July 24, 2013 • 31 mins
There is actually some disagreement about the actual origin point of ice cream, but almost everyone agrees it's delicious. The real origin story is a culmination of many cultures and ingredients coming together to fill the need for a frosty treat.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson UH, and I have the following
question to pose. Who doesn't like ice cream? I can
(00:22):
think of a lot of people who don't like I
really people who are lactose intolerant. But it might not
be that they don't like it, it's just something they've
had to eliminate when for reason. When I was in
massage school, our traditional Chinese medicine teacher and I told
us that in traditional Chinese medicine, ice cream is a
terrible food to eat because it's very cold, and it
(00:43):
has lots of sugar and milk and all of those
things together. From that perspective a bad combo. I'm almost
suspicious of people that don't like ice cream. Yeah, I cannot.
I really can only think of one or two people
that I've ever met. One of the brother of a friend,
and he has many suspicious dislikes in the food arena,
(01:04):
like he also doesn't like cheesecakes, So come on, we
can't trust that person. Um, But I love it, and
most people I know love it. I do like ice cream.
Did you know that one point six billion gallons of
ice cream are produced in the US annually. That is
a lot of ice cream. Um. And as we know,
you know, the serving size on a pine of ice
(01:25):
cream that's listed has been comedian fodder for years and
years and years. It's interesting, I will say before we
get deep into this podcast, because we're talking today obviously
about the history of ice cream, UM, that a lot
of it after a certain point, kind of centers on
the US. While I know that people eat ice cream
the world over. I think we're kind of considered the
(01:48):
NEXTUS point. I don't. I think it's kind of gotten
lumped in with Americana, like you have your slice of
apple pie and there's ice cream on the side pie
ala mode. Well, and I definitely there are a lot
of cultural ice cream things, like you know, I grew
up in in the Bible Belt in the church ice
cream social, Yeah, an annual thing that everybody looked forward
(02:09):
to for a really long time. And then you have
the whole preponderance of ice cream parlors that we will
talk about later and how that sort of became a
place for people to go and hang out, Like ice
cream became a really social thing in the United States
and not just like a food to eat for dessert. Yeah,
it's really It's an iconic food I think in in
(02:30):
the US for sure. Uh, it's just kind of fascinating.
I'm now wondering if we have a national dessert and
if ice cream is it. But I don't know. Uh,
do you have a favorite flavor? Oh? I will eat
chocolate ice cream of course, all day, but I don't
love chocolate. My mother in law really loves chocolate ice cream,
(02:50):
and I think she's suspicious of me that. I'm like,
that doesn't work for me. Um. Yeah. When I had
my wisdom teeth ur moved. My dad like woke me
up in the parking lot at the grocery store while
I was, you know, still kind of under some anesthesia still,
He's like, what kind of ice cream do you want?
And I was like, chalker, that's so pathetic. It was
very pathetic. I also feel like I should give a
(03:11):
quick shout out to one of my favorite ice cream
places in the world, which is in Canada. It's outside Vancouver,
I think it's technically in Burnaby called Kaza Gelato, and
they have hundreds of flavors of ice cream, and they
do really wild. That is where I had dirty and
ice cream, which I have to keep on a lid
on it, and they keep it far away from all
the other ice creams because it makes everything smells so bad,
(03:34):
but it's delicious. And that's where I had parent Gorgonzola
ice cream for the first time. And they do dandelion
ice cream almost any flavor I think they've tried to do.
And I love that place, like um, just to me,
it was like going into the factory of dreams at
that point. Yeah, what I can eat all of these things?
Oh my goodness. When I was a kid, there was
(03:54):
an ice cream place at the beach that we went
to every summer and my brother and my cousin and
I would all get these Uh it was bubble bubblegum
flavored ice cream that had little pieces of love that stuff.
