The Melba Ice Creamery: The Inside Scoop

          Around a year ago, Purple Cow, a Lawrenceville ice creamery, had closed, its owners retiring after years of serving the Lawrenceville community. They had been looking for someone to buy their shop and continue their work, and finally, the owner of The Gingered Peach, Joanne Canady-Brown, stepped in. Purple Cow was renamed the Melba Ice Creamery, after a cooked peaches and ice cream dessert, making this shop the first expansion of Canady-Brown’s peach-themed food empire. Though a few students have said they miss the old shop, most are thrilled with Melba’s quality ice cream, hand-made in the back of the shop. 

          In an interview with Canady-Brown, she describes her extensive ice cream making process. She begins by making the base, a mixture of organic milk, 40 percent heavy cream, sugar, and stabilizers (natural substances that prevent the ice cream from turning icy). After cooking the base, Canady-Brown leaves it in a freezer at -15° C for 24 hours to improve its taste. The next day, she puts the base into one of the shop’s two ice cream churning machines and adds whatever other ingredients go into the flavor being made. Afterwards, the ice cream goes back in the freezer for another 24 hours because. as Canady-Brown says, “time equals flavor, so the more patient [she is], and the longer [she waits], the better [the] outcome is going to be.” And the outcome certainly is delicious, with many unique flavors switching in and out weekly.

While Melba’s offers the typical flavors of Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Mint Chocolate Chip, it also boasts many other special new combinations. To start with, there are three flavors that Canady-Brown calls their “homage flavors.” One is the iconic Purple Cow, a black raspberry ice cream with chocolate chips, a tribute to the current shop’s predecessors. Another is the Jamaican Sorrel Sorbet, based on a drink called sorrel from Jamaica, where Canady-Brown’s husband is from. “[She] took [the] traditional Jamaican beverage and reinvented it as an ice cream” with spices and ginger mixed in with red wine. The third homage flavor is the Jumpin’ Johnnie, in honor Candy-Brown’s grandmother, the woman who taught her how to bake. It features a ginger caramel swirl and chewy oat streusel mixed into a sweet brown sugar ice cream, a mixture of all of her grandmother’s favorite flavors. The rest of the flavors are mostly “whatever [Canady-Brown] just [feels] like making.” After running a store in Lawrenceville for so long, Canady-Brown is “in a really beautiful position” as “the customers trust. . .[her] palette, and they trust [her] decisions, so that [she] really just makes things [she] would want to eat.” These flavors include the Rockiest of Roads (chocolate ice cream, roasted almonds, crispy rice pearls, fluff swirl and mini marshmallows), Cardamom Clement Sorbet (sweet and citrusy clementine puree paired with floral cardamom), Salted Caramel, and more. Additionally, seasonal flavors will switch as the weather changes throughout the year, the current flavors being Honey Lavender and Roasted Pumpkin Spice. Finally, Canady-Brown says that Melba will “make some flavors that a customer asks for,” so any Lawrenceville students with flavorful new ideas should head on over, buy some ice cream, and pitch their ideas to the shop. Students of the Lawrenceville School who just wanted a second Purple Cow will surely come to love this new shop, even with its differences. 

          In fact, many students, both new and returning, have already traveled across Main Street to try out Melba, and it seems that as of now, the outlook on the shop is positive. Catarina Correa ’26 and Miu Baholyodhin ’26 joined the school this September and have stopped by Melba a handful of times. The pair remarked that the magic of Melba does not lie in its flavors as much as its prime location. “Melba is a place where Lawrenceville students socialize and meet new faces,” Correa remarked when asked of her favorite aspect of Melba. Indeed, the upbeat music and lively chatter in Melba makes for a cheerful social setting. Baholyodhin, on the other hand, described the store as “comfortable and cozy,” noting that it is her go-to stop to finish homework. Baholyodhin states that compared to Starbucks, Melba is far less crowded, and unlike The Ginger Peach, the seating at Melba is very convenient. The pair agreed that the newly established ice-cream store’s five minute walk from the crescent makes it “very convenient” for them.

With all the factors added together, Correa and Baholyodhin both confidently rate Melba very highly. Even former regulars at Purple Cow speak positively about Melba. Christine Wu ’25 was especially content with the continuation of Purple Cow’s iconic flavor, the Purple Cow. She sees the continuance of the ice-cream flavor as a part of carrying on a distinctly Lawrenceville memory.