Ice Creams – A Coooooooooooooool History

Unfortunately, there is no documented evidence on the invention or consumption of ice creams before the 19th century.

Several favorite anecdotes were circulated on who invented ice creams.

One story goes that emperor Nero of Rome ordered his slaves to collect snow from the mountains and then added nectar, fruit pulp and honey.

Alexander the Great and King Solomon are also said to have enjoyed eating snow and ice flavored with honey and nectar.

Another narration is that Marco Polo, from his travels to China, brought with him the recipe for ice creams.

England seems to have discovered ice cream at the same time, or perhaps even earlier than the Italians. "Cream Ice," as it was called, appeared regularly at the table of Charles I during the 17th century.

France was introduced to similar frozen desserts in 1553 by the Italian Catherine de Medici when she became the wife of Henry II of France.

The first ice cream parlor was opened in America in New York City in 1776.

Commercial production was begun in North America in Baltimore, Maryland, 1851, by Mr. Jacob Fussell, now known as the father of the American ice cream industry.

In 1843, Nancy Johnson from New Jersey invented the hand-cranked ice cream churn. This worked ingeniously by agitating a container of ice cream mix in a bed of salt and ice on turning a freezer handle. The handle had to be rotated until the mix was frozen. From 1847 to 1877, more than 70 improvements to ice cream churns were patented. In the 1920s Clarence Vogt produced the first continuous process freezer which opened up the possibility for commercial ice cream manufacture. Ice cream became an edible morale symbol during World War II. Each branch of the military tried to outdo the others in serving ice cream to its troops. In 1945, the first "floating ice cream parlor" was built for sailors in the western Pacific. When the war ended, and dairy product rationing was lifted, America celebrated its victory with ice cream. The first Canadian to start selling ice cream was Thomas Webb of Toronto, a confectioner, around 1850. William Neilson produced his first commercial batch of ice cream in Toronto in 1893, and his company produced ice cream at that location for close to 100 years. There are also several intersting tales on how ice cream cones were invented. Italo Marchiony, an ice cream vendor selling home-made ice creams in a push cart, had a unique problem - his customers often wandered off with his ice cream serving glasses. To avoid this loss, he baked edible waffle cups with sloping sides and a flat bottom. These were the first cones, which he patented in 1903.

Others say that a year later, in the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, an ice cream vendor did not have enough serving glasses and so, he teamed up with a waffle vendor who rolled his product into "cornucopias”.

Invention of the ice cream soda is usually attributed to Robert M. Green, from Philadelphia. He sold a mixture of carbonated water, cream, and syrup and when he ran out of cream, he substituted cream with ice cream.

During the Victorian period, drinking soda water was considered improper and so some towns banned its sale on Sundays. An enterprising druggist in Evanston, IN, reportedly concocted a legal Sunday alternative containing ice cream and syrup, but no soda. To show respect for the Sabbath, he later changed the spelling to "sundae."

Now coming to the invention of popular ice cream flavors.

In 1983, Cookies 'N Cream, made with real Oreo cookies, became an instant hit, thereby earning the distinction of being the fastest growing new flavor in the history of the ice cream industry.

In 1991, another flavor phenomenon was created -- Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, which combines the best part of the Chocolate Chip cookie -- the raw dough -- with creamy vanilla ice cream and semi-sweet chocolate chips.

However, researchers argue that there is no historical evidence to support any of these stories. They would appear to be purely the creation of imaginative nineteenth-century ice-cream makers and vendors. Indeed, we have found no mention of any of these stories before the nineteenth century.

A book by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir, Ices: The Definitive Guide, published by Hodder and Stoughton, suggests that the historical basis of these tales is skeptical.

Chris Clarke, in his 2004 Royal Society of Chemistry monograph "The Science of Ice Cream", points out quite correctly that the history of ice cream is closely associated with the development of refrigeration techniques and can thus be traced in several stages:

• Cooling food and rink by mixing it with snow or ice
  

• The discovery that dissolving salts in water produces cooling
  

• The discovery (and spread of knowledge) that mixing salts and snow or ice cools even further in the mid to late 17th century
  

• The inclusion of cream in the water ices also evolved around this time
  

• The invention of the ice cream maker in the mid 19th century
  

• The development of mechanical refrigeration in the later 19th and early 20th centuries,

which led to the development of the modern ice cream industry.