It's like Chloe Lee sweet and I love it and
a terrible color, like not a color that's fund in nature,
but delicious. Yeah. Well, and all these things that I
(04:17):
associate with ice cream, a lot of them are things
that are done as a family or in a group,
or it is a very social foods unless you're eating
it by yourself straight from the carton in front of
the television, which I also do. Oh yeah, for sure,
I've definitely done that. Uh. But this all makes us
wonder where did ice cream come from in the first place? Uh,
(04:38):
And this is actually a pretty unresolved question. There are
many different theories. Um. There's a lot of disagreement about
the actual origin point of ice cream, and some of
that problem lies in semantics. Some food historians will qualify
ice cream by a certain set of criteria, and those
may not be the same criteria or definition that another
(04:59):
food you will use. And some people, for example, separate
ice deserts out by the inclusion or exclusion of dairy.
But even then the origins are hazy. Um. There's a U.
S D A standard that's current that says for a
food to qualify as ice cream, it needs to contain
at least ten percent milk fat, a minimum of six
percent non fat milk solids, and a gallon has to
(05:22):
weigh at least four point five pounds. But that's not
really um applicable to the historical record because those were
not in place and we're still trying to trace the origins.
So there are many different and interesting stories that have circulated,
and we won't even cover all of them, but we
will do a list um about the origins of ice cream.
(05:44):
So one of the earliest is a biblical mention. There's
a reference to King Solomon having iced drinks during harvest time,
which sounds like a wonderful idea. UM, but it also
doesn't sound that much like ice cream. But that's mentioned
in the UH and various accounts of ice cream history
is sort of a proto ice cream treat. And Alexander
(06:06):
the Great is said to have enjoyed snow and ice
that were flavored with honey or nectar, which sounds more
like a snow cone, but still is sometimes bandied about
as an potential origin point. I think it sounds like
snow cream, which we talked about in our prior podcast
stuff and people were horrified that people would do that. UH.
In the first century CE, Roman emperor Nero is said
(06:30):
to have gotten his slaves to bring him snow from
the mountains so that it could be combined with fruit,
again similar to the Alexander the Great thing. UH. And
then Marco Polo allegedly brought back a recipe for a
frozen dessert from his travels in Asia when he returned
to Italy. Uh And it's believed that this more closely
(06:50):
resembled sherbet than an ice cream. Uh And some people
say that it's the genesis point for ice cream and
gelato and similar frozen treats develop in Italy in the
mid fifreds. It's possible that Catherine de Medici introduced some
kind of ice cream to France when she married Henry
the Second Yeah, that she carried it over. So those
(07:10):
are all different. I have read different accounts that point
to each one of those things is this is where
ice cream started. But uh and they all may or
may not have truth to them. They're all, like I said,
pointed out in various discussions of ice cream as like
this is our ice cream really got its start. There's
so much variation, and many of them don't involve dairy,
(07:32):
So a lot of people will discount them um or
some people will support them, depending on their beliefs and definitions. Um.
And Also I think that in some cases a little
bit of like cultural pride comes into it. There are
people in France that will say it came from France,
people from Italy that will say it came from Italy,
people from China that will say it came from China
(07:52):
where we're about to discuss, because that often gets uh
believed in. But the truth really is probably that there
were many people wanting a delightful, tasty, cool treats, particularly
in hot weather, and so I think a lot of
different techniques and cultural desires kind of went into the
ice cream that we need today and how it developed.
(08:14):
The most favored origin story for ice cream is that
it comes from China. So there are some references to
a milk and rice mixture packed into snow for freezing
as early as two d b C. Then during China's
Tank period from six eighteen to nine oh seven, it's
believed that a version of ice cream was popular with
(08:34):
the nation's rulers, and they actually had dedicated iceman. These
men their entire job was to keep the palace supplied
with ice, and they would bring that ice from the
mountains and then it would be combined with a fermented
milk which is called kumas uh and camphor and flour.
And the dairy element could be sourced from a number
(08:55):
of different animals that could be um, cow milk, goat milk,
or buffalo milk in the amper was used to enhance
the texture and flavor. But that makes me have question
marks in my head and my stomach because it seems
like it would taste like mothball right well. And I
also wonder, um, as we talked about in our episode
(09:16):
on the history of cheese, how a lot of adults
can't tolerate lactose, uh, because they haven't been their their
digestive systems haven't been gradually accustomed to it. In in
Chinese cultures and a lot of Asian cultures, lactose intolerance
is a lot more prevalent, so milk is not a
(09:37):
big ingredient in a lot of Asian cooking. Yeah. So
I kind of wonder whether either the fermenting process took
down the amount of lactose, which probably actually I think no.
