How did ancient civilizations make ice cream? - Vivian Jiang
On a hot spring afternoon in 1963,
two men, sent by the American CIA,
snuck into the cafeteria
of the Havana Libre Hotel.
Their directive was to retrieve
a poison pill from the freezer
and slip it into the chocolate milkshake
of Fidel Castro,
the Cuban leader who was known to devour
up to 18 scoops of ice cream after lunch.
While exact details of the story are
contested, it's rumored that the pill,
however, froze to the freezer coils
and broke,
foiling the CIA’s plan and granting Castro
many more days to satiate his sweet tooth.
Ice cream has held a unique role in our
world’s history, culture, and cravings—
but where did it come from?
The first accounts of cold desserts
and iced drinks date back
as early as the first century.
In civilizations including ancient Rome,
Mughal India, and Tang dynasty China,
these icy treats were mainly enjoyed
by the royal elites.
And finding the means to freeze
these delicacies wasn’t always easy.
Wealthy Mediterranean nobility sent
laborers to trek up high mountains
to harvest glacial ice and snow.
Meanwhile, ancient Persians built
shallow insulated pools of water
and utilized a technique
known as sky cooling.
At night, the shallow pools would
naturally radiate heat
into the dry desert skies,
causing them to dip below the
ambient temperature and freeze.
Yet the cream-based treat we know today
made a much later debut.
It was originally inspired by sherbet,
or sharbat in Arabic,
an icy drink believed to have
originated in Persia,
and subsequently gained popularity
in the Middle Ages.
European travelers brought
sharbat recipes home,
and began creating their own
chocolate, pinecone,
and even eggplant flavored
takes on the refreshment.
In 1692, Antonio Latini,
a Neapolitan chef,
recorded a recipe for a
unique milk-based version,
which some historians dub
the first ice cream.
In the 18th century,
ice cream expanded its reach
as these recipes set sail alongside
European settlers to North America.
Yet it was still mainly enjoyed
by the upper classes
as the process to make it
was quite laborious,
and its main ingredients—
sugar, salt, and cream— were expensive.
George Washington is said to have spent
the equivalent of $6,600
in today’s dollars on ice cream
in one summer alone.
It was on American soil that the
frozen dessert entered its golden age,
as inventors and entrepreneurs began to
engineer ways to bring it to the masses.
In Philadelphia in 1843,
Nancy Johnson patented
a revolutionary ice cream-making machine
featuring a crank and beater,
which made the process easier
for any home cook.
And storing ice cream was no longer
an obstacle, as by the mid-1830s,
New England businessman “Ice King”
Frederic Tudor
had greatly improved the ice trade,
shipping thousands of tons of ice
to households across the globe.
Soon, ice cream was
on every street corner.
In the late 1880s, political turmoil
brought Italian immigrants to cities
like London, Glasgow, and New York,
where many took up jobs as street vendors
selling licks of ice cream
for roughly a penny each.
Meanwhile, American druggists discovered
the appeal of combining soda,
a drink thought to have therapeutic
properties at the time,
with ice cream,
and a new social spot was born:
the soda fountain.
When the sale of alcohol
was banned in 1920,
many American saloons reinvented
themselves as soda fountains,
and breweries like Anheuser-Busch
and Yuengling
pivoted to producing ice cream.
At the same time, refrigeration technology
was improving rapidly.
By the end of World War II,
the average American home had a freezer
that could house a quart of ice cream.
Even trucks could be equipped
with freezers full of frozen treats.
Today, ice cream continues
to take on new forms.
And while some of its mysteries
may never be solved,
one thing is certain:
our love for ice cream will never thaw.
