Ice-Cream Vendor Unknown.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18889, 12 October 1929, Page 17 (Supplement)

Ice-Cream Vendor Unknown.

In America there was once a suggestion to erect a memorial to the man who made the first ice-cream. Nothing was done, because he could not be identified. For it is certain that even 3000 years ago they knew how to prepare cooling drinks and foods to make life tolerable in heat waves. Old methods only distinctly resembled modern refrigerating usage. The ancients enjoyed not ice but snow creams, and the practice was one not of production but of preservation. In winter time quantities of snow were accumulated in large pits dug in the ground and they were carefully guarded until the dog-days. Western and Northern Europe is indebted to the Italians for the introduction of cooling drinks, which reached France in the sixteenth century, shortly before the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Italians also seem to have been the first actually to have produced—not preserved—ice by the infusion of salts, probably saltpetre, in water. The modern icecream—or, as it was then called, iced “ butter,” appears to have been first known at the Parisian Coffee House in 1774. The Duke of Chartres often went thither to enjoy a glass of iced liquor, and to his great delight the landlord one day presented to him his coat of arms fashioned in “ eatable ice.”