On HP Lovecraft and Ice Cream: Honoring Lovecraft's Birthday

It's that time of year again. H.P. Lovecraft's birthday is just around the corner on August 20. While some will dismiss the merits of honoring a dead man who has been in the ground for more years than he enjoyed in the sun, others seek to mark the occasion. Lovecraftian birthday rites are more important for those of us who remain here, as a way to measure the impact his work has had upon our lives.

How to Celebrate H.P. Lovecraft's Birthday

How, then, to honor the occasion of Lovecraft's birth every year it ticks by? Parties, conventions, readings, and tours in Providence have rightly taken place over the years, but the right culinary mood is often overlooked. What's a celebration without the right fare for guests? Only a handful of serious Lovecraftians patch together formal birthday gatherings each year, but for those who do, it's worth examining foods that make an appropriate centerpiece.

Birthday purists will inevitably research what foods Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself enjoyed. HPL was a notoriously cheap and flippant eater, in a time when dietary concerns for obesity and other physiological disorders was barely acknowledged. While it would be unwise, not to mention undesirable, to duplicate his eating habits all year around, celebrating Lovecraft's birthday is one time where his tradition looks tasty and reasonable.

 
Why Ice Cream?

His enormous sweet tooth is the stuff of legend, forever lifted from his personal correspondence, and enshrined in official biographies like S.T. Joshi's I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. While Lovecraft was extraordinarily partial to sugar saturated coffee, Hershey's chocolate bars, and pie, there's one rich delicacy that really stands out: ice cream. Throughout the roaring twenties and into the austere thirties, he frequented gourmet ice cream parlors as a favorite treat. In a 1931 letter to J. Vernon Shea, Lovecraft writes, "But I more often take ice cream, of which my favourite flavours are vanilla & coffee (the latter hard to get outside New England) & my least relished common flavour is strawberry."

Fortunately, ice cream is neither scarce nor hard to store today, which makes it a perfect way to toast HPL's legacy. The explosion of widely accessible flavors and other ice cream based dessert concoctions means it's highly adaptable, and there's almost certainly something for everyone in this frozen arena. Besides, Lovecraftians who wish to take matters a notch higher will realize it goes well with pie, another sweet temptation of the Providence writer.

Several other factors make ice cream a prime choice as well. In many regions where Lovecraft is best known, the icy dessert is at its popular zenith during the warmest months. Additionally, it can be easily passed out at parties, and makes irresistible bait for organizers hoping to set up an ice cream social based on Lovecraft's work. Finally, bold Lovecraftian cooks have stepped forward in recent years to create Cthulhuvian cakes and other outlandish confections. Ice cream, though, is just as malleable, and offers the ultimate challenge to culinary artists seeking to sculpt unspeakable Cthulhu Mythos horrors.

It's not entirely unreasonable to imagine H.P. Lovecraft sparking a tiny culinary following in the years to come. After all, who can resist the draw of blasphemously delicious Sundaes that double as evil idols?

-Grim Blogger