History of Ice Cream
The ancient Romans flavored ice with fruit and honey and Marco Polo (1254-1324) brought several recipes for flavored ice from the Far East to Italy, where it caught on in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Water ice and sherbet shops sprang up in France in the 17th century. In the late 18th century cream was added to water ices at shops in Paris.
Ice cream was popular in the American colonies and the early republic.
The hand cranked ice cream maker was invented in 1846 by Nancy Johnson in New Jersey and the first known commercial ice-cream factories was established in Baltimore in 1851.
With the advent of refrigeration it became possible to manufacture, store and ship ice cream in larger amounts.
The ice cream soda was invented by Robert Green on 1874 at a celebration at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
The sundae was apparently invented in Wisconsin in the 1890s, as means of getting around laws that prohibited the sale of ice cream sodas in Sundays.
The soda fountain operators served the ice cream with the flavored syrup but no soda and called the resultant dish a ‘sundae’ to avoid any religious backlash from the improper use of the word Sunday.
The ice cream cone was invented twice - once by an Italian immigrant to the United States, Italo Machiony, who patented a cone making machine in 1903, and the second time with an impromptu use of a Syrian waffle known as a zalabia to contain ice cream at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904.
History of Ice Cream