For Virginia Cooper, the taste of summer can be summed up as a mixture of milk, sugar, bananas, oranges and lemons and cream -- sour cream, that is.
Cooper debuted that flavor, which she calls Summer Scoop ice cream, at the Big Chill ice-cream social at Grace Court Park yesterday afternoon.
About 100 people attended the social, which featured live jazz, about 20 flavors of homemade ice cream and local celebrities sitting on blocks of ice to raise money.
The social raised about $5,400, which will go to The Shalom Project, a community development initiative of Green Street United Methodist Church and the West Salem neighborhood.
The project serves area families in a number of ways, including an after-school program, food pantry, health clinic and pharmacy and the Peters Creek Community Initiative that was established to encourage economic development on Peters Creek Parkway.
The project recently received a $31,000 grant from the Kate B. Reynolds Foundation, said Eileen Ayuso, the project's executive director.
The grant came with a challenge to raise $10,000 by July 31, and the Big Chill was part of the strategy her group is using to raise that money, Ayuso said.
The social was modeled after the Downtown Church Center's event the Big Chill, which was held for many years at Grace Court and ended about eight years ago.
The church center was organized in 1968 and included a broad range of churches in the downtown area that banded together to tackle a variety of social problems.
Cooper, her ice cream, and her church, Lloyd Presbyterian, took top honors in the ice-cream contest. She said that substituting sour cream for the more usual heavy cream made the difference in the ice cream's unusual flavor.
Kent Smith's dark chocolate Toblerone ice cream won second prize, with its Toblerone candy bars melted into a chocolate ice-cream base.
Smith was one of several male ice-cream makers at the event. He said that men bring a certain fearlessness to the task.
"We don't mind making it extra fattening," he said.
Maurice Shivers, 14, called himself an "ice-cream anarchist" who doesn't normally care for ice cream.
He said that a homemade peach ice cream from Green Street Church met with his approval. "I thought, ‘I don't like peach but I might like peach if it's made by the right person,'" he said.
Mabel Johnson said that one of her fondest childhood memories was making homemade ice cream with bottles of maraschino cherries.
"Daddy would break the ice with the hatchet," she said, "and I'd do the churn."
Jane and Jack Dougherty entered two flavors, burnt peach ice cream and watermelon sorbet.
Their watermelon flavor took third prize, though the Doughertys were modest about the success.
Jack Dougherty outlined the couple's method: "Surf the net, find a recipe, give it a try."
■ Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com.
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