CHICAGO — When I left home in New England years ago, I left behind Grape-Nuts ice cream.
Or so I thought, until I was living within walking distance of several Jamaican restaurants on the Far North Side. I noticed it on one, two, then three menus. I told no one. I once ordered takeout from the excellent Jamaican place Good to Go on Howard Street in Evanston and a woman waiting beside me asked what was that ice cream I just ordered — did I say Grape-Nuts cereal ice cream?
No, just Grape-Nuts ice cream, I said, then added, scrunching my face: You wouldn’t like it — kind of an acquired taste. Which is a lie. Anyone would like Grape-Nuts ice cream. I just worry — Chicagoans being eager to stand in line for trendy doughnuts and all — about a run on Grape-Nuts. I fear a Grape-Nuts bubble. The world needs secrets.
So, for now at least, Grape-Nuts ice cream in Chicago is an obscure Jamaican dish, a quirky favorite of Caribbean and New England kitchens, barely known to the Midwest.
Despite the name, no grapes or nuts are involved.
There is, though, Post Grape-Nuts breakfast cereal. Likely some of you use granola or cereal as a topping on ice cream. This is cereal blended into ice cream — to be specific, the Post Grape-Nuts mix of barley flour, whole-grain wheat and dried yeast. Traditionally, it’s worked into vanilla ice cream, where it then softens up and releases a slight malty taste and a modest crumble.
It’s not a bold, surprising flavor. It has a refined, vaguely oceanic, seriously English tang.
“The stuff sells like crazy with the Jamaicans who come in,” said Jamaican Paddy Shack owner Hakim Lee, whose Jamaica-born parents opened the first Dr. Bird’s in Buffalo, New York.
Lee moved here to take a job, then opened the second Dr. Bird’s in June. He expected another Jamaican flavor — rum and cherry, a twist on rum raisin — to be his bestseller. But it’s Grape-Nuts by a mile.
We talked about the questionable origins of Grape-Nuts ice cream, its largely murky history, full of assumptions and secondhand hearsay. Lee guessed that — as with a lot of Jamaican favorites, such as meat paddies and curried goat — there’s strong British colonial influence; after all, the Caribbean island didn’t gain its independence until 1962.
Strangely enough, that journey also begins in the Midwest. Post — founded in Battle Creek, Michigan, now headquartered in a Minneapolis suburb — created Grape-Nuts cereal in 1897, offering it initially as a healthy alternative.
According to Post, its founder C.W. Post liked to call the glucose that formed during the cereal’s baking process “grape sugar.” He mashed that against a slight nutty taste and created a brand name. To promote the cereal — which has long been a divisive, love-hate topic at breakfast tables — the company made Grape-Nuts the centerpiece of its recipe contests, and even used it to sponsor polar expeditions.
Indeed, my grandmother, an Italian-American native of Maine, counted Grape-Nuts pudding as a central dish in her kitchen repertoire. At some point, likely during the first decade of the 20th century, Grape-Nuts sneaked into ice cream throughout the New England states and Canadian Maritimes. Which is where it primarily remains, though far from the ubiquitous favorite it had been.
As for Jamaica, there is a sizable population of expats spread from Boston to Hartford. Recipes travel, bada bing, bada boom ... Anyway, that’s just another guess. But one thing is for certain: Jamaicans prefer Grape-Nuts in their ice cream, not in their cereal bowls.
Which is really for the best. Just don’t tell anybody else.
