After 32 years of slurping and licking, the author reflects on a lifelong passion and sets out to uncover the city’s best frozen assets.

As the establishment cracks and institutions crumble, it is no wonder we reach out to ice cream. It is a link to innocence and security, the last of the eternal verities. Or is it?

That’s what I wrote in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ice Cream but Were Too Fat to Ask" in the August 3, 1970, issue of this magazine, several thousand English toffee–Rocky Road Dove Bars ago, long before the cheeky insolence of wasabi sorbet and foie gras ice cream.

Ice cream has always been my weakness, unleashing the uninhibited, uncontrollable 8-year-old within me. In my fitful attempts at grudging moderation, I’ve been able to give up eggs and limit myself to a single bite of foie gras, for the sake of my own foie and the freedom to dip into dessert. I used to fantasize about do-it-yourself sundae bacchanals — with scoops of coffee, chocolate, and rum raisin in wet walnuts, hot fudge, and candied chestnuts with a splash of butterscotch.

One Christmas, long before the discovery of cholesterol, my then husband and I hand-cranked chocolate-chunk fudge swirl with pieces of date and toasted almonds and roasted a brace of geese for friends at dinner. I basked in the moans of joy from our guests while eating a civilized saucerful. Then, when everyone was gone and the kitchen immaculate, the two of us polished off another two quarts.

Thirty years ago, New Yorkers were just discovering that Häagen-Dazs, with its decorative map of Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, was actually churned in the fjords of the Bronx. That didn’t stop converts from mainlining it. And there were old-fashioned ice-cream parlors in every borough. Whipped-cream clouds drifted over Serendipity 3’s wondrously overwrought sundaes (real cream, that is, not the insipid spray-froth that Serendipity’s Forbidden Broadway Sundae wore when I visited recently).

New York was then in the full throes of an ice-cream renaissance. And the passion for greatness in ice cream has only intensified. Granted, there are a coven of fakirs and con artists trying to cash in on our lust — cutting corners, pumping up claims. Some addled geniuses seem sure that whisking up something no one ever dreamed of freezing before — vanilla-Parmesan, say, or coconut-tobacco with flutters of gold leaf — is a guaranteed trajectory to stardom. To this day, I’m less than impressed by Douglas-fir fudge or granola-and-jalapeño. So far, I’ve managed to avoid peanut-butter-and-bacon, and Jean Georges’s tofu-anise