If you visited the Green City Market in 2003 or 2004, you might have come across a young woman selling deliciously creamy ice cream in flavors like oven-roasted strawberry-mascarpone, gianduja, and vanilla bean. Her name was Nancy Silver, she was the pastry chef at Campagnola in Evanston, and she called her ice cream company Snookelfritz, an old German term of endearment used by her maternal grandmother.
Now 36, Silver became a vegetarian in a meat-eating family at 15, and her mother told her she’d have to cook for herself, thinking that she’d give up the idea in a day. Instead she learned how to make eggplant Parmesan and other standards from The Vegetarian Epicure, then moved on to Indian, Ethiopian, and Thai cuisines. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois she gravitated to a vegetarian cooperative, the Red Herring. She volunteered as a dishwasher the summer after her freshman year, graduated to paid cook in the fall, and except for a junior year spent studying in Israel (where she says she was wowed by the quality of the dairy products), continued part-time in that capacity until she got her BA in cultural anthropology in 1996.
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From Mod, Silver went to work for Michael Altenberg at Campagnola and also for his Bistro Campagne when it opened on Lincoln. “He was very active in the Green City Market, and that’s how I started selling my ice cream there,” she says. In early 2004 she spent a few months cooking for a caterer in Florence, Italy, but she returned for the summer market season. Around this time she began contemplating opening her own ice cream shop.
Except for organic cane sugar from Goodness Greenness, virtually all the ingredients come from Green City farmers: the milk and cream from Kilgus Farmstead, eggs and produce from several other vendors. Silver also gets inspiration from them. “Judith Schad of Capriole Farms gave me goat cheese to play with,” she says, “and I combined it with honey from the Chicago Honey Co-op to make rosemary honey and goat cheese ice cream.”
