FROM an interview in the New York Times Magazine with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's ice cream:
Q: Have you ever had any flavor failures?
Ben: Fred and Ginger. That's ginger ice cream with chocolate chunk bow ties. Now I happen to think that Fred and Ginger is a great flavor. There are great flavors that are well ahead of their time and don't sell that well.
Q: Did you ever meet a flavor you didn't like?
Jerry: Bubble gum ice cream. Gumdrop ice cream.
Ben: Once, while in Florida, I had something called Smurf ice cream -- it was blue with white dots. This was for research. In our business, research can be difficult and hazardous.
Q: Of your own flavors, which do you consider the best?
Ben: For some odd reason, I can't get Cherry Garcia off my mind.
Q: It's sort of a frozen Black Forest cake, right?
Ben: Except that its base is vanilla. Don't think we haven't tried frozen chocolate. It didn't work because the chocolate overpowered the cherries. There are things that are good in cake and terrible in ice cream. My first concept of Cherry Garcia was to chocolate coat the cherries and throw them in. It was really difficult for me to get a supplier who would make chocolate-coated cherries. Once we finally did, we tried them in the ice cream and they were lousy. We tried different chocolate coatings, thickness, cherries and it was still lousy. So we separated the chocolate from the cherries, because it was cracking off in the machinery. Next, I wanted whole cherries, but they wouldn't go through the machinery. Finally, we agreed on a combination of whole and half cherries.
Q: How does Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead feel about being a flavor?
Ben: He's honored. It's a good flavor. Plus he gets his royalty. We've since gotten flavor suggestions that pay tribute to other '60s cultural heroes: the Almond Brothers, Mint Jagger.