Ice Cream

I'm going to take a break from heavy topics like politics and education and discuss something truly important:  ice cream.

Margaret Piatt, age 5.
She certainly would have liked some ice cream to go with that birthday cake.

Aside from being the ideal accompaniment to birthday cake and one of the best things about summer, ice cream also has an interesting history.  It's a bit hard to imagine ice cream before the advent of modern refrigeration.  While flavored ices had already been popular for some time the first printed recipes for ice cream appeared in the early 1700s, and ice cream was referenced in the Oxford English Dictionary as early as 1744.

Before the processed was industrialized in the 20th Century, ice cream production was reserved for very special occasions.  It was a time-consuming, expensive and labor-intensive process that involved freezing cream in pots that were submerged in crushed ice mixed with salt.  Before refrigeration ice was harvested during the winter, stored either under ground or in sheds insulated with hay and then crushed by hand in order to make ice cream (or, of course, used for other purposes).  The salt is added to the ice because it lowers the freezing point of water thus making the ice colder.  The cream is agitated during the freezing process in order to add air to the mixture and prevent the cream from freezing into a solid block.  There have been many modern modifications to the ice cream production process, but the science of freezing air into cream remains unchanged (except in regards to very low cost ice cream that is essentially a mixture of chemicals that bears no resemblance to cream).

Both the ice cream cone and the ice cream sundae were reputed to have been invented by numerous clever culinary artists over several years, but both were well established by the early 1900s (the 1904 Worlds Fair saw the first mass introduction of the ice cream cone into American culture).  Today, the versatility and variety of ice cream is astounding.  Last week I was at a farmer's market where a vendor was making ice cream on demand using liquid nitrogen.  Innovation never ceases, but who can complain about such delicious novelty?

Now, I honestly don't know whether there will be ice cream at our 100th Birthday Party, but I do know that there is a truly wonderful ice cream parlor just down the street in West Liberty.