Why ice cream is soft
If you froze a tub of sweet cream in a freezer, you would get a hard block full of crunchy ice crystals. Ice cream is churned while it freezes, which keeps the crystals tiny, far too small to feel on the tongue, and whips air into the mixture. Cheap ice cream can be up to half air by volume. Italian gelato is churned more slowly, so it holds less air, uses more milk and less cream, and is served a little warmer, which makes the flavour stronger. SORBET contains no milk at all.
Brain freeze happens when something very cold touches the roof of your mouth. Blood vessels there tighten and then quickly widen again, and the nerves report it as a sharp pain in the forehead.
Ice and salt
Before electric freezers, ice cream was made by packing a tub of cream inside a bucket of ice and salt. Salt lowers the temperature at which water freezes, so as the ice melts the mixture can drop well below zero, to around minus twenty degrees, cold enough to freeze the cream. In 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia patented a hand-cranked freezer that worked this way, with a paddle inside turned by a handle. In winter, ice was cut from frozen lakes and stored packed in straw in ice houses.
Victorian street sellers served ice cream in small glasses called penny licks. The customer licked the glass clean and handed it back, and the seller refilled it for the next person, often without washing it. London banned penny licks in 1899 because they spread disease. Our Victorians page covers the period.
Sundaes, cones and favourite flavours
Several American towns claim the SUNDAE, and one story says the odd spelling was chosen so as not to disrespect Sunday. Edible cones existed earlier, but they became famous at the 1904 World's Fair in St Louis, where, the story goes, an ice cream seller ran out of dishes and a waffle maker at the next stall rolled his waffles into cones. An Italian immigrant in New York, Italo Marchiony, had already patented a mould for baking edible cups the year before. ROCKY ROAD was created in 1929, just after the Wall Street Crash, and was named, said its maker, to give people something to smile about in hard times.
NEAPOLITAN, with blocks of CHOCOLATE, VANILLA and STRAWBERRY side by side, is named after the Italian immigrants from Naples who brought layered ices to America in the 1800s.
Mint choc chip was invented in 1973 by a student in England, Marilyn Ricketts, for a competition to create a dish for the wedding of Princess Anne. MINT, PISTACHIO, HAZELNUT and COFFEE are old favourites, while BUBBLEGUM, COOKIE, FUDGE, TOFFEE and CARAMEL are more recent. Fruit flavours such as MANGO, COCONUT, BANANA, LEMON, CHERRY and RASPBERRY often turn up as sorbets. In surveys in both Britain and America, plain VANILLA usually comes out as the favourite of all. Japan goes further than most countries, selling ice cream flavoured with green tea, black sesame and even squid ink.