The Big Scoop


gracie's ice cream

photograph by pj couture

1. Every batch of honey-cornbread features about 36 muffins’ worth of Jiffy mix.
2. Colorful Fruity Pebbles are an occasional topping (and ice cream flavor).
3. Chunks of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal are swirled into a cinnamon-infused base.
4. The house hot fudge is based on a recipe from manager Jenny Lamb’s grandmother.
5. Black-raspberry chip pays homage to the Wellesley scoop shop where Cohen once worked.
6. Chocolate-Fluff is made with melted dark Callebaut chocolate.
7. The most popular specialty cone? That would be the torched-to-order Fluff version.

Somerville can be considered the birthplace of modern ice cream—it was in Davis Square, after all, that Steve Herrell mashed candy bars and cookies into a slow-churned base in the ’70s and spawned a plethora of imitators, including Ben & Jerry’s.

Will the Somerville scoop scene’s latest addition, Gracie’s, pick up where its trail­blazing forebear left off? Not quite, but that’s by design. “I describe it as standard ice cream flavors, but a little to the left or a little to the right,” says co-owner Aaron Cohen, who opened the shop last November in the former Sherman Café space. “Our whole menu isn’t going to be, like, kale-parsnip ice cream—though the sweet potato was pretty popular.”

Of course, there is one major way that Gracie’s is keeping it Somerville: It spackles its sugar cones with the area’s proudest invention, marshmallow Fluff, which gets blasted to order with a blowtorch.

22 Union Sq., Somerville, 617-764-5294, graciesicecre.am.