‘Sundaes Are for Sundays’

Dishing up how a childhood memory got re-scooped—and served back with unexpected sweetness.

I was trolling for this week’s essay and Alex, my eldest, suggested, “why not do one on sundae’s are for Sundays?”

What?” I asked incredulously. We were on the phone so he couldn’t see the puzzled look on my face.

“Sundaes are for Sundays!” he repeated, confident I would recall our family fun.

“What exactly do you remember about that?”

“You know, on Sundays we would have ice cream sundaes for dinner, and that led to us making homemade ice cream!”

“Oh, of course!” Shaking my head in disbelief. “What a great idea.”

“Yeah!” he said.

So now here’s what really happened.

Our first house was 1700 square feet – but it had the most incredible backyard: an inground pool, a 60x20 pavilion, barbeque area, outdoor kitchen, and full bath. Come summer, we entertained virtually every Sunday. Beginning late morning, there was no telling who or how many might show. We told people to bring meat for the grill and drinks. My kids were fish -- never leaving the pool unless it was to scarf down food. Literally, rinse and repeat.

Tim traveled on many of those Sundays. A car service picked him up usually around four to take him to the airport – signaling to guests to scatter. Everyone always helped pack up and put away food and drinks, but somehow wet towels, toys, empty bottles, plates, bowls, and what seemed like endless condiments remained. And no matter how much I tried to tire the kids out in the pool they would still have plenty of energy. I, on the other hand, was often shot.

On this one Sunday, I remember being in the kitchen, the counter was littered with bowls that had held marinades, trays that carried meats, salads that needed to be scooped into containers and put away. My darling duo, they were probably 3 and 5, started clambering for food. I wasn’t raising children; I was raising locusts.

Anyway, on this given day, in my response to “what’s for dinner,” I remember saying very enthusiastically, “It’s Sunday ... let’s have Sundaes!!”

It fell flat with my young audience. They looked at me quizzically – as if I were trying to entrap them.

“But what’s for dinner?” my eldest negotiator pressed.

“Sundaes!”

“But that’s not dinner.”

“It is tonight,” I said defiantly, grabbing ice cream, chocolate sauce, and sprinkles and placing them on the counter. There was silence as I dished out goodies. They ate noiselessly, looking at each other, and no doubt using mental telepathy to express their scorn at their unorthodox “meal.” When they were finished, Alex asked, in a plaintive voice that I remember very Oliver Twist-like:

“Can we have dinner now?”

Good lord. Had I scarred them for life? Will they be telling therapists years from now about how I forced them to eat ice cream for dinner? I hurriedly got up and made them sandwiches.

How is it that Alex’s memory was so different than mine? How could he have such a positive memory about something that seemed to traumatize him at the time? I had a chance to speak with Matthew Goerke, a leading speaker on memory development and the creator of “The Memory Switch” a training program that helps people with instant recall of facts, figures, and people’s names.

He laughed when I told him the story, relating that he and his wife often marvel when they hear one of their adult kids tell a memory. “We say, ‘that’s not at all what happened!’”

He told me it’s not unusual that people have different recollections of the same event. Basically, it comes down to how the person was left feeling by the memory. They call those episodic memories, which are autobiographical in nature, and psychologically and emotionally driven. Contrast these with semantic memories, which are about general knowledge - like facts, concepts, and ideas.

It turns out a “factual” memory can be skewed by what it meant to the individual.

In his book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foers spends a year chronicling how he went from a guy with an average memory to winning the USA Memory Championship. (You didn’t know such a thing existed??)

I’m not one to easily remember facts that are written in a book. However, if I experience the situation, I can remember almost every detail. Lately, though, as I find myself walking into a room with purpose — only to discover I can't remember why, I am questioning my ability to remember anything. Foers dismisses that with an earnest reminder that our memory’s biggest failure is forgetting how much we actually remember!!!

As Foers journeys to unveil the mystery of memory. he discovers that while we like to think of our brains as giant recorders – jotting down everything. In reality we store the images, the smells, the thoughts – the memories - in our brain - with very imperfect filing systems. “The three-pound mass on our heads,” he writes, “is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 billion neurons, each of which can make up to 5-10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory is … a pattern of connections between those neurons.”

(With so many routes to take to find a distant memory, it shouldn’t seem so unusual that sometimes we get some of the details wrong!)

But it turns out the mind is not “some sort of meticulous transcriber of our experiences.”

In a paper Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus wrote that even if we can’t recall a memory in full, its emotional residue lingers—and sometimes that’s what shapes the story.¹

To some degree, memories then, are in the minds of the beholders.

Alex and I each had very distinct recollections - mine was obviously negative. I had been trying to please the kids - and failed. Matt told me I was probably judging myself as being lazy - which is what solidified it in the negative column. Alex, on the other hand, had turned his memory into a positive: ice cream sundaes taste good, mom was in a weird silly mood, and he actually got dinner. While it might have been confusing to him, there were no real negative consequences; he stored it in the positive recollection file.

Is there a gender bias in memories, I wondered. Matt says yes. “Women tend to remember their mistakes - and don’t want to repeat them. While men tend to forget theirs.” (Ha!!) Now layer on the parent-child relationship.

