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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Ice Cream: A General History

Chocolate, Vanilla, whatevuh:

China is the probable origin place of ice cream as a combination of ice and milk. But it's recorded that Emperor Nero had combinations of fruit and ice made during his reign of some 70 years before Christ. The ancient Greeks consumed mixed confections of snow, ice and sweets in the form of honey or fruit which were made to be sold in the agora marketplaces.

Sherbets and iced-creams were being served in the royal courts of Europe during the time of the French nobility. Published recipes for ice cream dates at least back to 1718 in New England.

There was an "iced-cream" shop in 1776 in New York City. In 1846 the first patent on a hand-cranked freezer that combined salt, ice,and dairy. Throughout the 1800s "ice cream" as a product grew, with the first factory going into production in 1851 in the city of Baltimore.

Until the invention of mechanical refrigeration, ice cream was linked closely to the business of ice distribution in its most primitive state, i.e., businesses would cut ice from lakes and ponds in winter, and store the ice in deep holes, or in ice storage buildings that were thickly walled and lined with straw. (Ancient 'ice houses' are known from archeological digs for civilizations as old as Mesopotamia.) The creation of on-demand refrigeration freed the growth of ice cream as a product and as a business.

In the United States three particular events drove ice cream toward larger audiences, one was the general economic expansion of the Harding and Coolidge years after the end of Woodrow Wilson's presidency and a subsequent mini-depression.

"Between 1919 and 1926 the national production of milk and milk products increased by one-third and that of ice-cream alone took a 45-per-cent jump." (Page 138, from Only Yesterday: Informal History of the 1920s, by Frederick Lewis Allen. Originally published 1931.)

Another item was prohibition, which closed all (legal) public bars and saloons, and the societal shift made patronage expand at ice cream parlors.

The third was the quickly decreasing cost of refrigeration throughout the 20th century. This allowed smaller and smaller businesses to be able to afford the necessary refrigeration equipment, and directly linked was home refrigeration.

For further reading about ice cream and its history, visit wikipedia or the UK Canal Museum website.

Ice Cream Cones
Recipes for the making of cones date back to at least 1888, but the combination of ice cream on a cone (versus a disposable cardboard cup) for public sale and distribution took off directly because of the 1904 St. Louis' World's Fair in which an ice cream vendor ran out of the cardboard cups, and because of the heat the next door vender selling hot waffles was having little success and came up with the idea of a substitute in the form of a rolled waffle to hold the scooped ice cream.

Photo of "Baked Fudge Ice Cream" from the Eureka Springs, Arkansas Local Flavor Cafe.

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