As I write this, the second-southernmost state of the Commonwealth of Australia is steadily being slow-roasted into hellish oblivion. For the third week in a row, we’re having temperatures over 30’c. And that is what has inspired this posting about the history of ice-cream.
Heaven, I’m in Heaven, and my heart beats so, that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek…
Where Does Ice-Cream Come From?
Variations of ice-cream have existed for centuries. Cold, sweet foods which contained ice as a main ingredient date back to ancient times, in cultures as far apart as China and Ancient Persia (Iran, today), all the way to the Roman Empire. But how did ancient man produce these sweet, cooling treats, without freezers or refrigerators?
The First ‘Ice-Cream’
The first versions of ice-cream, which emerged in these ancient cultures, used crushed snow as the main ingredient. To the snow (stored in caves during hot weather, or harvested from mountains which remained cold all-year-round), various ingredients were added, depending on the tastes of the consumers, and the country of manufacture.
The first ice-creams of a sort, were fruit-based, and one of the main ingredients were fruit-juices, or purees. Of course, you could add anything you wanted to the ice; other ingredients included rosewater, saffron, or the crushed pulp of berries.
Living in the boiling climates that they do, it was the Arabians who developed ice-cream as we might know it today. Originally, the fruit that they added to crushed ice was not only to give it flavour, but also to sweeten it.
Eventually, Arabian innovators changed the recipe to improve taste and texture. To do this, sweetened milk was added to the ice instead of fruit, to create bulk and substance. And they used pure sugar, rather than the sugars found in fruit, to provide the sweetness. For the first time in history (about 900A.D.), we had our first ‘iced cream’, which literally combined ice, and cream (okay, milk…), to form a dessert that would remain popular for millenia.
The Spread of Ice-Cream
It took a while, but by the early 1700s, ice-cream was becoming popular all over the world. Recipes varied from country to country, but it was catching on fast. There were a few false starts and mistakes during the early years, but even these apparent failures gave us desserts which have survived the test of time, and became regional varieties of ice-cream; Italian gelato is one example of this.
Ice-cream became very popular in Europe. In France and Italy, and then eventually in England, too. By the late 1600s and early 1700s, ice-cream recipes had appeared, printed in a number of languages, including French and English. One of the earliest recipes for ice-cream in English dates to 1718! “Ice Cream” first appears as a dictionary-entry in 1744!
During the 1790s and the early 1800s, French aggression (remember a little chap named Bonaparte?) on the European mainland was driving Italians away from their homes. Italian refugees fled across the Channel to England, bringing their ice-creaming technology and skills with them.
Even before then, however, the popularity of ice-cream was spreading even further, and this sweet, cool dessert reached the Americas in the mid-and-late 1700s. The first ice-cream parlour in the ‘States opened in New York City in 1776. Ice-cream had been introduced to the colonials by Quaker migrants from Europe. Thomas Jefferson’s favourite flavour was supposedly vanilla.
How Do you Make Ice-Cream?
I hear you. How do you make ice-cream? They didn’t have freezers back then. They didn’t have fridges. And surely you can’t get ice and snow all year ’round? How did they make it in the summer, for example, when ice-cream would’ve been most popular? What, and more importantly, how, to do, when all the ice and snow is gone!?
Come to our aid, O great science of chemistry.
As far back as the early 1700s, housewives and professional ice-cream sellers had cracked the code of making ice-cream without all the fancy freezing and chilling apparatus which we take for granted today. Here’s how it’s done.
First, you need a pot or a can made of metal. Into this can, you put the ingredients of your ice-cream. The cream or milk, the flavorings and so-forth.
Find a larger pot. Line the bottom of the pot with ice. Lots of it. Put the smaller pot inside the larger pot, and pack in the space on the sides with even more ice. Now, just add salt.
A LOT of salt.
One particular recipe calls for a whole pound of salt.
what happens here, you ask?
The salt mixes with the ice, and the ice begins to melt.
The salty water is kept cold by the ice that hasn’t melted yet. And since salty water has a lower freezing temperature than pure water, the remaining ice can act on the salty water for a lot longer than it might otherwise do. And this drives the temperature of the salt-water-ice mix down even further.
This whole process is aided by putting the entire concoction of ice, salt, water and ice-cream, into the basement or cellar. The cold air slows down the melting of the ice that hasn’t already melted, and so the whole process is prolonged and lengthened out. The result is that the ice and saltwater slurry chills the sides of the interior pot or canister inside the main ice-pot. This, in turn, freezes the ice-cream mix inside the inner pot. Once the process is complete…you have ice-cream!