I think yeast used in brewing and fermenting does not
eat lactose. I'm super curious about this now me too.
It's fascinating to think about, and I was surprised that
(09:59):
it is the most favored stories since we don't associate
Asia and China specifically with a lot of dairy consumption.
It's kind of interesting, uh, And it could be that
it was so rare that that was part of why
it became a yummy, palatial like special treat, that there
was some level of um um exclusivity to it that
(10:21):
made it appealing. For all we know, it totally upset
their stomach, a special treat that made you feel ill affered.
But once all of these ingredients were combined, they would
pack the mixture into these metal tubes and then submerge
them in an ice pool for freezing, which is kind
of cool to think about. I wonder if anybody does
(10:41):
that style of ice cream making today. I would try
it for sure, even if it does taste like muffles.
I don't know if I would try camphor ice cream.
I would try it. I'm adventurous. I'll try almost anything. Yeah,
somehow I would be more inclined to eat bugs than
camphor ice cream. But then, and there is a lot
(11:02):
of things that happen having to do with um the
area of Turkey and Arab cultures, and how that kind
of slowly gets ice cream and frozen treats into Europe,
Europe and the European countries, and then it kind of
takes a lot of big steps towards being the dessert
that we know today. Arab people's are said to have
(11:22):
drunken iced slushy like sherbet style drink and medieval times, uh,
this was normally fruit flavored, and apparently it spread to
several European cultures because it was so refreshing and tasty. Yeah,
the travelers that would travel around the Mediterranean and do
trades with other countries kind of picked up this habit
of drinking it brought it right back home with them.
(11:44):
And one of the supporting elements for the belief that
ice cream true, you know, true ice cream I'm making
the air quotes originated in Italy, comes from their knowledge
of chilling various beverages in the mid to late fifteen hundreds,
using a slurry of salt, peter and snow to like
submerge things and quickly almost flash freeze them. And we
(12:06):
know this was used for wine to cool it down,
but it's believed that this process may have also been
applied to chilling these slushy sherbets that they had discovered
and picked up as a habit when they were traveling. Uh.
And they were sometimes called Turkish sorbets, and the word
sorbet is one in different European cultures. As this history
goes on, it really gets traded around in ways that
(12:29):
are not consistent. Different things were being called sorbet that
we would define differently I think today. So that's a
tricky one. If you're reading any of the the passages
or sources we list in the show notes, just know
that sorbet is a word that gets kind of tossed
around without consistency. Yeah. Well, and if you've if you've
ever seen, you know, an old fashioned ice cream maker
(12:50):
do its thing, you can sort of see a seed
of that process and this whole idea of using a
slurry of salt, peter and snow to cool stuff. Now, yeah,
so they were onto it early. Sorbet as we know
it was invented when these icy drinks, uh were made
into hard frozen treats that incorporated sugar. The man who
(13:11):
gets the credit for this was Antonio Latini, who was
working as a steward to the chief Minister of the
Spanish Viceroy in Naples in the late sixteen hundreds. He
further experimented and added dairy to the mix in Latini's
book scalco Ala Moderna, which means carver to the modern.
He included recipes for lemon, strawberry, sour cherry, chocolate, and
(13:33):
cinnamon ice, and a milk ice that's often cited as
the first two ice cream recipe. I would eat any
of those. They sound very interesting. Um. Cinnamon ice sounded
really interesting to me, mostly because my husband really loved cinnamon.
And in sixty six a cafe in Paris opened. Uh.
