ICE CREAMS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 September 1928, Page 8

ICE CREAMS

USED A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. Who invented ice cream? Promoted suddenly to public favour during the last twenty years, ice cream is popularly regarded as a comparative novelty imported from America with iced drinks, jazz bands, and fantastic dance steps. Most people are surprised to learn that it was esteemed a delicacy in Italy more than nine centuries ago. To reconcile the ice cream cornet of to-day with the visored helmets and drooping plumes of mediaeval Europe is difficult for modern domesticated minds, who regard the mailed paladins of those hard-fisted days as superior to such weakness of the palate. But the truth is that in all probability William the Conqueror, Richard Conqueror de Lion, and many another popular hero, have cooled parched throats with ice cream after a dusty fray as eagerly as does the modern miner at the end of a “drying” spell in the pits. Ice cream was merely

re-discovered in America. The cooks of the tyrannical Catharine de Medici are said to have introduced the secret recipe for ice cream into France in the sixteenth century. To them also is attributed the invention of’the delicacy by certain authorities. Be this as it may, it is certain that in 1630 Parisian gourmets flocked to the Cafe Procope, where ice cream was retailed by Procopio Cultelli, an enterprising Sicilian. through France to Britain the recipe for ice cream is first mentioned in this country by Lady Mary Wortley in a letter written in 1716. Fifty years later Elizabeth Raffaid published the “Experienced House-

keeper,” in which she gives careful directions in making “apricot’ ice,” concluding naively with the remark that, after all, any other fruit would do equally as well. Tradition has it that the first ice cream, vendor in the States was a man named Hall, who kept a shopt in New York. But not until 1786 are we on certain ground. In that year ice was cut on Lake Wenham, near Boston, and sent to New York for use in the manufacture of ice-cream. It was widely advertised in “The Postboy” of that year.

J Boston again figured prominently in t ice-cream history a little over 120 years i ago when an enterprising trader disi patched a shipload of ice to London. It was from this venture that Britain’s r increasing demand for ice cream and > iced drinks had grown, although Transi atlantic ice was gradually ousted from • the market by Norwegian competition. In 1850 ice cream was still a rich man’s delicacy. In “Vanity Fair” Thackeray makes Becky Sharp regard ice-cream as a “luxury” when on her honeymoon at Brighton. Indeed, it was not until 1865 that foreign politics gave the sale of ice-cream an impetus which brought it within the reach of the general public. Seeking shelter'in Great Britain during Garibaldi’s struggle for Italian freedom a Venetian named Santorelli started selling ice cream as it was made centuries ago from the freshlygathered snows of the Apennines. After that it was not long before the ice-cream barrow made its appearance in the streets.