Summer Food I: Del's. Freakin'. Lemonade.
In the same vein as street food, I'm also a sucker for "regional delicacies." Not the local recipes or produce or seafood, but commercial food products that persist in some confined geographic area--like the bizarre, Dr.-Pepperish-but-not-really soda called "Cheerwine" that you can find in the Carolinas. Anyhow, when the Fraulein and I went to Block Island with Madam Smith and Mr. Squishy just before Memorial Day, I got a chance to try a Rhode Island delicacy: Del's Lemonade.
Del's, on the surface, seems like your garden-variety frozen lemonade: you expect it to be a sickly-sweet, lemony slurpee, right? But Del's is done right! When I ordered one on Madam Smith's advice at a beachside seafood shack, they actually scooped it out of a large ice chest (in which it had been shipped to the island fresh that morning). The texture was fine-grained, like fresh-fallen snow, or the perfect shave ice (I've been to the place in the link, and they're finefineFINE). The flavor was delightfully tart and refreshing, slightly sweeter if you sipped the melty stuff at the bottom of the cup, and briskly headache-inducing if you scooped off the snowier bits from the top. On the whole, the perfect summer combination of sweet and cool (much like Fraulein M! Awww...).
However, I faced a bit of disappointment when we tried to recreate the island Del's experience in Providence: we found an ice cream shop near Brown where they served it out of an icee machine, and it was grainy and runny. Mind you, it was still tart and refreshing, although I missed the contrast between the sweet melt and the brain-freezingly-cold snow. I should also mention a second revelation from that beachside seafood shack: clam bellies! I'm not typically wild about the shellfish, but these fried, whole whatever-makes-up-clams were damned tasty, even compared to a parallel batch of whatever's-normally-in-fried-clams.
Del's, on the surface, seems like your garden-variety frozen lemonade: you expect it to be a sickly-sweet, lemony slurpee, right? But Del's is done right! When I ordered one on Madam Smith's advice at a beachside seafood shack, they actually scooped it out of a large ice chest (in which it had been shipped to the island fresh that morning). The texture was fine-grained, like fresh-fallen snow, or the perfect shave ice (I've been to the place in the link, and they're finefineFINE). The flavor was delightfully tart and refreshing, slightly sweeter if you sipped the melty stuff at the bottom of the cup, and briskly headache-inducing if you scooped off the snowier bits from the top. On the whole, the perfect summer combination of sweet and cool (much like Fraulein M! Awww...).
However, I faced a bit of disappointment when we tried to recreate the island Del's experience in Providence: we found an ice cream shop near Brown where they served it out of an icee machine, and it was grainy and runny. Mind you, it was still tart and refreshing, although I missed the contrast between the sweet melt and the brain-freezingly-cold snow. I should also mention a second revelation from that beachside seafood shack: clam bellies! I'm not typically wild about the shellfish, but these fried, whole whatever-makes-up-clams were damned tasty, even compared to a parallel batch of whatever's-normally-in-fried-clams.
posted by Doghouse Riley at 4:09 PM
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