Digging In to The Great Gatsby

I walked into Clementine’s Naughty & Nice Cream on a mission one spring afternoon. Actually, I was there on business—I needed to taste Jay Gatsby. You see, in celebration of 100 years of Fitzgerald’s novel, Clementine’s has crafted 4 Great Gatsby inspired scoops: a rose sorbet; a chamomile and apricot ice cream in pale green; a golden turmeric and cacao nib concoction inspired by the opening epigraph; and one inspired by 1920’s cologne notes, swirled with floral ripples, butterscotch shards, and a woodsy base. This last one, called “Old Sport,” was the green light I was after. In fact, I was promised by Clementine’s Goldbelly listing that one bite “captures the essence of embracing Jay Gatsby or Nick Carraway.” Through a scoop of ice cream and a spoon, I somehow would soon know what it was like to hug Gatsby and Nick, as well as taste what such an embrace would be like. This truly was a Great Gatsby experience unlike any I’d encountered before.

I’ve read The Great Gatsby many time, written about it maybe even more, and thought of it perhaps in a way that waivers on obsession, but I would call it passion. As such, I’ve had my fair share of Gatsby related experiences—from immersive plays to visiting high school discussions. However, my relationship with Fitzgerald’s characters is strictly on the page. But encountering Gatsby and the narrator Nick as ice cream, was a new experience, and I have certainly never considered what the pair would taste like, smell like, or feel like in such a corporeal sense. But this isn’t corporeal, really—I mean, it’s ice cream! But one scoop of “Old Sport” opened a new question for me: what would it be like to encounter Fitzgerald’s characters in this more sensory way? Does it point anywhere meaningful within the text? And why does this strange synesthetic ice cream flavor feel right for The Great Gatsby? As I bit into my ice cream, I wondered if through taste, I could read my favorite novel even closer, a little differently—and not just because I was trading pages for sweet cream and words for butterscotch shards.

This was not just a Gatsby inspired ice cream, but something different—not just a character scooped into a cone like trading Daisy for the daisies of chamomile but an imagined experience translated into a taste. When Clementine’s announced their Gatsby at 100 flavor lineup, I was quick to demand more information. And I truly do mean demand. Clementine’s and I had a one sided feud for a day while I pleaded in Instagram comments for more insights into the flavors and their inspirations. Whoever runs their social media coyly refused. I suppose this added to the mystery of Gatsby ice cream, as though I was some version of Nick at a party searching for answers about the mysterious Gatsby, but this is a very generous reading of my annoyance. But, I did find my answers on Goldbelly, a luxury food service that will ship gourmet foods from across the globe to your doorstep. Think Laduree macarons straight to your door or artisanal literary ice cream shipped on dry ice overnight. “Old Sport,” although related to the characters of the novel, is described as “a tribute to the fragrant accords of men’s cologne from the early 1920s” rather than pulling from flavors directly mentioned in the book. For example, Nick serves lemon bars to Daisy and Gatsby at their reunion tea. So this isn’t just a hug as ice cream or Nick and Jay as ice cream but also 20s cologne, its scent, as ice cream. Tasting a smell, a concept, a person—there were a lot of layers to these flavor notes, and it was complex. I don’t think I’ve ever had cedar ice cream with lavender and violet, and I’m certain I’ve never consumed the idea of holding a fictional character wearing expensive cologne. That’s a specific image. Me embracing Jay Gatsby, the smell of his cologne getting caught in my throat. Yeah, I love Gatsby, but that’s weird even for me.

This flavor gets closer to Nick and Jay than even the novel does. Beautifully written, obliquely introspective in its use of symbols and imagery, but Fitzgerald’s work reveals little about these characters outside of the direct context of the plot. What I know about Nick and Gatsby are only details relevant to the story: where they’re from, what they do on the weekends, what they care about, what their houses look like. In fact, symbols allude to more emotional states and character traits than anything the characters themselves reveal directly. I understand what kind of person they are rather than who they are. Overall, they’re lyrical archetypes fashioned into an American allegory. I don’t know what Nick or Gatsby really even do for fun, their likes and dislikes aside from Daisy, and Gatsby’s job as a bootlegger is only ever implied. Even as the most devoted reader, I’m not particularly close to them—I’m close to the story, the prose, the overall work of Fitzgerald, but I’m not so close to Nick or Jay that I feel as though I could reach out and touch them, hug them, smell them. What does Nick even look like? Gatsby is “gorgeous” but in what ways? I understand effects without truly seeing their source. There are so many details in the novel about what flowers Gatsby grows at his mansion’s gates or the guests he invites to his parties or the decor Nick sets in his sitting room for tea, but the personal, physical traits of Nick and Gatsby specifically are largely unknown. Instead, what is revealed about Nick or Gatsby is indirect through symbols—the green light shows this or that about dreaming in relation to Gatsby or the way he leans on a clock suggesting being stuck in time, but at the surface, this says nothing about who I would see, hold, and smell as the ice cream suggests. 

So how does this ice cream factor into The Great Gatsby? Is it just tangentially related, maybe drawn from some one-off reference to a toilet set? That’s not how I felt when I was eating it, not that it felt like wrapping my favorite novel in my arms—characters or otherwise. No, it was just like the symbols I’ve savoured with each reading. It points to somewhere I can feel but can’t exactly name, an essence rather than a concrete trait. I closed my eyes and tasted. Like the flowery descriptions I love so much, there is something sensuous in the experience of eating ice cream, activating one of my senses in the way Fitzgerald’s imagined world draws elaborate scenes. I couldn’t quite find the notes I’d been promised, unable to pin down the exact flavor. I knew it was sweet and inviting, easy to enjoy but complex and somehow undefinable despite being given an ingredient list. Enigmatic, alluring, a little pretentious and yet approachable—this is how I know Gatsby, too. That is, this is how Nick describes him, the man he so admires. This was Jay Gatsby or Nick Carraway telling readers about Gatsby, and not because it resembled some cologne they might wear. This ice cream was a concept of a concept like a symbol of a symbol, capturing a feeling rather than anything concrete, which is exactly what Gatsby and Nick are. Fitzgerald’s work is sprinkled with these kinds of moments—like when Gatsby holds a glass of chartreuse to represent the larger symbol of the green light—and Clementine’s perfectly captured Fitzgerald’s prose and his memorable but nondescript main characters.