Song of the Week: “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” by Harry Styles - “You’re sweet ice cream, but you could use a Flake or two.”1
There’s a scene, early on in L. M. Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables, where the irrepressible orphan Anne Shirley is invited to her first-ever Sunday School picnic. While Anne speaks about the picnic as a whole with an enthusiasm most people might use to talk about meeting a celebrity or a trip to Paris, she reserves her strong sentiments for the fabled dessert of ice cream, which she has never had before.
“Oh, Marilla,” she exclaimed breathlessly, “there’s going to be a Sunday school picnic next week - in Mr. Harmon Andrews’s field, right near the Lake of Shining Waters. And Mrs. Superintendent Bell and Mrs. Rachel Lynde are going to make ice cream - think of it, Marilla - ice cream! (76)
A little later she fantasizes again about the picnic, telling her guardian Marilla that “They’re going to have boats on the Lake of Shining Waters - and ice cream, as I told you. I have never tasted ice cream. Diana tried to explain what it was like, but I guess ice cream is one of those things that are beyond imagination” (78).
Anne of Green Gables is set in 1880s Prince Edward Island, so it’s not surprising that the now-familiar summer treat of ice cream is so exciting for Anne.
Though the hand-cranked ice cream maker, with its bucket, ice, and salt, had been patented by Philadelphia woman Nancy M. Johnson in 1843, around forty years earlier, the lack of widespread refrigeration technology meant that ice cream was still a relatively rare treat.
Making matters worse, Anne - a poor orphan who grew up in a series of neglectful and cruel homes before coming to Green Gables - was certainly not in a position to encounter ice cream at picnics, parties, or restaurants.
Though a series of misunderstandings almost prevents Anne from attending the picnic, she does manage to attend, and the event lives up to her wildest dreams.
“I’ve had a perfectly scrumptious time,” she tells Marilla, and details a variety of other excitements before finishing on the highlight: “And we had the ice cream. Words fail me to describe that ice cream. Marilla, I assure you it was sublime.”
This scene has stayed with me since my mother first read me Anne of Green Gables as a small child, both because Anne’s enthusiasm is so charming, and because its subject seemed so mundane to me. Sure, ice cream was a highlight of my childhood summers - at the local Hewitt’s Dairy on the last day of school, or on a warm night after a long hike - but I didn’t treat it like Anne’s earth-shattering wonder.
After learning more about the history of ice cream, however, I tend to agree with her: ice cream is a mundane miracle, and we should not take it for granted.
Words may have failed Anne - a rare thing in and of itself - but I will do my best.
Infinity Gauntlet
Last summer, on a stormy day in late August, I spontaneously decided that I wanted an ice cream maker.
I love to bake, and in the last decade I’ve accumulated specialized appliances (a KitchenAid Mixer, a hand blender, a food processor), tools (a bench scraper, a cookie scoop, a scale), and miscellaneous paraphernalia (donut molds, piping bags, silicon mats). I’ve made elaborate cheesecakes for holidays, latticed and braided pie crust, and done the punishing work of perfecting French macarons.2
It’s like I’ve been collecting desserts, Thanos-style, and ice cream was the last one needed to complete my Infinity Gauntlet.
So I did some quick research into home ice cream makers, searched Facebook Marketplace, and by that evening I was standing on a stranger’s porch in the pouring rain, passing her two plasticky green Canadian twenties in exchange for a box full of strange components
When I got my new machine (a Cuisinart ICE-21P1) home and set it up, I discovered a contraption that actually has a lot in common with the one Anne would have witnessed at that picnic: a freezer-safe bowl filled with liquid replaces the ice and salt, and an electric motor replaces Ms. Rachel Lynde, but the paddle remains essentially the same - as does the recipe and the result.
As I soon learned, there are two main kinds of ice cream: Philadelphia-style and French-style.3
Basic Philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream has a very short ingredient list: milk, whipping cream, sugar, a pinch of salt, and vanilla. You simply mix your components in a bowl, chill them for a few hours, and then churn them into an ice cream with a light texture and a pure dairy flavor.
