There are those few food items you could eat forever. Even those of you who don’t consider yourselves great food lovers will always buckle down when pressed, and admit that there is at least one dish that you do that "happy because you’re eating dance" to. And you all know what I’m talking about. Don’t pretend.

We have a couple of those items in my house, and they’re dangerous. It’d be fine if the food items we loved the most were the healthiest for us, and I consider those carrying on torrid affairs with lo-fat salad dressing and skim milk lucky the same way I’m jealous of some people’s natural love of international finance and investment strategy. But it’s safe to say that those things that we have the capacity to eat ad infinitum are the same ones that, if consumed infinitely, will kill us before we see cheap high definition televisions (and, by the power of Greyskull, I will have one of those).

One of the greatest things standing between multimedia bliss and me is ice cream. This might be the most common food fetish, it’s availability ranging across the economic spectrum from free-standing summer shacks to Fore Street, from the corporate Ben & Jerry’s in the mall to Maine’s own Beal’s. Compounding this is the recent addition of no less than five new ice-cream shops in the Greater Portland area, either already opened, or opening soon: Super Scoops in South Portland, Baskin & Robbins and Cold Stone Creamery in the Old Port, and Classic Custard and Toot’s, both in Yarmouth. It’s shouldn’t be a huge surprise, then, to find that despite the weather, New Englanders annually consume about 25 percent of the nation’s ice cream.

Like many processed edibles, the roots of ice cream are hard to pin down. There are Western theories that Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar sent slaves to climb the snowy peaks of the Apennines to freeze fruit juices for a treat in the first century AD; Eastern historians claim that the frozen ices that Marco Polo brought back from the Far East in the thirteenth century had been enjoyed there for more than a thousand years. The debate continues as to who first started adding cream to these frozen sweets, Europe or Asia, but the first documented fact is that Catherine de Medici introduced an early version of ice cream to France upon her marriage to the Duke de Orleans in 1533.

Adding to this unilateral effort to produce this exploding phenomenon was a Spanish physician, Blausius Villafranca (making my Top 10 Best Names Ever list), who began to use ice sprinkled with saltpeter for freezing cream in 1560. By 1700, books devoted entirely to "iced cream"-making were available, and people on the streets of Europe were enjoying ice cream very much like we do in the Old Port today.

There are essentially two types of ice cream — I won’t get into details on sherbet, ices, sorbets, granites, and other non-cream-based frozen desserts here, although all of them can be quite fine — those made with frozen milk, cream, sugar, and eggs, and those made with just frozen milk, cream, and sugar. The eggy types go by a few different names depending on slight ingredient and production variations, some of which might be familiar: frozen custard, gelato, French ice cream, Neapolitan ice cream, or New York ice cream. The latter is usually called either regular old ice cream or Philadelphia style, and is slightly less rich but easier, and cheaper, to make.

Compounding the confusion as to which style you’re getting is the looseness of the terms described above. Ben & Jerry’s, for example, puts egg yolks in almost all of its ice creams, and doesn’t differentiate production styles. Many restaurants have started calling any ice cream they offer "gelato," even though gelato has distinctive differences that puts it into a sub-category of it’s own: It should have a much more intense flavor and a thicker texture than regular ice cream or frozen custard because of the inclusion of more egg yolks. Purists would claim that gelato can only be served from a gelateria in Italy, but as a purist myself, I realize that we rarely put forth suggestions of any applicable use to the greater population.

And while eggs play an important role in how rich your ice cream is, perhaps the most important factor in determining the price and potency of the product is its overrun. This is the amount of air incorporated into the freezing mixture during processing. Without air, the ice cream would be hard as a rock and impossible to scoop. Too much air, however, makes the product fluffy, bland tasting, and warm in your mouth. Thus, it is the amount of overrun (expressed in a percent of the volume; if you start with one pint of mix and get two pints of ice cream, that’s 100 percent overrun) that determines its quality. Bulk ice cream, sold by the scoop, usually has 90 to 100 percent overrun. Premium ice cream has 60 to 85 percent, and super premium — Ben & Jerry’s, Haagen Dazs, Cold Stone Creamery — have only 20 to 40 percent. Gelato has 10 percent.

So get out there, people, and use this knowledge to your benefit — ask that counter gal or guy just what you’re looking at for overrun when you hand over your two quid. We must become whom we were born to be as New Englanders: informed ice-cream eaters, high definition television-free and accepting it more and more with every creamy bite.

Andy King can be reached at dinnerwithandy@yahoo.com