How did ancient civilizations make ice cream? - Vivian Jiang

On a hot spring afternoon in 1963, two men, sent by the American CIA, snuck into the cafeteria of the Havana Libre Hotel. Their directive was to retrieve a poison pill from the freezer and slip it into the chocolate milkshake of Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader who was known to devour up to 18 scoops of ice cream after lunch. While exact details of the story are contested, it's rumored that the pill, however, froze to the freezer coils and broke, foiling the CIA’s plan and granting Castro many more days to satiate his sweet tooth.

Ice cream has held a unique role in our world’s history, culture, and cravings— but where did it come from? The first accounts of cold desserts and iced drinks date back as early as the first century. In civilizations including ancient Rome, Mughal India, and Tang dynasty China, these icy treats were mainly enjoyed by the royal elites.

And finding the means to freeze these delicacies wasn’t always easy. Wealthy Mediterranean nobility sent laborers to trek up high mountains to harvest glacial ice and snow. Meanwhile, ancient Persians built shallow insulated pools of water and utilized a technique known as sky cooling.

At night, the shallow pools would naturally radiate heat into the dry desert skies, causing them to dip below the ambient temperature and freeze. Yet the cream-based treat we know today made a much later debut. It was originally inspired by sherbet, or sharbat in Arabic, an icy drink believed to have originated in Persia, and subsequently gained popularity in the Middle Ages.

European travelers brought sharbat recipes home, and began creating their own chocolate, pinecone, and even eggplant flavored takes on the refreshment. In 1692, Antonio Latini, a Neapolitan chef, recorded a recipe for a unique milk-based version, which some historians dub the first ice cream. In the 18th century, ice cream expanded its reach as these recipes set sail alongside European settlers to North America.

Yet it was still mainly enjoyed by the upper classes as the process to make it was quite laborious, and its main ingredients— sugar, salt, and cream— were expensive. George Washington is said to have spent the equivalent of $6,600 in today’s dollars on ice cream in one summer alone. It was on American soil that the frozen dessert entered its golden age, as inventors and entrepreneurs began to engineer ways to bring it to the masses.

In Philadelphia in 1843, Nancy Johnson patented a revolutionary ice cream-making machine featuring a crank and beater, which made the process easier for any home cook. And storing ice cream was no longer an obstacle, as by the mid-1830s, New England businessman “Ice King” Frederic Tudor had greatly improved the ice trade, shipping thousands of tons of ice to households across the globe. Soon, ice cream was on every street corner.

In the late 1880s, political turmoil brought Italian immigrants to cities like London, Glasgow, and New York, where many took up jobs as street vendors selling licks of ice cream for roughly a penny each. Meanwhile, American druggists discovered the appeal of combining soda, a drink thought to have therapeutic properties at the time, with ice cream, and a new social spot was born: the soda fountain. When the sale of alcohol was banned in 1920, many American saloons reinvented themselves as soda fountains, and breweries like Anheuser-Busch and Yuengling pivoted to producing ice cream.

At the same time, refrigeration technology was improving rapidly. By the end of World War II, the average American home had a freezer that could house a quart of ice cream. Even trucks could be equipped with freezers full of frozen treats.

Today, ice cream continues to take on new forms. And while some of its mysteries may never be solved, one thing is certain: our love for ice cream will never thaw.