As a mom, he explained, “You saw the mistake as bigger than it was – and it made a huge impact for you. For your son, while he wasn’t really happy about it, it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

As to how Alex turned the episode into a recurring one? It turns out that was pretty logical too. A few years later, my younger son James wanted an ice cream maker for Christmas. We got into the habit of making ice cream each weekend - usually Sundays because that was the day we were all at home and my dad would come over. Sundays became the de facto day that we made ice cream.

In essence, Alex converted the episodic memory – that one day when he was about five - into a semantic memory (we made ice cream on Sundays). “Two different memories about ice cream - and he just drew a neural pathway between the two facts,” said Matt.

If history is written by the victor, perhaps in family lore, memories are created by who tells the best stories.

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Memory Spark

This essay was sparked by a memory prompt from

Barbara at Projectkin

, who restacked an essay by Ira Hyman² on how our memories are reconstructed. She thought it might be a good prompt for family historians. I began thinking about psychology, but neuro-detoured to thinking about ice cream!

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Making Ice Cream

An ice cream maker is a terrific gift – and I highly recommend the one by Cuisinart. It’s been churning out treats for us for almost 20 years. The insert stays in our freezer so it’s ready whenever we are in the mood for homemade ice cream. It is delicious and simple to make.

Vanilla Ice Cream

• 1 cup of milk

• ¾ cup of sugar

• 2 cups of heavy cream

• 1 tablespoon of real vanilla extract³

• A pinch of salt

Whisk together the milk and sugar, then whisk in rest of the ingredients. Chill for at least an hour. Give an

other quick whisk and, churn!

We experimented with French vanilla ice cream, which is not a type of extract - but rather refers to the French way of making an egg-custard base. It is to die for - but requires carefully cooking the egg base and uses fresh beans. James only made the French vanilla once before opting for a Dutch Chocolate ice cream, where he sifted in fresh cocoa powder. Then one day he decided he couldn’t be bothered with sifting the chocolate. From that point on it he made the simple vanilla base that he augmented with candies, nuts, jelly, mint, and even peanut butter.

Tim recently took up the ice cream helm. A happy accident of using malted milk chocolate mix instead of cocoa has us now adding Carnation malted milk to the mix. Then he accidentally used half-and-half instead of heavy cream – which result in more of a gelato texture instead of ice cream.⁴

Food and Memory Bonds

It’s not unusual at all that food elicits strong memories. All our senses are engaged with a meal - sight, smell, taste, touch, even sound. But smell and taste in particular leave indelible memories. We smell things, then taste them. Over millennia this tandem has evolved to protect us from poisonous foods, foods that make us sick, and those that help us recall joyful moments.

Restaurateur and former Top Chef contestant Bryan Voltaggio has studied the impact of taste on memories. At Neuroscience 2014, Voltaggio revealed how he plays with flavors to create evocative moments. He seeks to create recipes⁵ that will connect people to a special time, a place, and a moment.

I am sure there are many flavor-memory connections that have been forged in my brain. But there is one in particular that transports me in time.

I have trained myself to drink my coffee black. (I was never going to deprive myself from caffeine simply because I didn’t have milk or sugar!) But every so often, I will have an espresso gelato or a sweetened coffee that carries me to my grandfather’s knee. Papa would sit at the little cafe-style kitchen table, shirtless except for a white, ribbed singlet, waiting for my grandmother to pour his java into a delicate tea-cup. (No mugs back then.) He’d pour in the cream - and so much sugar you could hear the grit when he stirred his mixture, before placing the spoon on the saucer. I couldn’t wait for him to finish because at the bottom of the cup was the fall out of sugary mix; a caramel-colored, creamy syrup. Papa’s been gone more than 50 years, but to this day when I taste that rich combination of sweetened coffee, he’s not just remembered – he’s present.

In the comments below, tell me about your favorite food memory!

Book I am reading

Diving into one of Ann Patchett’s early works, Truth and Beauty, which chronicles her friendship with award-winning writer Lucy Grealy. Patchett is the tortoise to Grealy’s hare, and captures the brilliance if not haphazardness of her long-time friend.

1. http://faculty.washington.edu/gloftus/Downloads/LoftusLoftus_Permanance.pdf

2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/202104/who-tells-your-story-how-we-remember-hamilton-and-ourselves

3. Of course, the extract has to be made from real vanilla beans. When you see the words imitation vanilla – please don’t touch. To me it has a harsh chemical taste. Once you use, say, a Madagascar vanilla - you’ll discover a rich, mellow flavor that just cannot be copied. Extract is made from vanilla beans soaked in alcohol. And the beans are from a genus of orchid that, besides Madagascar, grows in Mexico, Tahiti, and Uganda. The beans are pricey, so real vanilla extract is about five times more than imitation, but the price is worth it as real vanilla extract is the star of the dessert.

4. Gelato uses a greater milk-to-cream ratio than ice cream. It also is churned slightly differently - (more slowly) which we can’t do with our model. However, just keep churning a bit longer than with traditional ice cream 30-40 minutes instead of 20) to get greater density. Unless you are a connoisseur, trust me you won’t be disappointed.

5. https://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/the-arts-and-the-brain/2015/bryan-voltaggio-food-for-thought