Roman Emperor Nero
Chinese Royal Palace
Catherine de Medici
BombeIn France, toward the middle of the 1700's, the recipe changed some more as ice cream began to be made with an egg yolk custard base.
A Reception with George and Martha Washington
The first time the actual words "ice cream" were used to describe that frozen dessert was in 1744 in the Americas. It is said that the Maryland Governor, Thomas Bladen, served strawberry ice cream to impress his important guests. In 1784 ice cream became a favorite of George and Martha Washington, who bought "a cream machine made for ice" and delighted in serving the frozen dessert at gatherings. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson brought a vanilla ice cream recipe back from France.
Ladies Eating Ice Cream
During the 1790's ice cream was all the rage in New York. New flavors were introduced such as lemon, pineapple and raspberry. Dolly Madison created a sensation by serving ice cream at her husband's second inaugural ball in 1813. Soon ice cream recipes began to appear in cookbooks and some people would make their own ice cream at home. Still, some maintained that cold foods and drinks were unhealthy and bad for digestion.
Nancy Johnston's Hand-Cranked Ice Cream Churn
But making ice cream wasn't easy. It was done in a pewter pot kept in a bucket of ice and salt. The ice cream mixture had to be regularly stirred by hand with a "spaddle," which resembled a spade with a long handle. All this changed in 1843 with the invention of the hand-cranked ice cream freezer by Nancy Johnston, an American. Her patented invention consisted of a wooden bucket that would be filled with ice and salt and had a rotating handle. In the middle was a metal container to hold the ice cream. By "churning the cream" you could produce ice cream with a smooth and even texture.
Jacob Fussell
Jacob Fussell, a milk dealer of Baltimore, Maryland, set up the first ice cream "factory" in 1851. He shipped his ice cream in trains packed with ice to Washington D.C., Boston and New York, earning the title of the father of the wholesale ice cream industry. From then on, ice cream popularity skyrocketed. Other inventions were made to make ice cream better and faster such as William Clewell's mechanical ice cream scoop in 1878.
Ice Cream Sundaes
In 1880, the ice cream sundae was born. Many places fight over where it was invented. The most common story is that started in Evanston, Illinois, when it became illegal to serve ice cream sodas on Sundays. So the soda fountains tried topping the ice cream with different syrups, peanuts, or apple cider, to get around the rule. They called this new dessert the sunday. The name went through various spelling changes such as "sundi," "sundhi," and "sundaye" before it was called the sundae as we know it today.
Waffle Cone
The popular story of the origin of ice cream cone is that it was invented by accident at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair when an ice cream vender ran out of dishes and a Syrian immigrant nearby, named Ernest Hamwi offered his waffle-like Zalabia pastry to be rolled up as ice cream cones. However, there are several others that claim to be the first inventor. A couple of them were at the same World's Fair. A man named Abe Doumar was apparently already selling cornucopia shaped waffles with a scoop of ice cream, and a Turkish native claimed he sold edible cones at the fair as well. Since there reportedly were around fifty ice cream stands and many waffle shops, it's hard to know for sure who was the first. We can say for sure that the St. Louis World Fair was the place where cones became popular, though they weren't called cones. They were called "World's Fair Cornucopias."
Ice Cream Cart
Before the fair, venders in the US sold their ice cream in a small glass called a "penny lick," or they wrapped the ice cream in wax paper referred to as a hokey pokey from the Italian 'ecco un poco' which means 'try a little.' The closest thing to an ice cream cone had been used by the French and was made out of pastry, paper, or even metal. There is an English recipe for cones to be used to serve ice cream in Mrs. Marshall's Cookery Book from 1888. And there's a story that a mold for the cone was patented a year before the fair, by a man from New York named Italo Marchiony. He had been using cones to sell lemon ices from his pushcart for almost seven years. The flat-bottom cone didn't appear till the late 1940's when it was invented by Joseph Shapiro so workers at Dairy Queen could stand the cones on the counter.
Ice Cream Parlor
The US Prohibition Act in 1920 forced many bar owners to turn their bars in to ice cream parlors. Beer-makers switched to making ice cream and in nine years, the annual American ice cream consumption went from 260 million gallons to 365 million gallons.
The first commercial continuous process freezer came out in 1926, invented by H. H. Miller, making ice cream producing faster and more efficient.
Sailor Eating Ice Cream
In 1927, Americans were not only eating ice cream, they started singing about it, as the "Ice Cream song" ("I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!") was written by Billy Moll, Howard Johnson, and Robert King. But it wasn't until three years later that grocery stores actually sold the stuff. Even then, there was no good way to keep it frozen at home until the refrigerator/freezer unit was invented in 1939.
During World War II, ice cream was banned in Italy by Mussolini because it had become an American symbol. The US Armed Forces noticed that ice cream was a real morale booster and soon they became the world's largest ice cream manufacturer. They even designed a way for ice cream to be made in the gunner compartment of an aircraft bomber!
So Many Flavors