That first week, we made that basic Philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream, and it was the best vanilla ice cream I had ever had in my life.
The other style of ice cream, French-style (also known as custard style) is more complicated: it starts as a cooked custard thickened with egg yolks and then chilled before churning. Because it’s a little eggy tasting and churns into a richer, thicker ice cream, French-style is especially suited to heavy flavors like chocolate or coffee.
Though I was intimidated by tempering egg yolks (the first time I tried, back in university, I ended up with scrambled eggs in milk), a couple of weeks after our first ice cream experiment I painstakingly made French-style chai ice cream, using free range eggs, toasted whole spices and loose leaf black tea.
It was the best ice cream I have ever had in my life, full stop.
It’s not even that I’m a particularly talented pastry chef; it’s just that ice cream you have made yourself, so freshly churned that you’re scraping it out of the bowl with your spoon, is “one of those things that are beyond imagination.”
Base Ingredients
Baskin-Robbins famously sold thirty-one flavors of ice cream, and there are almost as many differing claims as to the origins of ice cream.4 As Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Fray explain in “We All Scream for Ice Cream,” an episode of their podcast “Stuff You Missed in History Class,” it is difficult to establish where ice cream began because there are so many accounts of sweet, ice-based desserts in ancient history.
The biblical King Solomon, for example, seems to have been an early fan. Proverbs 25:13 says that “Like a snow-cooled drink at harvest time is a trustworthy messenger to the one who sends him; he refreshes the spirit of his master.”
Similarly, myriad websites report that Alexander the Great enjoyed snow mixed with honey, and that the Emperor Nero sent his slaves into the mountains to gather snow, which was then mixed with honey and fruit.5
During the Chinese T’Ang period (A.D. 618-907), the wealthy consumed a dish that combined ice and dairy: dynasty founder King T’Ang of Shang purportedly had 94 “ice men” specifically to bring ice to the palace, which was then mixed with koumiss (cooked fermented milk), flour, and camphor (the stuff in moth balls). It may be a believable origin story, but I don’t know anyone today who would choose that dessert as a substitute for modern ice cream.
While ice cream’s origins are ambiguous, as is so often the case, things get a little clearer in the Renaissance. Frozen desserts seem to have spread from the Middle East and Asia to Italy during Marco Polo’s travels, but they really took off in the 16th century, with cafes in Italy, France, and England selling “cream ice.”
One of the first recognizable recipes for ice cream appears around a century later, in the Italian chef Antonio Latini’s cookbook Lo scalco alla moderna, or “The Modern Steward” (vol. 1 1692, vol. 1694).6
As Wilson and Fray explain, Latini provides recipes for several flavors of ‘sorbetti,’ including lemon, strawberry, sour cherry, chocolate, and cinnamon ice - and “a milk ice that’s often cited as the first ice cream recipe.”
The result, Latini says, is a “sumptuous” and “delicious” dessert that will satisfy the whims and discerning tastes of the nobility.7
Latini’s commentary makes explicit what you’ve probably already guessed: up to this point, ice cream and its predecessors were reserved only for the very wealthy.8
For that to change - for ice cream to become something that young Anne Shirley could sample at the Sunday School picnic - ice cream had to come to America.
Philadelphia-Style
Though we often say something is “as American as apple pie,” perhaps that apple pie should be served à la mode.9 A good argument can be made that ice cream is actually the quintessential American dessert.
The American love for ice cream, in fact, predates America itself: the first record of its presence in the Thirteen Colonies occurs in a a 1744 letter from William Black, a guest at the home of Maryland Governor Thomas Bladen, who described eating “a Dessert no less curious: Among the Rarities of which it was Compos’d, was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most Deliciously.”10
By mid-century, recipe books in Europe weren’t just including lists of what to include in ice cream, but also instructions on how to churn it at home. In her 1775 cookbook, for example, Elizabeth Raffald instructs her reader to place their prepared ice cream base of choice:
In a tub of ice broken small, and a large quantity of salt put amongst it, when you see your cream grow thick round the edges of your tin, stir it, and set it in again till it grows quite thick, when your cream is all froze up, take it out of your tin, and put it into the mould you intend it to be turned out of, then put on the lid, and have ready another tub with ice and salt in as before, put your mould in the middle, and lay your ice under and over it, let it stand four or five hours.
