Everyone loves a sweet, cold treat on a hot summer day. Whether in a sugar cone, waffle cone, or bowl, with so many flavors it’s hard to count them! But how did ice cream come to be what it is today, starting from just one flavor?
Ice Cream’s origins are widely debated, with guesses and arguments ranging all around the world. The most likely is that of Persian ice mixed desserts, which apparently can be dated back to 550 BC and Roman desserts sprinkled with snow dating back to the first century. These Persian desserts needed a special type of building called a Yakhchal used for storing the ice in the desert heat. As for the Roman desserts, they are documented in ancient cookbooks from Rome. Another, more fleshed out example of an early chilled treat is from the Tang period in China (A.D. 618-907), where King Tang of Shang kept 94 ice-men on staff, to harvest ice, which was used in tandem with a sort of yogurt, camphor, and flour to make a finished dessert.
Key to the diffusion of using ice in cuisine (especially desserts!) was the development of the technique of using salt to lower the freezing point, which the origin of is also not known exactly. However some Indian texts from the 4th century discussed the technique and the earliest technical description hails from the Dar al Islam where Ibn Abu Usabyi wrote about the applications of various salts in the medical field. This arrived in Europe in the early 1500s, not being used for food until the 1660s when sorbets started popping up in Naples, Paris, and Florence (amongst others). Following the feast of St. George at Windsor Castle in 1671, where ice cream was served only to the most elite in attendance, ice cream became a craze.
From here, nobles began constructing ice houses at their houses, with the ice being “farmed” and stored under bark and straw. However this ice was not directly put into dishes, as it was typically not safe for eating, instead used simply to cool food. And with the recipe for ice cream kept so closely, they did not appear in text until 1718. Soon after, (around the 1750s) the French started making a custard ice cream with eggs.
Many years later, as ice cream had diffused even to America, in the 1800s the ice cream machine was invented, using simply a metal container with a smaller wooden compartment containing, salt, ice, and a handle that rotated the mixture. The ice industry became a very common, yet poorly conditioned job, with harsh environments: starting in Norway, Canada, and America, and ending with shipments to large cities like London where the wealthy had large ice houses.
Modern refrigeration further revolutionized this process, with a closed-loop, vapor-compression cycle to move heat from the inside to the outside, where a refrigerant fluid evaporates, thus removing heat from the loop. Now, to contradict the idea that there are countless flavors of ice cream, estimates say there are around 1000 distinct flavors of ice cream worldwide. Even so, that is an incredibly large number, all starting from 1.
By Kallen Cooyar, SRVHS Student