Ice cream

• 1. Introduction

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  Ice cream is one of those things so ordinary it almost disappears from sight. You lick it, you finish it, you move on. But trace it back far enough and you find a Persian record from 550 BC, Mughal horsemen racing ice down from the Hindu Kush, and a Scottish confectioner selling scoops from shells for a penny outside a London train station. The questions worth asking are not just where ice cream came from, but how something once locked away in royal cellars and aristocratic kitchens became available to nearly everyone on earth. And what exactly is happening inside that smooth, cold foam that makes it feel the way it does.

• 2. Ancient Cold

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  Kakigori, the Japanese shaved-ice dessert, carries one of the oldest paper trails. During the Heian period, blocks of ice saved through the colder months were shaved and served with sweet syrup to the Japanese aristocracy in summer. Sei Shonagon, who served the Imperial Court during that era, referred to the practice in The Pillow Book.

  Syrian historian Ibn Abi Usaybi'a, writing in the 13th century in his book on the history of physicians, described the earliest known written process for making ice artificially. He attributed the technique to an earlier author, Ibn Bakhtawayhi, of whom nothing else is known.

  A Roman cookbook from the 1st century included recipes for sweet desserts sprinkled with snow. Persian records from the 2nd century described sweetened drinks chilled with ice. These scattered references do not tell a single clean story, but they do suggest that the appetite for cold sweetness is very old.

  The chemistry that would eventually make ice cream possible was the endothermic effect: salt added to ice lowers its melting point, which draws heat out of surrounding cream and allows it to freeze. Before this was understood, cream could be chilled but not solidified. That discovery changed everything that came after.

• 3. Legends and Courts

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  In the 16th century, the Mughal Empire ran relays of horsemen to carry ice from the Hindu Kush all the way to Delhi, where it was used to make kulfi. Australian food historian Charmaine O'Brien has suggested that kulfi likely evolved first in the cooler climates of Persia or Samarkand, and that the Mughals elaborated on a borrowed concept to create the creamy, perfumed dessert it became.

  Europe had no knowledge of freezing techniques before the 16th century. Once that changed, stories accumulated around the spread of frozen desserts, most of them difficult to verify. Marco Polo is often credited with bringing sorbet-style desserts to Italy from China, though nothing in his writings supports this. A legend holds that Catherine de' Medici introduced flavoured ices to France when she married the Duke of Orleans in 1533, bringing Italian chefs with her. Historical records show no Italian chefs at the French court during the Medici period, and ice cream already existed in France before Catherine was born.

  Charles I of England was reportedly so taken with what he called "frozen snow" that he offered his ice cream maker a lifetime pension in exchange for keeping the formula secret. There is no evidence this happened either.

  What is documented: in 1665, Jean Fargeon's Catalogue des Marchandises rares, edited in Montpellier, listed a frozen sorbet sold for three livres per pound, transported in clay pots and consumed from a container plunged into a mixture of ice and saltpetre.

• 4. Recipes and Recipes

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  In 1686, Francesco dei Coltelli, an Italian, opened an ice cream cafe in Paris. Within fifty years, another 250 cafes had opened in the city.

  The first French recipe for flavoured ices appeared in 1674, in Nicholas Lemery's Recueil de curiositez rares et nouvelles de plus admirables effets de la nature. Antonio Latini published sorbetti recipes in the 1694 edition of his Lo Scalco alla Moderna. Latini specified that his results should have the fine consistency of sugar and snow. Francois Massialot's Nouvelle Instruction pour les Confitures, les Liqueurs, et les Fruits, starting with the 1692 edition, offered recipes that produced a coarser, pebbly texture.

  In England, Elias Ashmole noted in 1671 that a plate of ice cream appeared at the Feast of St George at Windsor for Charles II. It was served only at the King's table. The first English-language recipe was published in London in 1718 in Mrs. Mary Eales's Receipts. Her instructions called for tin ice-pots packed in a pail layered with ice and bay salt, left in a dark cellar for four hours. Flavouring options included cherries, raspberries, currants, and strawberries, mixed with lemonade made from spring water.