Sometimes it's called Il Procope, sometimes La Procope, sometimes Cafe Procope,
(13:55):
but it's proprietor was actually Sicilian. It was a man
named Francesco Procopio de Cotelli uh, and it offered a
variety of ice treats, and some historians credit him with
bringing gelato to France, but others say his cafe only
offered very cold beverages. So there's some discrepancy about what
was really on the menu and whether he was importing
(14:18):
ice cream to France. Um. But what's really interesting is
that that cafe is still open today, so you can
go visit it. It really has the established six six
sign above it, and you can go. Let's go now,
all right, get in the car. The friench had already
been experimenting with ice cream like treats, specifically a concoction
(14:39):
called fromage, which is very similar to ice cream. This
was not made with cheese, even though it has the
same word as cheese. It's not completely clear why the
two words share the same name, but it's possible that
the frozen dairy dessert was chilled in cheese molds. As
fromage developed and started to be referred few as nij
(15:00):
which is the French word for snow, and then gloss,
which is what it's now called today, it became incredibly
popular throughout the country and in six which was the
same year Latini's Cookbook for Ices came out, a French
cookbook for similar desserts entitled La Maison regulas which is
a well ordered home, was written by Nicholas Audeger, and
(15:23):
it was touted as being quote the true method for
making all sorts of water essences and liqueurs strong and
refreshing in the Italian style. Odeja's book was much clearer
in its recipes and instructions, and its spelled out exactly
how to make crame glass a which is frizzing cream.
The use of a bucket inside of another bucket, with
(15:43):
the gap between the two filled with ice and salt
is described, as well as the method for stirring the
mixture in the interior bucket as it freezes until it
has the consistency of snow, which is really how I
scream still gets made as you're making in a funky
science experiment, which or if you're in a factory, but
(16:04):
when people have their home machines, that's it's really the
same deal going on. Um and Audi's book you can
actually read online if you are fluent in French. We
will have that link in the show notes. Uh, my
French is not good enough to follow a recipe of
that nature. It's kind of mediocre. But then sort of
an interesting thing happened, and this is sort of the
(16:26):
point where it becomes a very American treat. So while
ice cream existed in Europe for many years prior, and
the recipes and the love of the treat traveled across
the Atlantic with the colonists in the seventeen forties, there
is also this kind of wacky mythological tale that attributes
the invention of ice cream to Martha Washington. Uh. The
(16:48):
story claims that she left a bowl of sweet cream
outdoors overnight and accidentally stumbled upon the creation when she
discovered the forgotten dish which had frozen the next morning.
And of course there's this company really untrue. We have
instances of ice cream going on way before that, and
there's actually the first account of ice cream in America
is in a letter from seventeen forty four which was
(17:10):
written by a guest of William Bladen, who was the
governor of Maryland, um. And this guest was writing of
the time that he visited with the politician and what
was served while he was there, and ice cream was
one of the things. So even though Martha Washington did
not invent ice cream, George Washington did love it. Like
(17:31):
that's an understatement. I think he really super loved it.
In the seventeen eighty four ledger for Mount Vernon, there's
a record of an ice cream machine being acquired for
the sum of one pound, thirteen shillings and threepence, And
even with his own ice cream turns at home. In
seventeen ninety, George Washington is said to have spent two
hundred dollars over the course of one summer on ice
(17:52):
cream at a local shop, which is apparently close to
a hundred thousand dollars of today's money may have contributed
to the wooden teeth mythology. Well. And it's funny. When
I was talking to my husband about this, because I
was blathering on about how interesting I found it, he
wondered if it wasn't because he had the wooden teeth.
Ice Cream was a yummy thing he could easily eat
(18:12):
because it would melt in his mouth. I think everyone had.
I mean, definitely everyone had terrible teeth at the time,
but George Washington's terrible teeth are are infamous. Shortly after
Washington's death, an inventory of Mountain Vernon was made and
numerous ice ice cream supplies turn up. In that inventory.
There were two Pewter ice cream pots, as well as
(18:35):
numerous special ice cream serving dishes. Ice Cream was a
favored treat for both the company, who would you know,
arrive and stay there, and for the family in residence. Yeah.
When they had state dinners, you were pretty much going
to get ice cream as dessert. Uh. It was really
like I can't stress enough how much George Washington loved it.
