Summer 2009
Ice-Cream Sunday
Of course, it’s far too early in the day for the children to have an ice cream; ‘…they’ll never eat their lunch.’ But one look at the backlit array of exotic concoctions decorating the wall behind the bar and it’s clear that saying ‘no’ at this stage falls firmly into the ‘fat chance’ category. Something huge involving bananas, biscuits and a glass gondola duly arrives, accompanied by a classic strawberry sundae in a traditional, hand-blown serving dish. And then, for the first time today, force fed by the elegant parfait spoons of yesteryear, we have absolute silence…
The history of ice cream
Ice has been used to chill food and drink in many different parts of the world for at least 4000 years. But the first significant step towards ice cream making was the discovery, described in an Arabic medical textbook in 1242, that water is cooled when salts are dissolved in it. Yet it wasn’t until 1589 that Giambattista Della Porta, a scientist from Naples, discovered that far greater cooling could be achieved through mixing ice and salt.
The news quickly spread, and water ices produced using this method began to appear in the 1620s, starring in banquets in Paris, Naples, Florence and Spain during the 1660s. The first ice cream made with milk appeared in Naples in 1664 and, in the UK, ice cream was served at a banquet in Windsor Castle in 1671, still such a rarity that only those guests on King Charles II’s table got to sample it. The first recipe in English didn’t appear until 1718.
The use of egg yolks in custard-based ice cream first surfaced in France in the mid-1700s, and was introduced to America in the early 1800s. The craze for ice cream really took off with the introduction of the ice-cream-making machine on both sides of the Atlantic in 1843. Italy continued to lead Europe in ice cream expertise, and of the 10,000 Italians living in Britain in 1890, about a thousand listed their occupation as ‘street vendor’, invariably selling ice cream.
Their wares were often wrapped in waxed paper and known to the English as Hokey Pokey – a play on the Italian phrase ecco un poco meaning ‘here is a little’. Ice creams were also sold in small glasses known as a Penny Lick which, wiped clean for re-use, were a considerable health hazard.
Thank heaven, then, for Agnes Marshall, an English celebrity cook of the late 19th Century, who can claim to have invented the ice-cream cone in 1888, 10 years before a waffle vendor at the St Louis World’s Fair helped out the next-door ice-cream stall by rolling his waffles into cones when they ran out of dishes.
The rest, as they say, is history, with one more notable development. In the 1950s, a team of chemical researchers discovered a method of doubling the amount of air in ice cream, allowing it to be piped from machine to cone. Amongst their number was Margaret Roberts, who was to become better known under her married name; Thatcher.