America Icon Hall of Fame

[John&Vicki]

There’s a current discussion here about the Airstream Weber Grille. An interesting blend of two American icons. I thought it would fun to build a list here. Here’s a start:

(1) Airstreams
(2) Weber Grilles
(3) White Mountain Ice Cream Makers
(4) ??

What would you add?

Cheers,
John

[BigSxyWhtGuy]

Not sure I’m familiar with what a white mountain ice cream maker is... how about baseball or bourbon? Or are you talking specifically about brands that are iconic American? Like former Harley Davidson

[rmkrum]

Add cast-iron frying pans and Dutch ovens to the list of iconic tools.

From fond memory, a White Mountain ice cream maker is a hand cranked ice cream maker with a wooden outer bucket and a can that fits into it where the ice cream is frozen. You put lots of crushed ice dusted with rock salt in the space inbetween to freeze the ice cream mixture. The salt makes the ice a lot colder to freeze the mix rapidly.

The can rotates with gears and the crank, and a set of fixed wooden scrapers and blades mixes and circulates the mix over the inside of the can to beat air into the mix and make very smooth ice cream. When it’s super hard to turn the crank, the ice cream is done!

Takes bunches of bag ice and a box of ice cream salt and a lot of cranking, but it’s worth the effort. They were quite popular in the 1940 to 1970 timeframe.

We used to take one along on Boy Scout camping trips, where our Scoutmaster would have us dig a deep hole in the ground so he could make his grandmother’s peach cobbler in a cast iron dutch oven.

It was well worth the work, as the hole digger and the ice cream cranker got the first serving. The cobbler was flat-out amazing.

Sadly, the recipe died with Mr. ‘Shorty’ Williams. He was a great camp cook, leader, and a very nice guy. Sad. It’s been over 60 years, and I still remember him well. I’ve come close to his recipe but never got it exactly right.