When was ice cream first made?
Ice cream as it is known today was not the product of a single discovery or invention...
Updated On: 10/8/2007 [Total Votes: 706, Hits: 5361] Print

Ice cream as it is known today was not the product of a single discovery or invention. Therefore it is impossible to assign a definite date to its origin. There is reason for supposing, however, that ice cream originated in Italy, perhaps before the discovery of America. A variety of frozen compound was a common delicacy in Florence during the sixteenth century, and when Catherine de Medici became queen of France in 1533 she took her outfit for making a ice cream with her to Paris. The proprietors of Florin's Cafe in Naples maintain that ice cream was manutactured and sold there by a man named Florin nearly two hundred years ago. We have no means of determining what the nature of this early ice cream was.

Records of the introduction of ice cream into England are equally meager. In 1769 Mrs. Elizabeth Raffald published a book in London entitled "The Experienced Housekeeper" in which she gave the recipe for making a kind of ice cream. Ice cream made by a man named Hall, of 75 Chatham Street, now Park Row, was advertised in New York June 8, 1786, and there is record that a Mrs. Johnson served ice cream at a ball given in New York December 12, 1789.

In 1802 Samuel Latham Mitchill, a member of Congress from New York, wrote a letter to his wife in which he described a dinner given in Washington by President Jefferson. The dessert, wrote Mitchill, was of frozen fruit juices, well sweetened and shaped like a ball, inclosed in a steaming hot pastry, which was placed on a plate, the whole being covered with rich cream. The fact that Dolly Madison served ice cream in the White House at a New Year's reception during the Presidency of her husband is referred to in a letter written at the time by a Mrs. Seaton. But ice cream did not become common until many years later. It was still an oddity when the widow of Alexander Hamilton served it at a dinner given in Washington in honor of President Jackson. The first factory for the manufacture of ice cream in commercial quantities was established in Maryland in 1851.

Related Words:
Chatham Street, President Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Ice cream, President Jackson, Catherine de Medici

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