Simple.
Okay, not so simple.
The problem with this method is that, while it worked, it took a very long time. Up to four hours. When’s the last time you waited four hours to eat ice-cream?
A faster method of making ice-cream was needed. And in the early 1800s, that method arrived, in the United States…
Machine-Made Ice-Cream!
Since the early 1700s, ice-cream had been made the slow way. You filled a can with ice-cream, you sat it in a basin of ice and salt, and let basic laws of science do the rest. It produced a great result, at the expense of a lot of time. Something better had to be found to produce ice-cream in greater quantities, or at least, smaller quantities at a faster pace!
Enter…this:
Believe it or not, but this is the world’s first-ever purpose-built ice-cream maker.
Yes. That.
It was invented in 1843 by Nancy Johnson, a lady from New Jersey, in the United States.
How does it work, you ask? It works more or less the same as the previous method mentioned above, except this one takes more muscle. It produces ice-cream in the following way:
1. Put your ice-cream mixture into the interior canister.
2. Fill the bucket with ice, and salt.
3. Turn the crank.
And how exactly does this produce ice-cream?
Constantly turning the crank moved the interior can around in the slurry of saltwater and ice. This nonstop agitation mixed up the ice and water, but also mixed up the ice-cream. The result is that more of the ice-cream mixture gets to contact the freezing cold sides of its metal container, which means that the temperature of the ice-cream batch on a whole, decreases much faster. The faster you crank, the faster this happens, and the sooner you get ice-cream!
A bonus of the Johnson method of ice-cream making was that you also got ice-cream of a much better texture. The previous method, of simply freezing the cream in a bucket of icy saltwater produced a sort of ice-cream lump, similar to an ice-cube. The constant agitation produced by the hand-cranked freezer was that mixing the ice-cream around inside its receptacle prevented it from clumping together into chunks and blocks, and aerated it at the same time. The result was smoother, creamier ice-cream!
The result of this was that in 1843, you had the Johnson Patent Ice Cream Freezer. There are conflicting reports about whether or not Ms. Johnson ever patented her machine. Some say she did, in September of 1843, while others say say it was never patented at all. A Mr. William Young patented a similar machine and named it after her, in May, 1848. Whichever version of events is true, we have Nancy Johnson to thank for the first machine-made ice-cream in the world!
Ice-Cream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice-Cream!
From its crude beginnings in the Middle East, up until the mid-1800s, ice-cream was a delicacy and a treat. Phenomenally expensive and extremely fiddly, labour-intensive and tricky to make in any decent quantity, ice-cream was originally available only to the super-rich.
But it’s so easy. You get the cream, the sugar, the flavourings, you put it in a pot, you put the pot in the ice-water and the salt and…
It’s not so easy.
First, you need the ice. To get that, you had to carve it out of frozen lakes. Or haul it down from the mountains and store it in ice-houses during winter. And you needed to have an ice-house to begin with! And the labourers or slaves to cut, dig and haul the ice.
Then, you needed the salt. Salt was so tricky for most people to get that for centuries, it was traded as currency. It’s where we get the word ‘salary’ from, because people used to paid in salt, or paid money so that they could then go and buy salt for themselves. Salt was only obtained at great expense in time, from evaporating great quantities of seawater to obtain the salt-crystals, which would then have to be washed and dried and purified. Or else it had to be dug out of salt-flats, crushed, and purified again. This made salt extremely expensive, and out of the reach of mere mortals like you and me.
The relative scarcity of the ice required to cool down the cream, and the salt needed to provide the reaction, meant that large quantities of ice-cream were very difficult to make, and thus, were only available to the richest of people, who could afford the expense of the ice and salt. Most ordinary people wouldn’t have bothered to waste precious salt (used to preserving fish and meat) on something as wasteful and as extravagant as ice-cream! The damn thing melted if you left it on the kitchen table. What use was that all that fuss over something that didn’t last?
It wasn’t until large quantities of ice and salt were able to be produced, harvested or sold cheaply enough for anyone to buy it, that making ice-cream for everyone really became a going concern. Before then, it was simply too expensive.
Nancy Johnson’s ice-cream machine from the 1840s made efficient manufacture of ice-cream possible for the first time. Granted, these early hand-cranked machines could only freeze a small amount of ice-cream at a time, but they were a big improvement on waiting for hours and hours and hours for the same thing from a can sitting in a pot of salty slush!
