In her debut cookbook, the Nashville pastry chef turns ice cream into an archive of Black joy, Southern memory, and sensory style.

There is something inherently fashionable about ice cream: its gloss, its melt, its flirtation with color and excess. In Ice Cream Queen: Flavors from Black America’s Past, Present, & Future, Lokelani Alabanza understands that pleasure is never merely decorative. Her scoops are styled like statements—salted watermelon pink, hibiscus red, mint-chip green—but beneath the palette is a deeper project: reclaiming the frozen dessert as a vessel for Black culinary history, family memory, and contemporary imagination.

Alabanza, a Nashville-based pastry chef and founder of Saturated Ice Cream, arrives at the page with the confidence of someone who has spent years thinking through flavor as both craft and language. The book’s title nods to Sarah Estell, a free Black woman who ran a successful ice cream saloon in nineteenth-century Nashville and became known as “the Ice Cream Queen.” That lineage gives the cookbook its emotional architecture. This is not a novelty dessert book dressed up in retro charm; it is a cultural document with a lacquered, high-summer sheen.

The recipes move with the range of a well-edited runway: familiar silhouettes, radical fabrications. Malted Vanilla and Roasted Strawberry offer clean, classic lines, while Nashville Hot Chicken, PB&J, Juneteenth Sorbet, and Chocolate-Covered Kettle Chip push the collection toward playful provocation. Alabanza’s best ideas understand contrast as glamour—sweet against salt, nostalgia against invention, archival research against the immediacy of a cold spoon on the tongue.

For a culture and fashion reader, the seduction lies in the way Ice Cream Queen treats taste as an aesthetic system. Color, texture, temperature, and story become materials. The book’s visual world leans into saturation: creamy pastels, jewel-toned sorbets, and flavors that read almost like accessories—each one bright enough to complete a look, intimate enough to summon a grandmother’s freezer, a holiday table, a neighborhood shop, or a city’s particular heat.

What keeps the book from floating away on sweetness is Alabanza’s insistence on history. She situates ice cream within Black American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, drawing attention to makers whose contributions have too often been softened, obscured, or erased. The result is generous rather than didactic. Her tone invites readers to churn, taste, remember, and reconsider. Dessert becomes an act of attention.

If there is a critique, it is that the book’s exuberance may occasionally overwhelm readers looking for a strictly practical kitchen manual. But that is also its point. Ice Cream Queen is not only about what to make; it is about what a recipe can hold. Alabanza asks ice cream to carry history, pleasure, and future-facing fantasy—and, remarkably, it does.

Verdict: Lush, researched, and irresistibly styled, Ice Cream Queen is a cookbook that belongs as much on a coffee table as beside an ice cream maker. It is a celebration of Black creativity in its most pleasurable form: cold, colorful, and impossible to ignore.