How can we impress a date at an ice cream shop?

If you’re ever in Ruby Scoops ice cream shop in Richmond’s Northside and you see founder/owner Rabia Kamara (B.S.’10) stick her knuckle in the ice cream, be not concerned. The former Food Network show champion is just performing a highly scientific quality check.

“If I can nudge my knuckle into it, but it not go all the way through or it be too stiff, then I’m at the right temperature,” says Kamara, who graduated from L’Academie de Cuisine in 2012 and, with an ice cream maker snagged from an old Maggie Moo’s, opened Ruby Scoops in 2020.

This isn’t a trick Kamara learned in culinary school. Just a shortcut she picked up from running an ice cream shop. Here are a few other in-the-know ice cream facts to dazzle your date (or just pass the time) this summer while you wait for your double scoop.

Chill-power

The U.S. ice cream industry produced 1.23 billion gallons of ice cream last year, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. Chocolate was America’s favorite flavor. It’s also a flavor that requires extra cold.

“Chocolate’s also going to be harder to scoop than, say, vanilla,” Kamara says. “Because chocolate has more fat in it because of the addition of chocolate.”

Kamara keeps the temperature of the dipping cabinet — industry lingo for the front-counter display freezer — at between 6 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. (Fat and salt lower ice cream’s temperature. Things like honey and liquor can lower it further.) Keeping the temperature there is an art, with all the freezer opening and closing.

“The dipping cabinet has hot spots,” Kamara says. “Typically, the corners of the cabinet will be colder than the center. We’re looking for everything to be scoopable. If I have something with honey in it, I might put it in one of the colder corners because that will prevent that one from being softer than, let’s say, I want the vanilla to be.”

Selling on a name

Ruby Scoops sells a flavor named Grasshopper Pie. For Kamara, it breaks her ice cream flavor-naming rule: The name does not, in any way, indicate the flavor’s ingredients.

“If I go into an ice cream shop and there’s an ice cream called like Mama Moomers, yada, yada — what’s that? I don’t have time for that,” Kamara says. “I want to be able to look at it and see what it is.”

Kamara says servers shouldn’t have to waste time explaining extravagant flavor names while the line gets grumpy waiting for a cone (that’s the preferred ice cream conveyance for 40% of Americans, says the IDFA). Ice cream names are not wine labels, and assigned reading is not always good customer service. But rules can be bent. Sometimes a good name is just a good name.

“Most of my flavor names are descriptive, but Grasshopper Pie, that’s not,” she says. “On the flavor card I put underneath of it, it says: mint, marshmallow, Oreo. Those are the main three components. Whatever I can try to do to cut time.”

The Father of Ice Cream

Various estimates put the U.S. ice cream market’s worth last year at about $20 billion. The industry’s origins date to a free Black man in the first half of the 19th century.

“A lot of ice cream innovation in America is attached to Black men,” Kamara says. “The first person to really mainstream and commercialize ice cream production was a Black man who worked as a cook at the White House: Augustus Jackson.”

Jackson, who died in 1852, was a chef under Presidents James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. In 1830, Augustus Jackson opened his own ice cream shop in Philadelphia. Today, he’s known as the Father of Ice Cream.

“He was the person that really helped to streamline it because he started using rock salt,” Kamara says. That lowered the ice cream’s freezing temperature, which prevents ice crystals and leads to a creamier, smoother texture. Eventually, Jackson became an ice cream distributor, selling his product in metal tins to other shops.

Forty-five years after Jackson’s death, Virginia-born Black inventor Alfred Cralle patented the ice cream scoop.