French Vanilla Ice Cream

When I was very young, making ice cream was a very involved process. The cow had to be milked and the eggs gathered before the custard could be made. If we wanted strawberries we had to pick them. For ice, we piled into the back of the pickup and headed four miles away to the Blacksburg Ice Company. On the loading dock, big men split steaming two-foot-thick slabs of ice into blocks and tossed them into deafening grinders. The frozen pellets shot into our galvanized tubs, and we carried away