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Ice Cream: The Yankee Doodle Treat
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18442 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
1,997 Words |
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Kay Shaw Nelson
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“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” Does this well-known children's rhyme mean we all love ice cream? You'd better believe we do. The International Ice Cream Association (IICA) estimates that U.S. ice cream producers made 23.15 quarts per person in all of 1987.
Our affection for frozen treats isn't purely a matter of gluttony, however. Ice cream, after all, shouts patriotism and tradition. It is accorded a permanent place of honor at birthday parties and summer picnics. Weddings and anniversaries would not be the same without it. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841, “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend and so we buy ice cream.”
Ice cream is also big business. It's on the shopping lists of more than 98 percent of U.S. households. The retain value of ice cream and all related products is estimated at approximately $9 billion per year. The industry employs more than 18,500 people, whose annual earnings exceed $400 million.
From East to West
Although Americans did not invent ice cream, we can claim the paternity of ice cream sodas, sundaes, cones, sandwiches, sticks, bars, and floats. Not to mention Eskimo pies, Popsicles, banana splits, and soft ice cream, all in literally hundreds of flavors.
Nobody knows exactly where ice cream came from, but it probably derives from water ices known to the ancient Chinese. They are believed to have passed the art of making chilled fruit drinks to the Indians and Persians, who in turn introduced them to the Near East. The Emperor Nero learned of this delicacy and dispatched special runners to the Apennine Mountains for snow to chill his sherbets, flavored with fruit, nectar, and honey. After the fall of Rome, the Arabs recovered the trade secrets of sherbet making and later taught them to the Sicilians.
When Catherine de’ Medici married Henry II of France in 1533, she introduced the skill of making ices to her new subjects. Several varieties were served at her lengthy wedding celebration and subsequently featured at French court banquets. A hundred years later, Charles I was so titillated by Italian ices that the English monarch enjoined his confectioners never to reveal their secret formulas.
Flavored ices were first served to the Parisian public after 1670 at the Café Procope, which was owned by a Sicilian. Because of its specialties' popularity, the café flourished, and it was soon joined by a number of competitors. These establishments strengthened the ices' consistency by adding eggs and cream, and from then on, their repertoire of “cream ices” and frozen desserts knew no bounds. A 1768 English cookbook described such creations as “food fit for the gods.”
Ice cream arrived in the American colonies in the eighteenth century. Wealthy, prominent colonists knew it as a delightful novelty. A 1744 dinner guest of Maryland's Governor Thomas Bladen is credited with actually naming ice cream. He wrote to a friend that he had dined on a “...Dessert no less Curious; among the Rareties of which it was Compos'd was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most
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