Ice cream nation: Does Ecuador take the cherry?

Everyone loves ice cream. But Ecuadorians, particularly in Andean cities, are convinced they love it more than anywhere else. There are art exhibits made about it, a monument dedicated to it, no celebration is considered complete without it, and it’s everywhere – even early on a weekday morning.  

From colorfully layered creamsicles sold informally out of travel coolers to perfectly swirled soft-serve to the traditional sorbet-like helado de paila, the capital’s historic center is a bastion of cool, creamy treats.

“I eat ice cream every single day,” says Javier Lasluisa, a chef and professor of culinary arts at the Universidad de Las Amricas in Quito. “It’s an off day if I don’t at least taste it.” His father and grandfather were both “ice cream men,” he says, making and selling the treat. And he and his wife recently started developing recipes for their own ice cream brand. He acknowledges it may not be daily fare for all Ecuadorians, but it’s a pillar at any special event or festival in the Andean zone of the nation.

“We are a country that values our traditions, and ice cream is a part of that,” he says.

Down a steep slope from the historic center’s Independence Square is a creamy-yellow building that for the past 165 years has housed the San Agustín ice cream parlor. In a back room, up narrow stone steps, Joel Basurto stirs fresh coconut pulp and milk in a copper dish set atop a rough pile of ice and rock-salt, which are inside yet another copper container. After about 15 minutes of mixing round and round by hand, it slowly starts to solidify into the local treat, helado de paila. Small pieces of fresh coconut punctuate the thick, chilled dessert.

“Young or old, rain or shine, day or night, for Quiteños it’s always a good time for ice cream,” says manager Javier Muñiz. The cashier, dressed up in purple monk’s robes, says he sells scores of cones a day – not counting dine-in customers. Aside from the form in which the ice cream is made, part of what makes it so special are fresh local fruits like the taxo, also known as a banana passion fruit, or cherimoya, a custard apple.

No celebration without ice cream

Local legend has it that Angél Lozado’s great-great-great-great grandmother Rosalia Suárez “invented” this style of ice cream in Ecuador. Living in the north-central city of Ibarra at the foot of the formerly snow-covered Imbabura volcano, she is said to have used ice from the surrounding mountains to create her fruity concoctions.

Today, most of the glaciers are long gone, but Mr. Lozado carries on the tradition by running Helados de Paila Fifth Generation Rosalia Suárez. Five generations later, he acknowledges that he has a lot of extended family running their own ice cream operations, big and small. And although he has moved toward a more industrialized approach to ice cream production, he says he still rents his services making the copper-pot traditional version for weddings and parties.   

“One can function without ice cream, but a celebration doesn’t feel complete without it,” Mr. Lozado says. “The tradition of eating ice cream is in many ways kept alive by making it the old-fashioned way,” he says.

There is a permanent monument portraying a layered ice cream at the entrance to the town of Salcedo, about two hours south of Quito, and temporary art exhibits pay homage to the goody here as well.

Martina Miño Pérez, an Ecuadorian visual artist and cook, has organized several interactive art projects that revolve around ice cream, taste, and memory. The idea was sparked, in part, by memories of a childhood birthday party and how she can feel transported back to that moment and her mother’s homemade ice cream when eating lemon-flavored sweets.  

One of her works, exhibited at Quito’s contemporary art museum in 2020, consisted of six ice cream flavors that were meant to reflect different shared experiences in the museum’s neighborhood of San Juan. There was the bittersweet flavor of one ice cream meant to encapsulate the feelings of being a woman social organizer; another had an acidic base with some subtle heat, meant to represent the work of trying to make ends meet during the pandemic. The exhibit built bridges between the community and the museum by sending an ice cream cart out into the streets with these edible works of art.

“Ice cream is a good way to symbolize memory,” she says. “Memory is never fully intact, it’s always incomplete. Frozen in time until it melts away.”

Back in the historic center, Jean, who arrived here from the Democratic Republic of Congo two years ago, crosses the street on crutches – with an ice cream cone held perilously in one already-full hand.

He says he rarely ate it back home. But since arriving in Quito? “It’s everywhere you look,” he says. “Some days, you just need a little treat.”