Ice Cream... Mmmmm... Let's Talk About It!

My favorite is Haagan Daas plain vanilla. I don't much care for Ben & Jerry's ice cream, which is good, since I'd have to boycott them anyhow. I used to love the soft ice creams that were popular when I was a kid, particularly with the butterscotch shell. I can find it now with a chocolate shell, but not butterscotch. I guess kids quit liking butterscotch.

 

One theory is that ice cream came about thousands of years ago when someone left a bowl of milk outside on a cold night, although I have my doubts about that one since I don't think a bowl of milk left outside on a cold night would taste good. Another theory is that the "milk and honey" referred to in the Bible was actually ice cream. I don't know about that one, either.

The Chinese were mixing snow and fruit juices 3,000 years ago to make desserts, which isn't ice cream either, but Alexander the Great is said to have enjoyed a dessert made from honey, fruit juice, and milk, frozen with snow carried down from the mountains, in the 4th Century BC. That's pretty close. The first written recipe for ice cream was set down by a Roman general, Quintus Maximus, whose nickname was Gurgeo (the Glutton).

Ice cream, or desserts similar to ice cream, seems to have been forgotten in Europe until 1295 when Marco Polo brought recipes for water and milk ice to Venice from Peking. When Catherine de Medici married Duc d'Orleans (Henry II) in 1533, she brought gelatieri (ice cream makers) to France as part of her retinue.

When the daughter of Henry IV married Charles I of England in 1685, ice cream crossed the English Channel. Charles liked it so much that he paid his ice cream chef handsomely to keep his recipe a secret from the commoners.

By 1700, ice cream had become popular among the well-to-do in the American colonies. George Washington is said to have run up a $200 tab with a New York ice cream merchant, and Dolly Madison served ice cream at a state dinner in the White House; it was probably strawberry ice cream since a guest described it as "a large, shining dome of pink."

Nancy Johnson invented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer in 1846, and the first ice cream factory was opened in Baltimore a few years later. In 1859, the first year that the United States began keeping statistics on ice cream, the country consumed 4,000 gallons of the stuff. By 1900, the number topped 5 million gallons, and several other frozen confections were in production.

 

I had once read that these foods were said to have mystical properties because they are the only things we eat that are produced by critters solely for the consumption of their own young.

Regarding ice cream: my favorite is a molded Italian ice cream called spumoni, although I rarely have it, and only at Italian restaurants. I gotta think that @Tony Page has had his share of this.

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Second to that is soft-serve. When I was a kid we had the Mister Softee truck in our neighborhood that dispensed soft serve.

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As @Ken Anderson said, the dipped soft serve that formed a shell was the best (like a Klondike bar in a cone), although I don't recall there being a butterscotch option.

 

When I was searching for a picture of spumoni, I found a Wiki article that said in Italy all ice creams fall under the umbrella of "gelato," as opposed to the specific thing that's meant when we refer to gelato in English. I found a recipe for Pistachio Gelato, but it takes an entire $17 jar of pistachio paste to make 2 cups...I'll pass.

And you can be forgiven for confusing gelato with spumoni if you had too much spumanti.

 

Hand-to-mouth combat?