We All Scream for Asian American Ice Cream

Paul Nasrani had been in the ice cream business for five years before he introduced a flavor called Kulfi-Pistachio Cardamom from his brand Adirondack Creamery in 2009. It’s based on kulfi recipes he gleaned while cooking with members of his wife, Simi’s family in Kashmir. 

“At the beginning, no one would buy it because no one knew what cardamom was,” says Nasrani. But then sometime around the early 2010s, as food media proselytized America about cuisines around the world, that equation flipped on its head. “I would be sampling this flavor, and people who were not Asian were like, ‘Oh my god, it has cardamom, I wanna buy that!’” 

Kulfi-Pistachio Cardamom is now one of Adirondack Creamery’s top three or four best-selling flavors, alongside standard American flavors like chocolate and vanilla, which make up the bulk of their roster. Nasrani is currently tinkering with a new flavor based on carrot halwa, which hearkens to his father’s Punjabi heritage.   

Nasrani had left a career as a CFO in Manhattan to make ice cream, eventually opening a shop in Lake George, New York, in 2004. He’d grown up spending a week of every August with his family in Silver Bay, a popular retreat in the Adirondacks. The rest of the year, they lived in the small town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where Nasrani describes his childhood as a half-Indian, half-white kid with zero other Asian Americans around as “challenging and interesting.”    

He recalls that his father was once asked to speak at a Columbus Day event because his last name was mistaken as Italian. There were no Indian restaurants around, and his father didn’t really cook. But he relished eating everything on trips to India, surrounded by aunts and uncles all cooking together.

Nasrani learned to make ice cream from an old-fashioned hand-cranked machine while working at a nearby farm. He’d work the field during the day, picking vegetables, then help make ice cream, marveling at how the cream, milk, and eggs were transformed into the coveted product before his eyes. (Earl Whitebread, the owner of the farm, is commemorated with the Adirondack Creamery flavor Earl’s Chocolate Peanut Butter.) 

Adirondack Creamery has always had a strong mission to support its local foodshed by working directly with small, family-owned dairy farms. But its Syrian Date and Walnut flavor was developed in 2017 with another mission—to support Syrian refugees and combat hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric that was spreading across America. The flavor is based on ma’amoul, a Middle Eastern dessert with crushed nuts and date paste. Adirondack Creamery donates 50 percent of the proceeds for this flavor to the nonprofits International Rescue Committee and CanDo Action; to date, they have donated over $30,000. The tagline “We are all immigrants” is displayed prominently on each pint.

Ice cream is an apt vehicle for experimentation and conversation, say many of its makers. The churned dessert has a long-established vibe that is cheerful, lighthearted, and youthful. It all makes the storytelling, political messaging, and creative flavors based on Asian ingredients and dessert traditions a lot easier for everyone to swallow. “I think it’s a friendly medium,” says Nasrani. “It’s ice cream, so people know it’s going to have milk and sugar and be sweet and cold.”