Building on inventions such as the Johnson ice-cream freezer, by the mid-1800s, it was possible to produce ice-cream in commercial quantities, and the first company to do so was based in Maryland, in the United States.
The man responsible for the birth of commercial ice-cream manufacture was named Jacob Fussell. Fussell was a dairy-produce seller. He made pretty good money out of it, but he struggled constantly to sell his containers of cream. Frustrated about the fact that this cream would otherwise constantly go to waste, Fussell opened his first ice-cream factory in 1851.
Fussell spread the gospel of ice-cream, and as more ice-cream manufacturers sprang up around the ‘States, you had ice-cream for the common man.
Ice-Cream in Modern Times
By the 1900s, ice-cream was becoming popular everywhere. In the 1920s, the first electric refrigerators, and by extension, the first electric freezers, made ice-cream production, selling, buying, storing and of course, eating, much easier. It was during this time that companies and distributors like Good Humor (1920), Streets (1930s) and Baskin-Robin (1945) began making names for themselves…and which they still do today.
Since the invention of the Johnson ice-cream freezer in the 1840s, ice-cream could now be made faster and cheaper. Refrigeration technology, and the technology to manufacture enormous, commercial quantities of ice also aided in the ability to make ice-cream available for everyone. This also led to ice-cream being served in different ways for the first time in history.
Ice-Cream on a Stick!
If as a child, or even as an adult, you ever went to the corner milk-bar, drugstore or convenience-shop, and opened the ice-cream bin, and pulled out an ice-cream bar on a little wooden paddle or stick, then you have two little boys to thank:
Frank Epperson, and Harry Burt Jnr.
Ice-cream-bars, or frozen, citrus-based popsicles, or icy-poles, were invented in the early 20th century by two boys living in the United States.
The first popsicle was invented in 1904, by little Frank Epperson. Epperson was eleven years old when he tried to make his own, homemade soft-drink. He poured the necessary ingredients into a cup, and stuck a wooden paddle-stick into it to stir the contents around. Epperson left the mix outside in the garden overnight, and went to sleep.
During the night, the temperature plunged to frigid, subzero temperatures. When little Frankie woke up the next day, he found that his mixture had frozen solid inside the cup! Undaunted, as all little boys are, he simply turned the cup upside down, knocked out the frozen soda-pop, grabbed his new invention by the stirrer-cum-handle, and just started sucking on it. The world’s first-ever popsicle!
The invention of the world’s first ice-cream bar can be attributed to young Harry Burt.
Okay, so Burt wasn’t so young. But he did invent the ice-cream bar on a stick.
Burt’s father, Harry Burt senior, was experimenting with a way to serve ice-cream on the go. To make the ice-cream easier to sell, he set the cream into blocks. To keep the customer’s hands clean, he dipped the blocks in chocolate and froze them so that clean hands need not be soiled by contact with melting ice-cream.
The problem was that…what happens when the chocolate melts?
This was the point brought up by Harry’s daughter, Ruth Burt. Harry wasn’t sure what to do about it. That was when Ruth’s younger brother, 20-year-old Harry Junior, came up with the idea of freezing the ice-cream with little wooden sticks already inside them, to give the customer something to hold onto, and minimise the chances of ice-cream going all over the customer’s hands.
Daddy liked the idea so much that he gave it a shot, and success ensued! Between them, the three Burts had invented the ice-cream bar on a stick!
Sundaes on Sundays?
Ah. The joys of having a dish made almost entirely out of ice-cream. Sinful, isn’t it?
Apparently, someone thought so, because in the United States, it was illegal to eat ice-cream on Sunday!
Is that true?
Honestly, nobody knows. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The legend goes that since selling ice-cream was illegal on Sundays, ice-cream vendors would sell ‘sundaes’ instead, deliberately mis-spelling the name to circumvent the religious morality laws (‘blue laws’) which were killing their businesses.
Something else that nobody knows is where the sundae as an entity, was invented. The United States. But which city? And state? Nobody knows for sure.
Whoever invented sundaes, and for whatever variety of reasons, we should thank them for inventing one of the most enjoyable and most variable ways of consuming ice-cream ever thought of.
…Banana split, anybody?
Sweet, Creamy Goodness
Looking for more information? Here are some links…
http://firesidelibrarian.com/projects/s532/icecream.html
http://inventors.about.com/od/foodrelatedinventions/a/ice_cream.htm
http://www.idfa.org/news–views/media-kits/ice-cream/the-history-of-ice-cream/