialize in homemade sauces and syrups, superb toasted nuts, and fresh whipped cream piped on from a pastry bag. At a Buffalo candy shop called Alethea’s, the Mount Olympus frappe consists of buttercrunch ice cream and sliced bananas topped with truffled hot fudge and freshly-made marshmallow sauce. If hot fudge is too fudgy, you can ask for Aletha’s thinner and more sharply flavored chocolate sauce, bittersweet chocolate or, for a twist, chocolate mint. Some historians believe that the sundae was invented as a way to serve ice cream on Sunday (when, in puritanical Midwestern venues, serving anything with carbonated water – such as a soda – was verboten because it smacked of cocktails). There are at least a dozen stories of the exact place and time when sundaes first were served.