But he was not the only person. Thomas Jefferson had
(18:58):
his own recipe for vanilla. Uh that he had handwritten
now and he served it with Savoy cookies. And you
can actually see that handwritten recipe online. It's part of
the American Treasures of the Library Congress, and we'll link
to that in our show notes. And he is Jefferson
is said to have maintained multiple ice houses so that
he could constantly be storing ice for making more ice cream,
(19:19):
as well as storing his ice cream once it had
been made. That he was just stockpiling ice cream supplies
and ice cream. I'm also in favor of a giant
ice cream stockpile. The Lincoln's were also big fans Mary Todd.
Lincoln would frequently host strawberry parties, which would get together
centered around dessert service and co starring with the ice
(19:41):
with the strawberries was ice cream. Yeah. So uh. Ice
Cream has a very favored history with American presidents and
even more modern presidents have definitely sung the praises of
ice cream. And we all love it. It's good, I'm
telling you, uh. And perhaps because of the popularity with
the early political leaders, ice cream was enthusiastically embraced in
(20:03):
the US, But up until the early eighteen hundreds it
was kind of a fancy pants dessert for wealthy people
and high society types. Yeah, if average people cannot afford
to keep things cold and uh and to get all
the ice in, the sugar and everything else that are
needed to make it, then it does make it a
very exclusive food. Yes. And then when you think of
(20:26):
people maintaining multiple ice houses to keep their stockpile, that's
not something most people would have had access to. But
the insulated ice house was invented around the turn of
the century, so that meant that more people could have
ice cream on hand, whereas prior to that, only wealthy
people could really maintain an ice house because they would
have to have a constant ice coming in and constant
(20:48):
management of the situation in the temperature. Yeah, it really
It reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about why
sweet tea is so popular in the South. It had
to do with if you could afford the sugar and
the ice needed to make sweet tea. You're doing all right? Yeah,
it's a little bit of a calling card of your aristocracy.
Would you like to come over and have sweet tea
(21:09):
on my part? The money for that on the veranda
In the early New Jersey housewife Nancy Johnson made ice
cream in the normal way in a metal bucket packed
with ice and salt. It was great, but this was really,
as we've talked about, at time consuming and it's hard
to keep things consistent when you're having to stir them constantly.
(21:32):
So she invented the hand cranked ice cream churn, and
her new artificial freezer was patented on September and the
basic design continues to be popular now with pretty minimal changes. Yeah,
ice cream churns that you by now are so similar
to that original one. Obviously the components are made of
more modern materials, but yeah, but you can also still
(21:57):
buy hand cranks. There. You take a little more work
earned that ice cream, which is probably good, but um, yeah,
it's it's retained its function and it's continued to be
about that same thing that the Italians were doing with
ice and salt mixed together, surrounding this thing, surrounding the
dairy buckets so they could kind of quickly freeze it.
(22:21):
So little change, don't mess with perfection. The first commercial
ice cream factory was opened in eighteen fifty by Jacob Fussell,
and he was a dairyman from Baltimore and he wanted
to make use of the surplus cream that his dairy
was producing, which you know, once they had cleared that off,
they had to use it very quickly. So it went
into making ice cream and so I scream. At that point,
(22:43):
you know transition. It became not just a home main
treat that you would be using your hand crank for,
but an actual industry, which as we know, has flourished. Yes,
eighteen seventy four saw the first ice cream soda shop
in the United States, as well as the origin of
the soda jerk. So the late Victorian and Edwardian Eras
saw a real explosion in ice cream popularity. By the
(23:06):
nineteen teens, all of America was covered in ice cream shops.
And another thing that may have contributed to ice cream
sort of being so associated with the US is that
during World War Two, ice cream was like a huge
part of the morale efforts of the U. S. Armed Forces,
Like it was literally listed as a line item in
their morale budget, like that they had to have rations
(23:28):
of ice cream for the soldiers. The military served ice
cream for the troops, and they even established this blows
my mind in the most wonderful way a floating ice
cream parlor in the Western Pacific that would serve the soldiers.
