“It’s Cold But It Tastes Sweet?” — German Women POWs Had Never Tasted Ice Cream Before D
The spoon went in too easily. That was the first thing. She had expected resistance, the density of something solid, the pushback of food that had been prepared with heat. Instead, the spoon moved through it the way a hand moves through water, and the substance parted and closed again and left a curved impression that held its shape.
She brought the spoon to her mouth. The cold arrived before anything else. Not the cold of winter air or metal or stone, a different cold, a cold that came from inside the thing itself. She held it on her tongue for a moment without swallowing. Around her, the mess hall continued. Nobody was watching.
To understand what that bowl meant, you need to know what cold had been before it. In the winters of the war, cold was what happened when there was not enough fuel. It was the temperature of a room where the heating had not worked since October. It was the feeling of bread that had been outside too long.
Cold was the thing you moved through on the way to somewhere warmer, except that somewhere warmer was often not available. You learned to manage cold, to dress against it, to treat it as an adversary. The idea that cold could be something you put in your mouth deliberately, something offered, something meant, did not exist in any register she had.
The camp in winter was cold in the way that buildings are cold when they were not designed for the people now living in them. The barracks held heat poorly. The windows let in drafts that moved along the floor at night. The women had learned the particular economy of warmth, how to sleep with extra layers, how to stand close together without making it conspicuous, how to move through a cold room quickly and not think about it.
Cold was background. Cold was expected. Cold was not something that arrived in a bowl and waited for you to decide what to do with it. The announcement, if it could be called that, was a change in what was placed on the tray at the end of the main meal. A mess worker moved along the counter with a metal scoop and placed something white and rounded into a plain metal bowl.
The motion was quick and practiced. He had done this before. He moved to the next tray. The women in the line looked at what had been placed in front of them. Nobody explained it. There was no explanation offered because no explanation seemed necessary to the people serving it. The white shape sat in its bowl and began, very slowly, to change.
One of the women touched it with one finger before picking up the spoon. The surface was smooth and firm and left a small impression where she had pressed. Cold came off it the way warmth comes off a stove, radiating outward, present before contact. She had not touched food that was this cold since before the war.
She looked at the woman beside her. The woman beside her was also looking at it. Neither of them had a word for it in any language that currently felt applicable. They carried their trays to the table and sat down and continued to look at it for a moment before anyone touched a spoon. At the table, they did not all eat at the same moment. This was not coordinated.
It was simply that each woman arrived at her own readiness at her own pace. One pressed the spoon in and brought it up and looked at it before eating it. One watched the others for a moment first, not for permission, but for information. One closed her eyes when the cold arrived and kept them closed for several seconds.
What was happening at that table was a series of individual encounters with the same impossible thing, each one private, each one without any prior framework to place it in. The cold came first, that was the sequence. The cold hit the front of the mouth and moved inward, and by the time it reached the back of the tongue, the sweetness had started.
Two things that did not arrive together in any food she had known before. Cold meant the absence of heat. Sweet meant something entirely different, warmth, density, syrup. The combination did not have a name in any sensory vocabulary she currently held. She sat with the spoon in her hand after the first taste and tried to locate what she was experiencing in some existing category.
It was not in any existing category. It was simply itself. At the next table, an American soldier was finishing his portion while talking to the man beside him. He ate it the way you eat something familiar, spoon moving automatically, attention elsewhere, the bowl empty before he had consciously registered eating it.
He had probably eaten ice cream 200 times. He would eat it 200 more. He pushed the bowl to the side and continued his conversation. The woman who was watching him did not look away immediately. She was trying to understand how something could be this unremakable to one person and this without category to another at the same moment in the same room.
The ice cream was changing as she watched it. The edges had softened and were beginning to pool in the bowl, the clean rounded shape losing its definition, becoming something looser and more liquid. There was a time limit on it. It would not wait. This was also something without precedent, food that required you to engage with it at the speed it demanded, rather than the speed you chose.
She picked up the spoon again. She ate the rest of it slowly, but not as slowly as she had eaten the first bite. The cold was less shocking now. The sweet was the same. When the meal was over, the mess hall began its clearing process. Trays returned, tables wiped, the organized noise of an institution moving from one phase to the next.
The women collected their trays. The bowls were empty. The ice cream had been eaten. From the outside, from the perspective of the mess workers moving through their routine, nothing notable had occurred. A meal had been served. People had eaten. The room was being cleaned. From the inside of one particular experience, something had happened that would be difficult to explain to anyone who had not been sitting at that table.
That evening in the barracks, the women who had been at the table tried to explain it to the women who had not. This was harder than expected. The words available, cold, sweet, soft, were individually accurate and collectively insufficient. Cold described many things. Sweet described many things.
