Summer’s rotating treat.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The entire setup is as showy as a theatre, with a modest street cart as the stage, and a metal roller as the main actor. The sealed roller is filled with crushed ice and salt. Thick layers of milky cream lie spread evenly about the roller’s outer surface. The heavy roller is continuously rotated by a hand-operated handle to keep the cream frozen. While the air around the cart bears fruity aromas—no artificial colours or syrups in sight.*

This is the world of roller wali ice cream. Unlike industrial ice cream, it is made right in front of the customer. The recipe is simple: ice, and cream, and fruit. Freshly cut pieces of fruit are pressed onto the rotating roller; they cling quickly to the cream lying frozen about the roller. The fruit-laden mix is then scraped off and served in a bowl.

The roller wali ice cream carts surface every year at the start of summer, but sightings are rare. In recent years, ice cream has been seen in Bhogal in south Delhi, Civil Lines in north Delhi, Sita Ram Bazar (formerly Turab Nagar) in Ghaziabad, and the Jacobpura-Sadar Bazar area in Gurugram. Last week, one evening, it was spotted outside Jama Masjid’s Gate No. 1 in Old Delhi, even though the peak heat has yet to arrive. The cart is run by two brothers, Aneep and Ravi. A plastic basket is currently crammed with apples, oranges, grapes, bananas, strawberries, and a whole pineapple (still holding onto its leaves). The men have just begun their day’s business and are yet to cut the fruits into coarse pieces. Once chopped, the fruits will be placed in a bowl. Meanwhile, Ravi is continually rotating the cream-coated roller. When a customer will approach, Aneep will take the bowl of cut fruit and press it against the rotating roller’s cream, carefully following the simple recipe described above.

The brothers arrive each summer from their village in distant Etawah. They stay in the city until the winter begins. Each evening, they navigate their cart through various markets, often late into the night. At this moment, the cart is parked in the middle of the road. Soon, a third street hawker appears, carrying a tall tower of pink cotton candy, stealing the thunder.

Whatever the distraction, after Diwali, which is many months away, the two ice cream men will return to their village to farm their land. Their fellow vendors, hawking the same uncommon dish, will also shift to other vocations, and roller wali ice cream will again grow as unreal as a myth.

*Sadly, some vendors have started using artificial syrups for colour and added flavour