Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 283, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 December 1918 — French Afraid of Ice Cream [ARTICLE]

French Afraid of Ice Cream

Paris.—lce cream is a new dish to the Inhabitants of France. Some of the big city dwellers may have had a passing acquaintance with it, but the rural folk and those in the villages saw their first ice cream made in the American army camps. Many of the permanent American camps in .the service of supplies have "made ice cream a regular feature, the regimental canteens turning out the frozen delicacy for several hundred men. ; The introduction of ice cream to the French peasant children has been productive of much amusement to the American troops. The youngsters think it is hot One of the men of an engineer regiment took a mess kit full of ice emm to a French farmhouse. One of the small boys took a big teaspoonful. A look of pained amazement came over his face, and, emptying his mouth of the frozen cream, he ran screaming to the protection of his mother’s skirts crying: “Chaud! Chaud!” (Hot! Hot!) The other children who had watched rather horror-strlckeh the fate of the first became convinced that , the ice

' Icream was some sort of a white fire and they would have nothing to do with it. The mother had to eat virtually all of the cream in order to induce them that it was cold rather than hot and that when not taken too fast was good to eat. Eventually, the children ate the last of the dish. But they partook of it gingerly, evidently greatly mystified that anything which first seemed hot then cold could be good to eat. But in time the kids got to liking ice-cream and they became as great a nuisance around the camps asking for ice cream as they had been before in seeking chewing gum.