We’ve made it through another winter and the summer is upon us. Summer time is beach, pool and Ice-cream time. Have you ever wondered where this amazing treat comes from and who was the clever guy who added the cone the ice-cream? Here are some cold, hard truths about the treat.
Ice cream as we know it seems to have emerged in 17th-century France. (A first-century Roman emperor is said to have sent runners into the mountains for snow to be flavored with juices. In the 13th century, Marco Polo brought back from China descriptions of a sherbet like dessert.)
The cone didn’t appear until 1904, when a Syrian waffle maker at the St. Louis World’s Fair began rolling his pastries into horns to help an ice cream vendor who had run out of dishes. (The idea had been patented a year earlier, by an Italian in New York City, but the fair popularized it.)
Today the average American eats about 19 litre of ice cream a year―the world’s highest per capita consumption, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.
Top-selling flavours (surprise!): vanilla, with 33 percent of the market, and chocolate, with 19 percent.
It takes 2.5 kg of whole milk and 500g of cream to make one gallon (3.8 kg) of ice cream.