So it was like a floating treat factory. It was
on a barge and it had to be towed by
other ships. It wasn't self powered, but its only job
(23:50):
was to produce ice cream for soldiers, uh, which is
really fascinating and interesting. Uh. And it was quite expensive apparently.
And when the war conclude, ice cream was a huge
part of the festivities. From the end of the war
through the seventies, prepackaged ice cream started to grow as
something you could buy at the supermarket. And it's the
(24:12):
planted most of the quaint ice cream shops that had
become popular in the early nine dreds. Yeah, and of
course that sort of started this big shift that we've
witnessed in the last couple of decades where some people
would say the quality goes down when you're getting um
ice cream at the supermarket. But then there has also
been this sort of growth of the boutique industry of
(24:33):
these smaller ice cream shops again that are kind of
more specialized. There are artisan ice creams now. I've visited
two of such shops over Fourth of July weekend, when
it was extremely hot in Boston. Yeah, a good fresh
ice cream, like a homemade ice cream is good stuff.
Uh yeah, And we have these specialty shops all over
(24:56):
the US now and in other countries as well. But
of course we owe all of these yummy treats. Were
enjoying with all of our mix ins to China or
Nero or Marco Polo or King Solomon, depending on whose
version of the story you believe in which definition you
hadhere to in terms of historical context, ice cream, I
(25:17):
love it. I was just immensely relieved the time this
particularly like I can understand how it became a popular
thing to serve ice cream during the harvest or to
people who were traveling in hot weather. Um, just because
of having walked to a place in the ninety degree
heat and then walked back while drinking a frozen drink
(25:42):
and man with a different experience, the trip back was
so much better than the trip out, and the whole
all I had been able to think was it's so hot.
It's so hot, And then on the way back, I
was like, I'm drinking delicious. This was this was a
like a survey that was yeah, a frozen tree, It's
shocking how effective they are and just kind of cooling
(26:04):
you down. I meking you feel good on a day
that is sweltering. We um. Anybody that runs knows probably
about the Peach Tree Road Race, which is a huge
race here in Atlanta on the fourth of July. It's
like up to sixty runners now, so it's quite mammoth uh.
And after you finish, you kind of have to go
through this cattle shoot set up where they march everybody
(26:24):
up this one street to get back to public transportation.
And smartly, a few years ago, we have a local
um ice cream popsicle it's not all ice cream, but
a popsicle vendor called King of Pops, and they had
the very smart business idea to start setting up rolling
carts along that route because you can't go off of
that route, like they kind of keep you cordoned in
(26:45):
and police block off other streets so you can't kind
of verge out and have a mass. So it's just
like all these people marching by, and it's so hard
to resist. You just pull out your money or your
credit card and you're like, yes, please give me the
pops And it makes it so much better at that
if you were just walking without them. Yeah, we were
walking to Fenway Park on the fourth where people ate
(27:05):
lots of ice cream to keep cool. Um, And I
was thinking about the pahgre Ray Race and how it
must have been miserable. Yeah. I did not run it
this year. I usually do, but I opted not to
this year. Um, partially because I thought about that horrible
march back to public transportation, and I dislike it so
much that I was like, that's let somebody else have
(27:27):
the entry. There's like a whole lottery system to even
get into the race anymore because it's gotten so big. Uh.
And apparently there was so much rain this year that
the park that you kind of have to travel through
to get done, get your stuff and then leave was
covered in mud. So I was glad I missed, but
kudos to everybody that ran it because it was sweltery
(27:48):
and muggy. I ran just not there. But I did
not have ice cream afterwards, So that's my punishment, like now,
and I did not have ice cream at Fenway Park,
just because when the ice cream was coming by, it
was late enough in the game that we were starting
to think about when you're gonna leave yet, at which
point I did get a frozen coffee drink yum, also delicious. Uh.
(28:13):
So that is the scoop on ice cream, not to
make a pun. Uh. Do you also have some listener mails?
I do, indeed. Uh. This one is from our listener Lou.