  In 1769, Italian confectioner Domenico Negri founded a shop in Berkeley Square, London, at the Sign of the Pineapple. His trade card advertised, among other things, "all Sorts of Ice, Fruits and creams in the best Italian manner." Twenty years later, his former apprentice Frederick Nutt published The Complete Confectioner, which contained 31 ice cream recipes. Flavours included ginger, chocolate, brown breadcrumbs, and Parmesan cheese.

• 5. America's Appetite

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  A 1744 account described ice cream served at a dinner hosted by Maryland governor Thomas Bladen: guests noted "some fine Ice Cream, which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most Deliciously."

  Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were all known to eat and serve ice cream regularly. A merchant's records from Chatham Street, New York, show Washington spending approximately $200 on ice cream in the summer of 1790. The same records show Jefferson keeping an 18-step recipe for the dessert. Jefferson is sometimes credited with introducing ice cream to America, which is incorrect, though he did help introduce vanilla ice cream specifically. First Lady Dolley Madison served ice cream at her husband James Madison's Inaugural Ball in 1813.

  Small-scale hand-cranked ice cream freezers were invented in the 1840s, one in England by Agnes Marshall and one in America by Nancy Johnson.

  Carlo Gatti, a Swiss emigre, set up the first ice cream stand outside Charing Cross station in London in 1851, selling scoops in shells for one penny. Before Gatti, ice cream in England was an expensive treat confined to those who had access to an ice house. He built an ice well to store ice cut from Regent's Canal under a contract with the Regent's Canal Company, and by 1860 he was importing ice on a large scale from Norway.

• 6. Sundaes, Cones, Sodas

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  The ice cream soda was invented in the 1870s. The invention is attributed to American Robert Green in 1874, though no conclusive evidence confirms his claim.

  The sundae emerged in the late 19th century. Some accounts say it was created to get around blue laws that forbade selling sodas on Sundays. Towns that claim to be its birthplace include Buffalo, Two Rivers, Ithaca, and Evanston.

  The first written suggestion that a cone could serve as an edible container for ice cream appeared in Mrs. A. B. Marshall's Book of Cookery in 1888. Her recipe for "Cornet with Cream" specified that the cornets were made with almonds and baked in the oven. The cone's popularity in the United States grew sharply at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. A story attached to that event holds that an ice cream vendor ran out of cardboard dishes and a nearby Syrian waffle vendor offered to roll up his waffles into cones. The new form sold well and spread quickly among other vendors at the fair.

  Agnes Marshall, called the "queen of ices" in England, wrote four books on frozen desserts between 1885 and 1894 and gave public cooking lectures. She patented her own ice cream maker and was the first to suggest using liquefied gases to freeze ice cream, after seeing a demonstration at the Royal Institution.

• 7. Mass Production and Science

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  Ice cream became widely available in the second half of the 20th century, once cheap refrigeration spread around the world. Vendors competed heavily on variety: Howard Johnson's restaurants advertised a world of 28 flavours, while Baskin-Robbins built its marketing around 31 flavours, described as one for every day of the month. The company has since developed over 1,000 varieties.

  Soft-serve ice cream, which has more air incorporated into the mix, lowered production costs and was popularized in the United States by chains including Dairy Queen, Carvel, and Tastee-Freez. Soft serve is dispensed from a spigot directly into a cone or dish.

  In the 1980s, thicker varieties began selling as "premium" and "super-premium" under brands including Ben & Jerry's, Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream Company, and Haagen-Dazs.

  At the microscopic level, ice cream is a colloidal emulsion of water, ice, milk fat, milk protein, sugar, and air. Milk proteins such as casein and whey are amphiphilic, meaning they can bind with both water and fat, which is what holds the emulsion together. The process called Ostwald ripening causes large ice crystals to grow at the expense of small ones over time. Slowing that process is what keeps ice cream smooth: smaller crystals mean a finer texture. In the US, the FDA requires a product to contain more than 10% milk fat to be labelled ice cream at all. Americans consume about 23 litres per person per year, the highest figure in the world, while Australians consume 18 litres and New Zealanders 20 litres.

  In 2006, some commercial producers began using liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream in the primary stage, eliminating the need for a conventional ice cream freezer. The technique Agnes Marshall first proposed after watching a Royal Institution demonstration had, more than a century later, found its way into commercial production.