Needless to say, while ice cream was becoming more popular, with some cafes and restaurants selling ice cream in the 18th century, the ice and time needed still made it a dessert mostly popular among the very wealthy.
Among those first high-profile ice cream fans were two of the Founding Fathers.
George Washington famously loved ice cream: a “Cream Machine for Ice” was purchased in 1784 for his home at Mount Vernon, and when he died the tally of his household effects included numerous ice cream moulds, pots, and spoons. During Washington’s presidency, Martha Washington held weekly parties where she served ice cream: Abigail Adams describes being “entertained with Ice creems [sic] and Lemonade.”
Thomas Jefferson also loved ice cream: his Monticello estate’s archives include his hand-written recipe for ice cream, which he likely acquired from his French butler while he was living in Europe. Jefferson’s recipe is complicated in execution, but extremely simple in ingredients, calling only for “2 bottles of good cream, 6 yolks of eggs, ½ lb of sugar.”
It is the nineteenth-century Black pastry chef Augustus Jackson, however, who is frequently identified as the American “Father of ice cream.” Jackson was a pastry chef at the White House for twenty years (1817-1837), where he no doubt churned many batches of ice cream for Presidents James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson.
In 1837, Augustus Jackson moved back to his hometown of Philadelphia, and opened an ice cream parlor and catering business where he sold ice cream he made without eggs: according to legend, this is the origin of Philadelphia-style ice cream!
Jackson sold his ice cream to Black-owned restaurants throughout Philadelphia, and eventually became one of the wealthiest Black residents of Philadelphia even as he helped bring ice cream to the masses.
Less than a decade later, of course, fellow Philadelphia resident Nancy M. Johnson invented the hand-cranked ice cream maker, making ice cream churning much easier and less time-consuming (assuming, of course, that you could get ahold of some ice from a straw-insulated ice house).
In the 1870s, German engineer Carl von Linde invented industrial refrigeration, and with that, Americans (and Canadians, and Brits, and people around the world) were off to the races!
In the years that followed, several American innovators independently created banana splits, baked alaska, and ice cream cones (more on those in a moment).
In the latter half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, ice cream became a ubiquitous year-round treat, consumed by people across social classes at church picnics, ice cream parlours, and soda fountains. It appears in novels like Little Women and, of course, Anne of Green Gables, and soda fountains are staple settings in familiar media like Scooby-Doo and the Archie comics.
As home freezers spread throughout the United States, brands emerged to package the ice cream parlor experience and send it home, and ice cream transformed once again from a treat eaten outside the home to something that could also be enjoyed directly out of the carton, perhaps while crying on the couch over a recent breakup.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan declared the third Sunday in July “National Ice Cream Day.” The American love affair with ice cream has only gotten more powerful: today, the American ice cream industry contributes $13 billion to the economy annually. The average American eats 20.8 liters of ice cream per year, or 5.5 gallons.
Americans still don’t earn the top spot, however, in annual ice cream consumption per capita: that honor goes to the sweet-toothed citizens of New Zealand, who eat a whopping 28.4 liters (7.5 gallons) ice cream each every year.
Ice Cream for Good
So, if you’re the average American, and you’re consuming your requisite 5.5 gallons of ice cream per year, you might be doing it somewhat guiltily. Ice cream, after all, is not generally classified as a health food.
In fact, in the era after the popularization of ice cream but before the popularization of public health, ice cream was something of a menace.
During the Victorian era, poor street vendors began selling ice cream in London from small carts. This was prior to the invention of the ice cream cone or the disposable paper cup, so they typically served ice cream in small glass cups called “penny licks”. Customers would pay a penny (the equivalent of around fifty cents today), lick the ice cream directly out of the glass, and then return it to the vendor, who would then immediately fill it with ice cream for the next customer. If they were very lucky, the vendor might first rinse the glass out, without soap, in water taken from a nearby well or polluted river.
