Not a paid endorsement

Listen. This is not a paid endorsement. Nobody has given me anything. I grow my own chillies, I buy organic where it counts, I am in the gym, and I will stand here and tell you that freshness is the entire argument of this website — and then I will drive to Handel’s and order a banana split the size of my head.

I did not realise how bad it had got until somebody went through the archive and counted. Four pictures. Four separate occasions where Handel’s packaging is sitting in a photograph on my own site, going back to 31 March 2025. That is sixteen months of smuggling an ice cream habit into a food archive and filing it under something else.

The last one is the one that convicts me. It is a photograph about picking Thai chillies out of the garden to make steak fried rice. Serious picture. Mortar, scarlet chillies, stems still on. And there in the background, uninvited, a tub of Handel’s. I did not put it there for the shot. It was just there, the way it is just there.

People ask why I have never made ice cream. Every other thing on this site I have worked out from first principles — the Overnight Pastrami, the Cold-Fermented Pizza Dough, a whole page about Chicken Feet Bone Broth because the feet are three dollars. I would love to make my own ice cream someday. I get discouraged because Handel’s is so good it can never be surpassed. That is the honest answer. Why would I spend a weekend losing?

The closest I come is building on top of it. The A Proper Banana Split here is my version of what they hand you in the tray, and Cherry, Macadamia and Dark Chocolate Sundae is what happens when the tub makes it home and I start opening jars. Both of those recipes are, if we are being accurate, cover versions.

The part that annoys me

Here is what I found out, and it is irritating, because it means they beat me at my own argument before I was born.

Handel’s started in July 1945, in Youngstown, Ohio, with a woman called Alice Handel selling ice cream out of her husband’s gas station. And the first batches were made with fruit she picked out of her own back garden.

Read that again, then go and look at my garden page, where I spend a thousand words explaining that you should grow the thing you are going to cook. She was doing it in 1945, in Ohio, next to the pumps. She ran that one parlour for forty years and they renamed the street Handel’s Court for her anniversary.

It is not a single parlour any more. It was bought by Lenny Fisher, it is run out of Canfield, Ohio, and it is over 175 stores across 20 states now. Their own press releases like to say National Geographic called it the best ice cream on the planet — I have never been able to find that in National Geographic, so take it as a thing they say rather than a thing I am telling you.

The Southern California run is recent and relentless. Irvine, Oxnard, San Diego, Glendora, Santa Monica, Palmdale, Thousand Oaks, Burbank, Manhattan Beach. They are putting them where I live. I am not claiming that is personal. I am saying I have painted an ice cream shop in Manhattan Beach in gouache and I would like that entered as further evidence.

So: not a paid endorsement. An admission. Everything else on this site I made myself, and the one thing I cannot beat was started eighty years ago by a woman with a backyard and a gas station, which is exactly the kind of story I would have made up if it were not already true.