The History of Ice Creams

While not involving dairy, the first ice cream dessert recorded is credited to Emperor Nero of Rome when he sent his slaves off to the mountains to bring back ice for a fruit-topped ice dessert during his reign between the years AD 37 to 68!

AD618 to 697 saw the reign of King Tang in Shang, China where milk was first introduced to the recipe and made its way back to Europe to be further developed by the Europeans into ice-creams and desserts more similar to what we see today.

The last 300 years or so have seen the biggest developments in ice-cream, which was largely popularised by the Americans, inventing improved methods of production such as salt-on-ice to keep production temperatures lower and opening the first ice-cream parlour in 1776. Although Londoner Philip Lenzi is credited as the first person to add it to a restaurant menu two years prior to this.

The 1800’s saw the larges production changes, culminating in the first ice-cream factory in 1851 and the now standard ice-cream scoop in 1897. Cones were reportedly introduced in 1903 by an ice-cream vendor Italo Marchiony to avoid breakages or losses of expensive ice-cream glasses, but are also considered invented a year later by a vendor at the St. Louis World Fair who on running out of dishes teamed up with a nearby waffle-maker to make “Cornucopias” with rolled up waffle batter to serve as ice-cream cones.

In the last century, the major ice-cream manufacturers of today appeared, such as Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs, bringing ice-cream to the masses and inventing whole new recipes such as the hugely popular Cookies and Cream and Cherry Garcia named in tribute to rock legend Jerry Garcia.

Although the first “Hand-Crank” ice cream maker was released around 1850, today’s makers are a much more recent invention using electricity to continuously stir air into the mix for you, and can come in the self-contained freezer variety or with a freezer bowl which is pre-cooled in your home freezer before-hand. This has brought the prices down as low as around £25 for the latter type making home-made ice-cream a reality for anyone interested and many more recipes as people are now free to experiment and create their own ice-cream concoctions at will.