Ice Cream. Two words that can quickly sum up a summer experience, a childhood memory, an intimate moment at home with a loved one, or a night of crying and cursing over boys with your best girlfriends. It’s no surprise that ice cream is loved all over the world. It’s one of those staples of life that can bring you instant happiness.
But how well do you know this bringer of joy and sweetness? Did you know that:
- The first recorded recipe ever found for ice cream was by Lady Anne Fanshawe. She handwrote the ingredients and procedures to make ice cream back in 1665. The ingredients were interesting, to say the least. The ice cream was flavored with orange flower water and ambergris; a semi-liquid mixture puked up by a sperm whale.
- Vanilla is arguably the most accessible ice cream flavor today, but this was not the case in the past. Vanilla ice cream was a rare find – and an exotic one – in the late 1700s. This was because vanilla was a rare commodity at the time until the middle of the 19th century.
- During the first few years of television, cooking shows use mashed potatoes to simulate ice cream since the real deal melted too fast due to the heat of the set lighting.
- Chocolate ice cream was invented first before vanilla. The first recorded recipe for chocolate ice cream appeared in Italy. It was documented in the book The Modern Steward in 1692.
- Around 3.3 billion gallons of ice cream is consumed all over the world every year. That quantity can fill up 5,000 Olympic-size swimming pools! On an average, Americans eat 45.8 pints of ice cream each year.
- Ice cream cones were invented in 1904. During the St. Louis World’s Fair, a Syrian waffle maker rolled out his pastries into cone shapes to help an ice cream vendor who had run out of dishes to serve his ice cream. It’s worth noting that the idea of an ice cream cone was already patented a year earlier. The idea came from Italian living in New York City at that time. But it was during the fair that ice cream cones were popularized.
- Professional taste-testers of ice cream use specially-made gold spoons to taste new ice cream flavors. The gold utensil enables the tester to sample what’s on the spoon with virtually zero traces of the flavor left from the last chunk of ice cream on the spoon.
I scream, you scream for ice cream! Now you can enjoy this frozen delight every day the year with these drool-worthy shots of ice cream.