How ice cream changed America - 4 February 1994

This I think I feel is going to be a talk about four immigrants and the story of the first two is enough to make me confess that on one great and pressing American issue I was wrong – I've changed my mind.

It's the issue what is called US English, a movement to persuade the states to write into their constitutions, they all have separate written constitutions an amendment declaring English to be the official language for all public occasions, speak your native language when you feel like it at home, at play, but in school, in court, in public business dealings and so on either speak English or be given an interpreter.

I think about 20-odd states have passed such an amendment, but two or three of the most powerful, I know, certainly in Florida, I think in Nevada where there are a million or two new Hispanic or Latino immigrants they have fiercely fought the issue as racist, discriminatory etc and had it overturned. I fear the course of US English is failing, I'm sorry but I can see now why it's probably going to be increasingly unworkable as these two cases will show.

In a decisive case 20 years ago, a judge ruled that a Chinese boy who knew no English ought not to have to try and get his education in a school where only English was spoken. What that ruling did was to start in the states receiving floods of immigrants bilingual education, teach them in their own language while they were making we hope the transition into English. Since then bilingual education has been adopted everywhere, it's well done, it's badly done and it can be wildly unjust – as a typical example, a girl with a Spanish surname, the father had skipped town, was put in a class that taught only in Spanish but she knew only English, the rule say the name determines the language. After much bureaucratic groaning and heaving she was put into a class where English was just the second language, unsatisfactory all round.

To compel English is obviously cruel and hopeless and we can no longer go back to the days when immigrants' children were dumped in English classes to sink or swim. The fatal change happened I believe when it was decided that you didn't need to speak English to vote. Since then, not two congressmen in 100 or maybe in 435 is going to insult their ethnic constituents by supporting the brave lost cause of US English.

Whenever I drive back to New York from the end of Long Island in the summer, on the back road, along the first stretch of 20 miles or so a very quiet road with nothing but vineyards, tree nurseries and an occasional very green field reaching to the horizon, a sod farm is what it is. You want a garden beside your house for a party tomorrow evening, they'll slice it up and plant it. Along this road, I have to pass a horse breeding farm, it covers about 250 acres is meticulously maintained. The triple fencing alone must have cost a fortune, so I boggle to guess at the price of 250 acres along that narrow coastal strip of the island. We keep waiting and hoping to hear any winter now that the farm will breed a runner for the Kentucky "Darby"/"Derby" so we can say the brothers are neighbours of ours. The brothers, they are the happy, I hope, end of the story, their grandfather was a German immigrant into New York with a quality or a reflex typical of the vast majority of poor city immigrants from central and southern Europe at the turn of the century, which was to seek work at once at their old job and show a willingness, which I must say was aided and abetted by the merciless labour laws, to work 14 hours a day and hope to succeed.

You will always hear about the one in a thousand who by a spark of ingenuity broke the mould of sweated labour and went off on his own and prospered. This grandfather I'm talking about was a baker, he worked long hours in a bakery until he realised that he baked as good if not better bread than the firm, so he he canvassed his neighbours. He stayed home, he bought a push cart, he got up before dawn and he baked and baked and loaded his cart and shoved it around in all weathers and sold to his neighbours on the block where he lived and then the next block. Well you can guess the rest, he had to hire an assistant then too, he branched out from bread into little cakes, I don't know how many years it took him to handover to his sons a very thriving business but his grandsons the two brothers founded a chain and delivered boxed cakes of many varieties and cookies first to New York then to the suburbs. Today, I guess it's the most far reaching delivery system in the United States. Suffice it to say that about five more years ago, the two brothers sold the business for I heard something like $200 million and then turned to realise their American dream, a horse breeding farm and there it is the most beautiful I've seen north of the blue grass country in Kentucky.

I thought of them, of their grandfather I should say when another man with a push cart died last week and gave an original not to say a gleeful twist to the immigrant story; his name was Reuben Mattus, M-A-T-T-U-S. Ruby, he emigrated from Poland in his middle teens. I suppose most immigrants always think that their country, the country of origin make the best of whatever was a favourite food at home. I don't know what distinguished the ice-cream of Reuben Mattus, but as a teenager he peddled the homemade ice-cream from a horse and wagon, he started with soliciting little sweet shops, candy stores then small restaurant, then bigger ones this went on for 30 years. And for once this is not a story of a small humble business that first crawled and then skipped to a fortune, he made a comfortable living until he was in his late 40s, then he acted on a tiny item of social observation. It was something we've all noticed but we notice it say "tut tut" or we are seduced and we move on. It's an element in the natural snobbery of all of us to believe at some point that Colombia coffee is better than our own, that French cakes must be better, Japanese raw fish, Maryland crabs, there, right there.

I believe this snobbery to be universal especially among superior people who have never tried the supposedly superior foreign dish. When I was a small boy socially pretentious people in the north of England made a point of not putting salt and pepper on the table because they'd heard the French didn't, they I was told the French put all the delicious seasoning into the cooking. Unfortunately, the tables at which I had the misfortune to run into this doctrine did not employ a French chef. Indeed in my time in the English provinces, showers of salt, sandstorms of pepper were essential to make the food not merely palatable but edible.

Well back to Reuben Mattus, old or ageing Ruby. He had the not so quaint notion that maybe his customers would pay more if he could offer them something different and in the same instant he discovered the triumphant corollary: why does this cost more, because it's different. What was different, its name. He'd given them something strange, exotic, unheard off a Danish name. He had his cartons printed up with a little map of Scandinavia oh them, I'll tell you now don't take out a microscope and don't hope ever to find the name neither as a place name nor a family name. Furthermore, it's not Danish, it's Reuben Mattus's double talk pig Latin Danish. The name he came up with was Häagen Dazs H-A-A-G-E-N hyphen D-A-Z-S and he iced the cake by giving the hyphenated word an umlaut. There is no umlaut in Danish; there isn't a word, no such word as Häagen-Dazs. I don't think we have to reach very far to prove that his instinct was sound.

I remember this was the beginning of the '60s, the vision came to Ruby in 1959. I remember a lady, an English lady, I'm sorry to say, who had many affected ways and one time in a restaurant she asked for ice-cream, probably she asked for an ice-cream insisted it must be Häagen-Dazs and bawled out the waiter when he said that was not the brand they served, he was left she hoped with the feeling of an uncultured slob. So Mr Mattus was right, he had the wit, however, once his ice-cream caught on in a big way to see that in one important way it was different. He maintained that by about 1960 ice-cream everywhere had deteriorated had gone thin and watery, I don't believe this for an instant but Reuben Mattus deeply believed it and so he thickened and enriched his new brand so as I say he charged more because it was richer and creamier, it was Häagen-Dazs. I've no idea how to pronounce it obviously since it doesn't exist in any known language.

Well the mystical belief in the superiority of Reuben Mattus's invention spread far and wide all across America onto Europe and Asia and by the time he was 71 he had hundreds of Häagen Dazs franchise stores all around the globe. He sold the name and the product to a famous old American flour firm.

Two years ago, he had another thought provoked by the new mantra coined and chanted by diet maniacs and cholesterol freaks low-fat, low-fat, low-fat. So he made and put out his very own and the wheel had come full circle. There is now available not Reuben Mattus's homemade ice-cream, but Mattus's low-fat ice-cream, it doesn't quite have the ring does it, but he was probably on to something. He didn't live long enough to find out.

Last week down in Florida on a holiday, he had a heart attack and died, he was 81.

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