We are all familiar with ice cream, but do you know the origin of ice cream can date back to almost 1500 years ago? Chinese people had started to make ice cream(with milk in ice) since Tang Dynasty. Keep reading, more stories about ice cream are here!
Which Country Invented Ice Cream?
There is no way to know for sure who invented ice cream or which country it originated from, as with many other aspects of food history. In China in the eleventh century BCE, the first mentions of ice houses and snow eating were made. “Then, around 200 BCE, there’s a reference to people in China eating [a combination of ] milk and rice that was frozen in the snow,” she says.
How did we get from that to something that is more like the ice cream we have today? Persians deserve credit for our success. Around 400 BCE, they invented the predecessor to artificial refrigeration: a large pyramidal structure called a yakhchal that used evaporation and insulation to keep things cool.
By the 11th century CE, Persians were making something called sharbat, which Wassberg Johnson says is “probably the closest ancestor, at least linguistically, to ice cream, and where the word ‘sherbet’ comes from.” Thanks to trading with the Indian Empire, Persians had access to sugar, which they combined with water and flavorings to create sharbat.
The icy treat “came to Europe through Moorish influence after the Crusades,” she explains.
How Did Ancient People Harvest Ice?
Ice cream requires a way to stay cold in order to be consumed. Therefore, if you wanted chilled food in the days before refrigeration, you needed ice. “It’s tough to pinpoint the origin of ice cream or even the ancestors of ice cream, but the general consensus is that in the ancient world, people got ice a couple of different ways,” Wassberg Johnson says.
Some ice that formed naturally was harvested, but it wasn’t always as simple as going outside and walking through a winter wonderland. “In the ancient world, lakes didn’t really freeze in the Mediterranean and Middle East, so they were getting glacial ice and snow from high up in the mountains,” she says. All the time and effort that went into collecting ice made it something that only the wealthiest people could afford.
It was a different matter to find ice in the desert, as in ancient Egypt. Wassberg Johnson asserts that there is proof that evaporation is a common method of cooling. “When you put water in a porous clay container and wrap it with a wet cloth, evaporation would pull the heat out of whatever was in there,” she explains. “Alternately, in desert regions where it would freeze at night, people would spread out very shallow dishes filled with water to obtain a thin piece of ice in that manner.”
Who is the Father of Ice Cream?
Another presidential chef—a free Black man from Philadelphia named Augustus Jackson—is referred to as the “father of ice cream.” He is credited with creating the modern method of making ice cream (adding salt to the ice to lower and control the temperature), even though he isn’t the one who invented ice cream.
But as Maria Panaritis pointed out in a 2019 article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, there are very few mentions of Including newspaper archives, historical records about Jackson are welcome. Although there are many current articles on Jackson’s life, they give contradictory details about what he did and when. From what is known, it appears he served as a cook in the White House between 1817 and 1837. He then left the White House and returned to Philadelphia, where he established a confectionery and/or catering company that produced and distributed ice cream all over the city.
By chance, Philadelphia also serves as the home of America’s oldest ice cream company. Since 1861, Bassetts Ice Cream has been in business. In 1885, the company opened its first store, and in 1892, it relocated to the city’s renowned Reading Terminal Market. Since then, it has been dispensing scoops there.
A little more than ten years later, ice cream’s best friend, the waffle-like cone, was created—by mistake!
When Was Modern Ice Cream Invented?
Modern ice cream didn’t come into existence until the Age of Exploration, when White Europeans began colonizing the Americas. “The Spanish Empire was the first European group to colonize the ‘New World,’ and they got involved with sugar production and bringing chocolate and vanilla from Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th century,” Wassberg Johnson elucidates. “Naples, Italy, was also part of the Spanish Empire at the time, and sorbetto, or sorbet, originates there.”
French aristocrats started eating the frozen dessert next, followed by those in England—”the land of all things dairy,” as Who frozen milk and cream mixtures is how Wassberg Johnson puts it.
Ice cream had gained popularity in Europe by the 18th century. Wealthy American colonists had access to ice cream using locally produced milk and cream, ice from lakes, sugar and molasses from the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the labor of enslaved people, according to Wassberg Johnson. People like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington imported ice cream makers from Europe.
In fact, Jefferson loved ice cream, which was particularly apparent when he served it at the President’s House (now known as the White House) in Washington, D.C., is part of what helped popularize the dessert in the But of course, Jefferson didn’t make the ice cream himself; that was up to his staff, which included his French-trained (but still enslaved) chef James Hemings, his French butler Adrien Petit, and Honoré Julien, a French chef who cooked for Jefferson throughout his presidency.
