Thinking back to her first memory of ice cream. Lokelani Alabanza recalls the Neapolitan flavor as a staple in her grandmother’s freezer.

“I did not want [the flavors] touching, so I ate them separately. I didn’t want to eat them together,” she shares with a laugh.​

That laugh is joy, and it’s what Alabanza believes ice cream is a vessel for.

Like most of us, we were introduced to ice cream at home with our families. Those first memories of the cool dessert are something she wants today’s families to have as they make ice cream from her collection of recipes in her first book, Ice Cream Queen: Flavors from Black America’s Past, Present, & Future, available now.

Alabanza is an internationally trained chef based in Nashville, Tenn., who navigated a culinary school and many kitchens, often as the only Black woman in the room. “I went to the New England Culinary Institute, which was run by white men, and any of the women chefs that I knew were extraordinary, but there were very few of them,” she recalls.

After culinary school, she started working full-time, but the only job she could find was in the pastry program at Grace Restaurant in Los Angeles. Pastry wasn’t her first choice, but she learned to love creating desserts. “I learned that I was good at it, and then it became a game. How to get better each day,” she said.

In her early career, she learned how to make ice cream to pair with desserts. She never expected that ice cream would bring her where she is today.

Her curiosity about the sweet treat went beyond experimenting with flavors in the various kitchens that she worked in. One day, a Southern Foodways Alliance Gravy podcast episode playing in the car on a road trip led her to Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. “Toni did incredible work taking her time and resources to create this extraordinary collection of first-edition African American cookbooks, which I hadn’t learned about at all in culinary school or in the kitchen,” Alabanza shares.

There was a shame Alabanza felt when she discovered Tipton’s book. She wondered why she didn’t know about this history and this great work. Then she opened Tipton’s book, and it sparked her hunger to learn more about Black history through recipes. She realized there was so much she didn’t know about our history, influence, and impact on food. She took it upon herself to start exploring that history more. “I truly do live with one foot in the past and one foot in the future,” she says.

Alabanza started with collecting cookbooks and then photographs. “I remember the very first photograph I ever bought. I think it was 2018, and unknowingly I had bought this photograph of this little precious Black girl holding an ice cream cone,” she says.

Over the years, she assembled a collection of ice cream artifacts, such as scoops, spoons, and old churns, as well as 30 first-edition cookbooks. “I am just a steward of these objects. They are part of the culture, and they’re part of this Diaspora. It’s not just Black American history. It is American history,” she says.

With Ice Cream Queen, Alabanza wants people to know that Black Americans have long influenced the frozen delicacy. One of the things that blew her mind during her research was the amount of wealth that ice cream created for Black people in America at one point, but then that generational wealth disappeared. Black Americans contributed to ice harvesting and to the manufacturing of ice cream. Then there is Sarah Estell, a free Black woman in Nashville who made ice cream between 1830 and 1860, and influenced the Parmesan ice cream recipe in the cookbook.

Now, everything she has collected has helped inform Ice Cream Queen. The book not only includes stories about Black contributors to the frozen dessert but also recipes inspired by that history and by our culture. From Nashville Hot Chicken and rose-petal flavors, to every Black elder’s favorite, butter pecan. “Food has always reminded me of the people I come from, whose DNA runs through me. This is who I am; this is how I present,” she shares.

When you think back to your first memories of ice cream, you can’t help but think of joy. The delight you get from the taste, the comfort of the cold on a hot day, and the feeling of being around the people you love. It’s our own personal history with the dessert that Alabanza wants us to remember and replicate.

“I want people to just create their own legacies from this book. I want you to remember that memory that might cause a little ting, a tinge of pain from missing it or those in it, but to know that’s beautiful,” she says.

She calls it time traveling. Using core memories to move you forward in the present day. “I want you to be able to time-travel through this book, and then to do what you want with these recipes,” Alabanza says.

It’s what we’ve been doing for years: taking recipes, putting our own unique spin on them, and passing them down. Ice Cream Queen was meant to help us keep traditions alive, like making ice cream just like your grandparents and great-grandparents did at home. Reclaiming our history and our joy one scoop at a time.

In the climate that we’re in right now, joy is what we require. Community is what we need, and ice cream offers both at once.

Author: Brittney Oliver

Read the original article on Essence.