From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The film opens with an empty conveyer belt, the camera moving along it to a plump layer of ice cream getting pushed out of a nozzle, then to a drizzle of molten chocolate that is run on top of that, further along the conveyer belt. The action is repeated again and again. At the next stage, a thick ribbon of ice cream is extruded over the belt at twice the speed of the previous ones. The effect is magic, reminiscent of a gymnast’s streamer trailing in the air, with the rhythm of a locomotive, or a Steve Reich composition, or a painting by Bridget Riley.
I had forgotten about Wall’s Viennetta, an unremarkable feature of childhood birthday parties, until in 2016 I was forwarded a video that had gone viral. The minute-long film of a Viennetta factory production line was widely described as hypnotic – because, well, it is. The production is almost entirely automated, with human intervention required only for quality control, exposed to us for only a second when the film ends, the camera pointed into a bin of upended rejects. This is the genius of the Viennetta, the product of a gloriously simple and mesmeric process that makes something that looks both complicated and – if I may say so – beautiful.
Two more ‘flat’ layers of ice cream and chocolate are piped on top, the mixture slumping into the undulations below it, before a spigot, wagging eagerly like the tail of a fat Labrador, pushes a snake of ice cream over that. The ice-cream blanket that tops it both disguises and discloses the sine-wave ridge beneath, and the whole thing is finished with a spray of chocolate.
The consumption of a Viennetta is a sensuous pleasure, a textural triumph. The thin layers of dark chocolate shatter as you slice it, the shards held in place by white ripples of impossibly soft ice cream. The whole thing is sumptuous: the ice cream reclines in its white folds like a woman in a Sargent painting. Both have a certain slumped decadence, even before we arrive at the decadence of ice cream itself.
An advert from 1985 for Viennetta, alongside Wall’s less well-remembered Sonata. Photo: reproduced by permission of Unilever PLC and group companies
Ice cream is a sensory delight all of its own: cold, sweet, with a texture that necessarily changes as you eat it. The best I’ve had in recent memory came from Kitty Travers’s La Grotta in south London (damson and grappa was my highlight of Christmas day). Like Wall’s, Travers also makes ice-cream cakes.
Unlike Wall’s, Travers makes her cakes by hand, but her process does have something in common with the factory: extrusion. Using a piping bag, she tops her cakes with tight florets or loose swirls of ice cream. The latter is more gentle, it plays more with the medium, highlighting its luxurious weight, like the looping shepherd’s crook at the tip of a soft serve (another time ice cream is extruded to great visual effect). Sensuality requires substance, and ice cream has substance – thickness, viscosity, weight – in abundance.
An extrusion, both watching and performing one, is equally sensual, as evidenced by how full the internet is with videos of them: pasta coiling out from its brass die, cut by a rotating blade; icing squeezed on to cupcakes (during a particularly bad weekend in the pandemic I watched tens of hours of Russian piping-nozzle reviews); the horror of dermatologists pushing spirals of blackhead up out of the skin like toothpaste from a tube. Extrusion reminds us of all sorts of fundamental physical pleasures, fond memories of squeezing through tight crawlspaces as a child, of being hugged tightly, and those more carnal forms of embrace.
A Viennetta is an extrusion that is, quite literally, frozen in time. To see one is to understand instantly the process that created it, but what you do with it is up to you. You can leave it in its box in the freezer aisle or serve one, as I did, at a New Year’s Eve dinner party. You can even allow it to melt. The slow drip of ice cream ruffle in candlelight was deeply romantic, the taste deliciously nostalgic.
Spooning fat ripples of ice cream into one’s mouth is probably one the most sensual pleasures that has ever been invented. It’s certainly the most sensual pleasure one can acceptably partake of in front of friends and family.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.