It’s never too cold to eat ice cream, is it? Author Leonhard Hieronymi and photographer Christian Metzler have eaten, rated and photographed Pinocchio sundae all over Germany. The result is a delightful panopticon with cream
Each and every one of us knows what a Pinocchio sundae looks like: It has a long waffle nose that sticks in a milk ice cream ball head that is in turn on a larger body of ice. Also: two chocolate lentils and an edible hat. The rest is fantasy. Or boredom, depending on the situation. In search of the forms that a Pinocchio sundae can take, the author Leonhard Hieronymi and his former school friend, the photographer Christian Metzler, visited as many ice cream parlors in Germany as they could reach in nine days. How do you get such a strange idea? “There hasn’t been a book on Pinocchio sundae.” Now there is one. It is a work full of wit and tragedy.
Armed with pills from Doppelherz and Tetesept powder to compensate for the vitamin deficiency, the friends drive a distance of 2500 kilometers to 125 ice cream parlors in all federal states in order not only to photograph the Pinocchio creations on offer, but also to eat them. A self-experiment that soon degenerates into an endurance test. Not only because the duo eats an average of ten sundaes a day, but also because it is not that easy as a grown man to order a children’s cup. At “Eis Dolomiti” in Königstein, for example, they want to assemble the Pinocchio just for children. An additional euro solves the problem. In other places the staff is more persistent. Still other ice cream parlors have closed, with the result that “only” 91 Pinocchios are served and eaten – a workload that makes even die-hard dessert eaters sweat on their foreheads. The weariness comes on the third day: “We can no longer see vanilla,” noted Hieronymi in his travel report.
Gradually the road trip turns into a tour de force, the protagonists seem trapped in a time loop: the marmot greets every day, sometimes every hour, uh Pinocchio ice cream. Again and again there are arguments between friends because the increased sugar consumption apparently makes them aggressive. A low point occurs in Bremen’s “Gelateria e Panini Da Ros”, where the Pinocchio turns out to be Maya the bee because “there were no more ears in stock”. The previously unthinkable happens: Maya the bee ends up in the garbage.
In Vechta, Lower Saxony, the mug served in “Gino’s Café” looks “like a car driver who had an accident on the A1”. In Leipzig, passers-by can watch one of the authors desperately after visiting the “Härlein ice cream parlor”: “You don’t want to build it! You don’t want to build it! ”Exclaims. “In almost every ice cream parlor we go to the bathroom to wash our sticky hands. The ice cards are always covered with a thin, peeling layer of plastic that is extremely sticky. There are ice stains on our cell phones, the screens are greasy, our pants and shirts are full of vanilla. “
Incidentally, Stuttgart turns out to be the “most hostile to Pinocchio sundae” city in Germany. In only one of the seven ice cream parlors visited, the two are served the requested dish. Overall, the yield varies considerably. The palette ranges from carelessly piled-up ice towers to filigree constructions on a cream and strawberry bed. The ice-cream eaters in Friolzheim experience a highlight in the “Gelateria Goia”: In a bowl that resembles a cartoon character with a hat and hair, there are two ice-cream balls as eyeballs with eyebrows made of apple strips.
Nevertheless, the résumé is shocking: “I wish,” said Metzler, “that there had already been a book about Pinocchio ice cream. Then we would have been spared all that. “