Does Ice Cream Have Eggs in It?
Some (but not all) ice creams contain eggs. Here’s where things might become a little complicated. The dessert, which was becoming more and more well-liked across Europe at the time, was given a unique twist by French chefs in the mid-1700s. In addition to the regular ingredients found in ice cream—milk, cream, sugar, and flavoring (usually vanilla)—they also included egg yolks in their recipe, making what we now consider frozen custard.
Imagine the United States of today. Which goods fall under the definition of ice cream and which are, by definition, frozen custard are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It all comes down to egg yolks: custard must have at least 1.4 percent egg yolk and at least 10% milkfat while ice cream must have at least 10% milkfat and less than 1.4 percent egg yolk. (Curiously, those laws contribute to the disparity in flavor between American and British vanilla ice cream.)
Where Did Some of the Most Popular Ice Cream Flavors Come From?
Ice cream’s wide variety of flavors, with new ones being created on a regular basis, is part of what makes it so appealing. It wasn’t always like this, though. Wassberg Johnson asserts that one of the earliest mentions of consuming ice and dairy foods with some type of flavoring is from China during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), even though there is no way to know for sure what the first flavor of ice cream ever invented and consumed by humans was. “It was a mixture of flour, water buffalo milk, and camphor that was frozen,” she explains, noting that it wasn’t enriched with eggs (like a custard) and didn’t contain added sugar.
The first flavor of modern ice cream, according to historians, was camphor, though you probably won’t find it on the menu at your neighborhood ice cream parlor. However, other early flavors are still well-liked today.
Chocolate
As far as modern ice cream flavors go, chocolate was likely invented first, according to Sarah Lohman, a food historian and author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. “Because of the precedent of frozen drinks, some of the earliest ice cream flavors were drinks, like coffee and tea,” she writes. “[It was created much earlier than vanilla ice cream because of this.”
The first frozen chocolate recipe came from Naples, Italy, published in Antonio Latini’s 1692 book The Modern Steward, Lohman notes.
Vanilla
Jefferson is credited with having the first known ice cream recipe written down by an American, despite the fact that he neither invented nor even brought ice cream to America. The flavor? Vanilla.
But James Hemings, the chef who was a slave to Thomas Jefferson, is credited with inventing vanilla ice cream. “Hemings trained as a French chef while in France with Jefferson,” says Wassberg Johnson. “They brought back whipped cream, macaroni and cheese, and vanilla ice cream when they came back. Hemings ended up being the member of Jefferson’s family who contributed most to the Americanization of many of those foods.”
After more than 200 years, the flavor is still popular in America. After a long day at the office, it is consumed straight from the carton, added to apple pie, blended into milkshakes, and sandwiched between chocolate wafers in ice cream sandwiches.
Butter Pecan
Unknown as to who created butter pecan, the traditional flavor is said to have gained popularity among Black Americans because they were forbidden from eating vanilla ice cream during the Jim Crow era, according to a piece of folklore that is frequently repeated. That said, no evidence has been found to verify the story, according to Kelly Nusz and Darryl Goodner, who started “Butter Pecan Podcast” to get to the bottom of this mystery of food history.
Strawberry
Strawberry ice cream’s creator is also not known with certainty thanks to a lack of reliable evidence. “There’s an apocryphal story that can’t be proven one way or the other about a formerly enslaved woman named Aunt Sallie Shadd who supposedly invented strawberry ice cream for Dolley Madison,” Wassberg Johnson elucidates. “It is disputed whether Sallie, a real person, was the first to create strawberry ice cream. In the 1810s and 1820s, she worked in the ice cream industry.”
How Did Ice Cream Become So Popular?
f small and highly localized, it took off once artificial refrigeration became available—first commercially, then in people’s homes—and ice cream was suddenly more accessible to people of different socioeconomic classes. These days, you can find packaged ice cream in supermarkets and corner stores, ice cream trucks that sell the chilled dessert to children, and thousands of ice cream shops all over the country. You can choose from a wide variety of flavors as well, such as traditional options like vanilla and chocolate, as well as more contemporary options like milk and cookies, caramel macchiato, and chai tea, as well as some genuinely bizarre options like cheddar cheese, cereal milk, lobster, and everything bagel.