The combination of the two arriving in sequence in a single substance that transformed as you ate it, that had no word. One woman held her hands a few inches apart to indicate the size of the bowl and then gestured at her mouth and then shrugged. The shrug carried more information than the words had.
One of the women who had not tasted it asked, “But why is it cold?” The question was genuine. Food is hot or food is the temperature of the room. “Neither answer applied,” one of the women who had eaten it said. “They make it cold on purpose.” The listener considered this. She said, “Cold is on purpose.
” The question stayed in the room for a moment. In the world they had come from, cold was what happened in the absence of effort. Warmth required effort. Cold was what you got when effort was not applied. The idea that someone had applied effort specifically to make something cold, as an act of care, as a form of generosity, required a rearrangement of several assumptions simultaneously.
Outside, the camp was cold in the ordinary way of camps in winter, the perimeter wire, the dark fields beyond it, the wide sky. Inside the barracks window, the light was still on. The conversation had moved from description to something more like philosophy, what it means that there exists a place in the world where people have enough of everything that they can afford to make dessert cold, not just enough food.
Enough food and enough of whatever makes things cold and enough time to apply it and enough reason to believe that the people eating the dessert deserve something beyond the functional minimum. The women were not sure they had believed in such a place before tonight. One woman wrote about it that night.
She wrote, “Cold and sweet at the same time.” She underlined it. She had been writing in this notebook since the early months of the war, not a diary exactly, more a record of things that should not be lost. Most of what she had written was difficult. This was not difficult. She did not know what category to put it in.
She wrote it under no heading, just the sentence underlined once sitting on the page by itself. “Cold and sweet at the same time.” She looked at it for a moment before closing the notebook. It was the most precise description she could manage. It was also, she understood, almost entirely inadequate. The next morning was cold in the ordinary way, frost on the ground, the mess hall light on early, the kitchen already working.
The women rose and dressed and went through the morning in the way they went through every morning. But something had shifted slightly in the way the camp read, not dramatically, not in any way that could be pointed at specifically. The mess hall, seen from across the compound, was not quite the same building it had been the day before.
It was now also the building where cold had been sweet, where something had been given that required effort and care and a belief in the people receiving it. She walked toward it in the morning cold. The frost did not feel the same as it had yesterday. At breakfast, she paused for half a second as she passed the serving counter, not long enough for anyone to notice, long enough for her to note where the bowls had been placed the evening before.
The counter was ordinary in the morning, eggs, toast, coffee, nothing cold, nothing white, nothing that gave way under spoon like that. She moved down the line. She collected her tray. She found a place to sit, but something had changed in the way she moved through the mess hall, something small and not quite nameable, like the difference between walking through a room you have never been in and walking through a room where something has happened to you.
She ate breakfast without incident. The food was the same food. The room was the same room. The women around her were the same women. But she was eating breakfast as someone who had tasted ice cream the night before, and this was a different category of person from the one who had eaten breakfast yesterday.
The category was small. The difference was not dramatic, but it was real. She had one more data point about what the world contained, one more proof of a kind of generosity she had not previously held evidence for. The evidence sat inside her. It did not require display. It was simply there. The mess hall served three meals a day, seven days a week, to several hundred people.
Most of those meals were functional, calories delivered in an organized way to people who needed them. Occasionally, something arrived that was more than functional, something that had no military rationale, no strategic purpose, no practical justification beyond the belief that the people eating deserved more than the minimum.
Ice cream was one of those things. It proved nothing about the war. It changed nothing about the situation. It was cold and sweet, and it melted if you waited too long, and it sat in a plain metal bowl on a metal tray and asked nothing of you except to notice it. The bowl sat empty on the tray with a thin residue of cream at the edges.
In an hour it would be washed and stacked with the others. Tomorrow it might hold the same thing again, or it might hold something else. The bowl did not know what it had contained. The bowl was a bowl, but the woman who had eaten from it carried something the bowl did not. She carried the knowledge that cold could be sweet, that effort could be applied to coldness as an act of care.
That in this particular building, at this particular table, something had been placed in front of her that had no military purpose and no strategic rationale, and existed only because someone had decided she was worth it. She wrote one more line in her notebook before lights out. Below the sentence she had written the night before, cold and sweet at the same time, she wrote, “They made it cold on purpose.
” She looked at both lines. The first was a description of a sensation. The second was a description of an intention. Together they said something she had not previously had words for, that the cold was not incidental. That someone had decided the cold was part of what she deserved. She did not know the name of whoever had made that decision.
She did not know if they had thought of it as a decision at all. She closed the notebook. Outside the camp was cold in the ordinary way. Inside the bowl, nothing remained but the faint sweet residue of something that had been worth writing down.
