A Super Fun Article About Ice Cream

Everyone loves ice cream! And if by some miracle you don’t, you surely know that you are the exception, and you can still be amazed by these ice cream facts! For me, ice cream is more than just a sweet treat – it’s memories with friends and family, summer days on the beach and after-school play dates. So I set out to learn more about it, and found some sweet, refreshing facts.

How did it all begin?

                        

                         

Surprisingly, we still don’t know where exactly ice cream originated from. The first written recipe was found in a 1665 cookbook, but there are stories and scriptures about flavored ice dating back thousands of years. And why wouldn’t it, when such a simple thing: mixing ice with fruits or other flavorings, gives such amazing, tasty results. Around the 10^th century, they started producing ice cream with a milk base, but nobody is entirely sure how it was made, or what the ingredients were, though there are some pretty off-putting guesses.

     The perfect scoop

No matter how different modern ice cream popsicles get, there is something beautifully traditional in the simple ice cream scoop in a waffle cone. I remember seeing two vendors in a small town in Croatia, across the street from each other, doing juggling tricks with ice cream cones – they made it into performance art. And while they had some pretty strange flavors (like sour apple bubble gum, which was colored electric blue), the most popular flavor in the world remains vanilla. And what about the base? The waffle cone was the happiest accident of the early 1900s, when an ice cream vendor ran out of paper cones, and asked a waffle maker working next to him to help him out. The pairing was a match made in heaven – as we still use it today. I also found out that it takes an average of 50 licks to get through a scoop, and I am definitely counting it down next time to check!

Try to DIY

After many years of ice cream loving, I decided to try and make my own. A bold step, but I felt up to the challenge. I tried so many recipes, from blending up frozen fruit with honey to get a sorbet, to two-ingredient creamy goodness. If there is one thing I got out of it all, besides an abundance of ice cream, it’s that it is just too much work, and the result can’t compare to the store-bought ones, especially without an ice-cream machine! So unless you have a really big reason for customizing your ice cream, just get a tub from the store. For my wedding, I turned to my favorite ice cream store, who not only provided amazing ice cream, but also had a cart at the event, so that my guests could have a full experience, which fit perfectly with the carnival theme we were going for. And when you try ice cream that good, the DIY just can’t live up to it – but it’s a fun experiment if you are looking for a weekend project.

  Quirky facts I love

There was a point in time when it was illegal to serve ice cream on cherry pie in Kansas.

1 in 5 people share their ice cream with their pet (which is not a good practice, unless the ice cream is 100% natural and low in sugar!)

3% of Americans eat ice cream in the bathtub!

The largest ice cream cone was 2.8 meters tall, achieved, naturally, in Italy.

Chocolate ice cream was invented before vanilla, because chocolate was widely available, and vanilla was a luxury flavor.

In fact, ice cream was considered a luxury desert before it started being mass produced.

You can easily combat brain freeze by placing your tongue on the roof of your mouth, to bring the temperature back up.

There is a fruit in Hawaii that tastes just like vanilla ice cream, called inga feuillei.

So next time you go out for a sundae, remember that there’s a lot more behind that desert than just frozen milk! There’s a whole history and a culture behind it that spreads across all continents and nations, and I think that is pretty damn cool (pun intended)!