WHO INVENTED ICE CREAM?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20290, 24 December 1927, Page 13

WHO INVENTED ICE CREAM?

Introduced suddenly to public favour during the last 20 years, ice cream i« popularly regarded as a comparative novelty imported from America. _ Moat people are surprised to learn that it was esteemed a delicacy in Italy more than nine centuries ago. To reconcile the ice cream bricks and cornets of to-day with the visored helmets and drooping plumes of mediaeval Europe is difficult for modern domesticated minds. But in all probability William the Conqueror, Richard Cosur de Lion, and many another popular hero 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 (writes Basil Fuller in the Daily Chronicle). Ice Cretan was merely rediscovered 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, and to them also is attributed the invention of the delicacy by certain authorities. That the Pilgrim Fathers carried an ice cream recipe on their voyage in the Mayflower is improbable. To the best of our know* ledge the secret was unknown in England when they rveighed anchor. In 1718 in* was cut on Lake Wenham, near Boston, and sent to Xew York for use in the manufacture of ice cream. Boston again figured prominently in ice cream history a "little over 120 years ago when an enterprising trader despatched a ship load or ice to London. It was from this venture that the increasing demand for ice cream and iced drinks has grown.