This was, understandably, an enormous health hazard, and today historians believe penny licks were a prominent disease vector for the spread of both tuberculosis and cholera. Because of this unsanitary practice, penny licks were banned in London in 1898, prompting a rush of innovation that ultimately resulted in the adoption of the much more sanitary ice cream cone.
Today, thankfully, most health concerns about ice cream are due to its high sugar and fat content, not its role in spreading cholera. There is research, however, that suggests that eating ice cream might actually be very good for you, in ways that counteract popular narratives about food and health.
In 2018, Harvard graduate student Andres Ardisson Korat defended his dissertation presenting the baffling results of his research into links between dairy consumption and health: many of the widely lauded benefits of yogurt consumption were equally true of ice cream. In fact, he found, “among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of health problems.” The finding was so baffling that Ardisson Korat tried as hard as he could to debunk the finding. “He and his committee had done, like, every type of analysis - they had thrown every possible test at this finding to try to make it go away. And there was nothing they could do to make it go away.”
As TikTok creator Thomas Germain points out, this research does not necessarily suggest that ice cream is unusually beneficial from a nutritional standpoint, nor does it mean that you should start eating a half cup of ice cream every day just in case.
However, the reluctance of scientists like Ardisson Korat to speak to ice cream’s potential health benefits is a testament to the power of prevailing cultural narratives - and the difficulty we often face if we go against them.
That leads me, in fact, to a related question. Putting questions of physical health aside, we might also ask whether ice cream is good for us on a social level - slurped up through two straws as a classic first-date milkshake, scooped alongside a celebratory slice of birthday cake, or licked from a cone while sitting on the hood of the car alongside your family on a warm summer night.
For more than a century, people have used ice cream and its popularity as a vehicle for political and social causes.
Nineteenth-century radical anarchist Emma Goldman, for example, was constantly looking for ways to raise money for her compatriots’ various schemes to overthrow the government. One such scheme was a Massachusetts ice cream shop, which she opened with two of her friends in 1892 to raise money to support striking workers. After a few months, however, Goldman moved on to nursing, lecturing, and protesting directly - and eventually participated in the conspiracy to assassinate President William McKinley!
Eighty-six years later, childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield founded a Vermont ice cream company, Ben & Jerry’s, that also became known for its political bent (though, to the best of my knowledge, Ben and Jerry have never participated in a plot ot assassinate anyone).11
Ben & Jerry’s has its own non-profit arm that specializes in children’s welfare, and since their founding they have taken strong stances against oil drilling in the Arctic, in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street, climate change, and Black Lives Matter activists, and in support of reproductive rights.
“We love making ice cream - but using our business to make the world a better place gives our work its meaning,” they explain. “In other words: we use ice cream to change the world.”
Ice cream’s popularity also makes it an ideal vehicle to help encourage cultural education and exchange. Last week, the Canadian ice cream brand Chapman’s announced they were partnering with Chippewa chef Zach Keeshig on a limited edition run of ice cream sweetened with maple syrup and flavored using fresh sweetgrass. “ "It doesn't just have to be wild rice and squash," Keeshig says. "We can introduce new techniques to bring Indigenous food to life and put it on the forefront."
Morale
During World War II, the U.S. military decided that ice cream was more than just a cold treat for hot days or a fancy dessert for celebrations: rather, it was a matter of survival.
When provisioning troops - particularly in the Navy - the United States prioritized easy and continual access to ice cream. Special servicemen were trained in the making and serving of ice cream, and contemporary propaganda posters and other records report that the average battleship carried, among its other supplies, 60,000 quarts of ice cream. The American military appetite for ice cream was so powerful that the military maintained three floating ice cream barges, whose sole purpose was to produce ice cream and distribute it to ships in the Pacific Theater.
As “The Food Historian Blog” details, rationing campaigns encouraged civilians to eat fruit sorbets and other alternative frozen treats to free up dairy products for soldiers, and propaganda emphasized the nutritional content of ice cream as well, calling it “an important source of vitamins, proteins, and minerals.”
“Ice cream,” this 1944 ad proclaims, “is a fighting food.”
