NOT SO MODERN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20104, 24 March 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

NOT SO MODERN

WHO INVENTED ICE CREAM? The alarm recently aroused by the outbreak of a mysterious illness in the track of an itinerant vendor of ice cream has prompted widespread inquiries as to the origin of this favourite dish (writes Basil Fuller in the London Daily Chronicle). Promoted suddenly to public favour during the last 20 years, ice cream is probably regarded as a comparative novelty, imported from America with iced drinks, jazz bands, and fantastic dance steps. Most people arc surprised to learn that it was esteemed a delicacy in Italy more than nine centuries ago.

To reconcile the ice eream coronet of to-day with the -visored helmets and drooping plumes of medieval Europe is difficult for modern domesticated minds, who regard the. mailed paladins of those hard-fisted days as superior to such weaknesses of the palate. But. the truth is that in all probability, William the Conqueror, Richard Coeu'r 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 “dryin’ ” spell in the pits. Ice cream was merely rediscovered in America. The cooks of the tyrannical Catherine de Medici arc said to have introduced the secret recipe for ice cream into France in the 16th century and to them also •is attributed the invention of the delicacy by certain authorities.

But 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. Passing through J rance 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 Housekeeper,” a forerunner of the modern cookery book, in which she gives careful directions for making “apricot ice,” concluding naively with the. remark that after all, any’ other fruit would do equally as well.