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The history of ice creams probably began back around 500 BC in the Achaemenid Empire of Persia (Iran) with ice combined with various flavors to produce summertime treats. In 400 BC, the Persians invented a special chilled dessert food, made of rose water and thin vermicelli-sized noodles made from starch, which was served to royalty during summers. The ice was mixed with saffron, fruits, and various other flavors. The most popular Persian ice-cream now is popularly known as 'bastani sonnati'. The Chinese made a frozen mixture of milk and rice was used in China around 200 BC, they generally poured a mixture of snow and saltpetre over the exteriors of containers filled with syrup and various flavors, for, in the same way as salt raises the boiling point of water, it lowers the freezing point to below zero. The Romans got in on the act, too combining mountain snow fruit toppings to create chilled delicacies. The Mughals back in the 16th century from the Indian subcontinent used relays of horsemen to bring ice from the Hindu Kush to Delhi, where it was used in fruit sorbets. They also brought the popular dessert 'Kulfi' which is a frozen dairy dessert from the Indian subcontinent and is often described as "traditional South Asian ice cream adopted from 'bastani sonnati', a Persian ice cream.
The popularity of ice-cream necessitated an important technological shift for the preservation of ice. Unless you wanted to eat your ices in the depths of winter to high up in the mountains, you needed not only to bring snow or ice to where you wanted to consume it, but also to find some way of storing it in warm climate. This required a special sort of building, now known as an ice house. The ice house are generally built underground and generally insulated with straws and stone chambers which provide sufficient cold to preserve ice that had been cut from frozen lakes and rivers in the winter, or snow that had been brought down from the mountains. When the matter came into a debate, it had been suggested that the Babylonians may have built rudimentary ice pits as early as the second millennium BC and there is some evidence to indicate that, much later, Alexander the Great had an ice house, too. But that they were in regular use in ancient Rome is beyond doubt; and their growing prevalence soon facilitated the development of a thriving snow trade, criss-crossing Europe, the Near East and the Mediterranean. By the later middle Ages, snow was on sale in most large ports.
While the ice cream made with frozen dairy products, rather than snow or ice did not come until much later. During the Tang Dynasty during AD 618 AD to 907, for instance, the Chinese made a cold, creamy gloop by packing buffalo milk, flour and camphor in snow. But it was easy enough to cool milk down; it proved remarkably difficult to freeze it. It was all a matter of physics. As we now know, most cows’ milk freezes at somewhere between -0.535°C and -0.565°C, a little below the freezing point of water and packing it in snow doesn’t get it enough cold to become a solid. The challenge was, therefore, to work out not just how to store snow and ice but also to know how to make it colder. Surprisingly, the solution to this seemingly intractable problem was saltpetre. When saltpetre is added to snow or ice, energy is absorbed from the surrounding environment thus producing a rudimentary form of refrigeration. As early as the mid of 16th century, foodies were beginning to cotton on to the potential of this process. In Magia naturalis (1558), for example, the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista della Porta described how ice laced with salt could be used to freeze wine which is like a milk has a freezing point below that of water.
When a mixture of saltpetre and snow or ice was first used to produce ice cream, however, is something of a mystery. There are plenty of legends. Some say that Catherine de’ Medici brought the recipe with her to France when she married Henri, duc d’Orleans in 1533, while others suggest that Charles I of England gave his chef a lifetime pension to preserve the original recipe a state secret. These are however nothing more than 19th-century fantasies when every bit were nonsensical as the claim was that Marco Polo brought ice cream back from China in the Middle Ages.
Although it is hard to be certain, the earliest form of ice cream seems to have been produced a little before Della Porta started freezing wine. As the historians Caroline and Robin Weir have recently pointed out, the first printed references appear in Europe around 1530. Yet it was not until the publication of Mrs Mary Eales Receipts in 1718 that the first recipe appeared in English. Even then, the process described was laughably vague.
To ice cream:
Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them with any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten’d, or Fruit in it; shut your Pots very close; to six Pots you must allow eighteen or twenty Pound of Ice, breaking the Ice very small; there will be some great Pieces, which lay at the Bottom and Top: You must have a Pail, and lay some Straw at the Bottom; then lay in your Ice, and put in amongst it a Pound of Bay-Salt; set in your Pots of Cream, and lay Ice and Salt between every Pot, that they may not touch; but the Ice must lie round them on every Side; lay a good deal of Ice on the Top, cover the Pail with Straw, set it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes, it will be froze in four Hours, but it may stand longer; then take it out just as you use it; hold it in your Hand and it will slip out. When you wou’d freeze any Sort of Fruit, either Cherries, Raspberries, Currants, or Strawberries, fill your Tin-Pots with the Fruit, but as hollow as you can; put to them Lemmonade, made with Spring-Water and Lemmon-Juice sweeten’d; put enough in the Pots to make the Fruit hang together, and put them in Ice as you do Cream.
By 1768, when M. Emry published the very first ice cream recipe book 'L’Art de bien faire les glaces d’office; ou Les vrais principes pour congeler tous les Rafraichissemens' the process had become more refined. Much care was taken to describe exactly how long milk would take to freeze, how the ice and salt should be packed and how the ingredients could be protected from contamination by the refrigerants. Still, there was considerable scope for variation. Milk cream and custard were used almost interchangeably and the flavorings could be even more diverse. As Jeri Quinzo (a freelance writer specializing in food history) has described in her book 'A Global History and Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making' about the recipe of ice cream recommending use of rose petals, crushed macaroons, caramel, ginger, lemon, musk, chocolate, laurel, tarragon, parsley and even asparagus.
For many years, historians assumed that these early ice creams were consumed primarily by elites and it is not hard to see why. Most recipe books were written by those who catered to aristocratic or even royal households and there is abundant evidence of ice creams being served in an unambiguously ‘elite’ context. Late in the 18th century, the Sèvres Manufactory produced a range of beautiful ice-cream coolers and dishes for Louis XV and his court in the year 1813, President James Madison’s wife arranged for ice creams to be served at his inauguration ball in Washington DC and, 25 years later, Balzac delighted in describing the lavish plombiers, which were served as a dessert in the great houses of Paris in his novel, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes between 1838-47.
But Dr Melissa Calaresu ( a faculty of history) has stated that ice cream was not just the preserve of the elites especially in 18th-century Naples. Partly because of the vibrancy of the snow trade, it was possible for people much lower down the social scale to make, sell and enjoy ice cream as well. Not only were there plenty of shops and cafes selling ice creams, but there was also a host of vendors who sold it in the streets and there is evidence to suggest that many families may have made it at home, as well.
By the middle of the 20th century, ice cream had become popular and big business throughout the world after cheap refrigeration became common. There was a blow-up of ice cream stores and of flavors and types. Vendors often competed on the basis of varieties: Howard Johnson's restaurants advertised "a world of 28 flavors,” and Baskin Robbins made its 31 flavors ("one for every day of the month").
One of the important developments in the 20th century was the introduction of soft ice cream, which has more air mixed in, thereby reducing costs. The soft ice cream machine fills a cone or dish from a spigot. In the United States, chains such as Dairy Queen, Carvel, and Tastee-Freez helped popularize soft-serve ice cream. Baskin-Robbins would later incorporate it into their menu. Despite their humble beginnings, Baskin-Robbins (est. 1945), Häagen-Dazs (1961) and Ben & Jerry’s (1978) have all become multinational firms, boasting a wide range of distinctive flavors and instant brand recognition the world over.
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