While both government and commercial messaging continually emphasized the nutritious power of ice cream for American troops, it also acknowledged a more unique value that ice cream provided: it was essential for morale.
“One Marine’s dream of the post-war world is a mountain of strawberry ice cream,” declares a 1943 advertisement. “He wrote his girl from Guadalcanal that he wants it three times a day, every day for five years. In standard servings, that’s over 900 quarts! Strawberry ice cream was a symbol, of course, to a hot, tired fighting man in a fox-hole - a symbol of his home town and the corner drug store - a symbol of America.”
Those advertisers were perhaps more correct than they realized when they called that corner-store ice cream “a symbol of America” - a dessert once eaten only by the wealthy, now considered the right of every ordinary, hard-working person.
What those WWII propagandists and ration suppliers did understand is that, when it comes to finding motivation to survive and keep fighting, treats and little luxuries can be just as powerful as practical things. Ice cream promises summer days ahead when snow is falling, new friends at a Sunday School picnic after years of deprivation and loneliness, and celebrations of first birthdays and hundredth ones.
Taylor’s birthday is tomorrow, and his favorite birthday treat is Dairy Queen ice cream cake. This week, I undertook my most ambitious homemade ice cream project yet: creating a gourmet Dairy Queen ice cream cake entirely from scratch. I made that perfect PHiladelphia-style vanilla ice cream, and a rich dark-chocolate French-style ice cream. I crushed Oreo cookies into crumbs, and melted belgian dark chocolate with cream to create chocolate ganache. Last night, I stayed up far too late whipping cream into frosting, and tonight I’ll write careful words in sparkly red gel icing and festoon the edges with rainbow sprinkles.
It has taken hours and hours, and the ingredients cost more than a ready-made cake, and by tomorrow night it will be gone. But I don’t regret it one bit.
Ice cream is ephemeral. If you don’t devour it, it melts away. But that doesn’t make it any less sweet.
When it comes to ice cream, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
“Flake” refers to the Cadbury Flake, a British chocolate bar that often tops a cone with vanilla soft-serve ice cream to make a “99 Flake.”
I went through six batches in the course of a month to learn to make them for a friend’s baby shower, and as soon as it was over promptly swore off the little cookies for the next five years.
I won’t be talking about gelato, sorbet, frozen yogurt, or any of ice cream’s other family members today except in passing. Ice cream is already a huge topic!
The Baskin-Robbins website gives this explanation as to their famous thirty-one flavors claim: “Baskin-Robbins was founded in 1945 in Glendale, California by Burton Baskin and Irvine Robbins, ice cream enthusiasts and brothers-in-law, whose passion inspired what is now the world's largest chain of ice cream specialty shops. What was once a selection of 31 flavors—Baskin-Robbins "31®" stands for a different ice cream flavor for each day of the month—has grown to more than 1,400 in its flavor library.”
No, as usual, I couldn’t find any citations or concrete references to actual texts. This time, however, I simply didn’t have the energy to keep looking. I’m not trying to earn a Classics degree, you guys.
Latini’s book also contains the earliest surviving recipe for tomato sauce! What a guy.
Or at least, that’s what Google Translate says he said
Or ordinary people really craving cold desserts in the dead of winter - the first blizzards, perhaps?
Wikipedia does a good job here of rounding up the claims made about the origins of apple pie à la mode, or “according to the current fashion.”
A man named Charles Townsend claims to have invented the dessert while staying at a hotel in Cambridge, NY in the 1890s. Needless to say, during the Victorian-era ice cream boom, Townsend was not the only person to have the brilliant idea to combine pie and ice cream
This section is mainly sourced from the website of Colonial Williamsburg, a living history village in Virginia that I visited as a kid. They love precise citations, and I love them.
Ben Cohen has anosmia - the lack of a sense of smell - which dramatically affects his ability to taste, which is why Ben & Jerry’s ice cream contains so many texturally interesting mix-ins.
Happy birthday, Taylor! You're fortunate to have such a devoted wife that makes HOMEMADE ice cake! What an interesting topic, Melodie.