And she has to make lots of small car trips
and so she listens to our podcasts during those to
make time pass. She says, I was so excited when
I heard the Kellogg episode because my great grandmother went
to Battle Creek Sanitarium recently. My grandmother and I were
(28:35):
going through boxes of family things and found a scrapbook
that my great grandmother had made while she was there
from about nineteen eighteen to ninety one. It's filled with
pictures of Dr Kellogg and men used from the cafeteria,
all vegetarian, and even her class schedule. It was a
pretty big deal for a woman of her time from
West Virginia to be able to go to school, so
she was very grateful to Kellogg. She went from there
(28:57):
to work as a dietitian at Bellevue Hospital. Thank you
for the work that you do. That's really really cool. Uh.
And I actually wrote back to Lou, and I hope
she writes to me back, because I was wondering if
she had ever heard any insights on nutrition through kind
of the family um storytelling lines, because you know, to
think about how nutrition must have been viewed then versus
(29:20):
the subsequent years after she left the Kellogg Sanitarium, and
how many fads started to happen in different weird things
in the Uh. You know, vegetarian diet had not really
been adopted all over the place at that point, so
to have gotten an early exposure and then seen it
kind of grow slowly in popularity must have been really fascinating.
I love it's so cool to have that connection to history,
(29:43):
and especially because they have, you know, all of these
mementos from the sanitarium her great grandmother kept. So cool. Yeah,
well it's not maybe the most widely known place. It
didn't make a name for its out, so yeah, that's
pretty neat. Uh. If you have any connections to history,
or you just want to write as about anything else,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(30:03):
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and you will get how ice cream Works, which also
(30:24):
includes a recipe for how to make your own ice
cream very quickly. I believe it's the baggums it it
is the bag which who doesn't want to do that?
Let's do that right after this And you can learn
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(30:46):
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(31:09):
Go to audible podcast dot com slash history to get
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sign up today.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson UH, and I have the following
question to pose. Who doesn't like ice cream? I can
(00:22):
think of a lot of people who don't like I
really people who are lactose intolerant. But it might not
be that they don't like it, it's just something they've
had to eliminate when for reason. When I was in
massage school, our traditional Chinese medicine teacher and I told
us that in traditional Chinese medicine, ice cream is a
terrible food to eat because it's very cold, and it
(00:43):
has lots of sugar and milk and all of those
things together. From that perspective a bad combo. I'm almost
suspicious of people that don't like ice cream. Yeah, I cannot.
I really can only think of one or two people
that I've ever met. One of the brother of a friend,
and he has many suspicious dislikes in the food arena,
(01:04):
like he also doesn't like cheesecakes, So come on, we
can't trust that person. Um, But I love it, and
most people I know love it. I do like ice cream.
Did you know that one point six billion gallons of
ice cream are produced in the US annually. That is
a lot of ice cream. Um. And as we know,
you know, the serving size on a pine of ice
(01:25):
cream that's listed has been comedian fodder for years and
years and years. It's interesting, I will say before we
get deep into this podcast, because we're talking today obviously
about the history of ice cream, UM, that a lot
of it after a certain point, kind of centers on
the US. While I know that people eat ice cream
the world over. I think we're kind of considered the
(01:48):
NEXTUS point. I don't. I think it's kind of gotten
lumped in with Americana, like you have your slice of
apple pie and there's ice cream on the side pie
ala mode. Well, and I definitely there are a lot
of cultural ice cream things, like you know, I grew
up in in the Bible Belt in the church ice
cream social, Yeah, an annual thing that everybody looked forward
(02:09):
to for a really long time. And then you have
the whole preponderance of ice cream parlors that we will
talk about later and how that sort of became a
place for people to go and hang out, Like ice
cream became a really social thing in the United States
and not just like a food to eat for dessert. Yeah,
it's really It's an iconic food I think in in
(02:30):
the US for sure. Uh, it's just kind of fascinating.
I'm now wondering if we have a national dessert and
if ice cream is it. But I don't know. Uh,
do you have a favorite flavor? Oh? I will eat
chocolate ice cream of course, all day, but I don't
love chocolate. My mother in law really loves chocolate ice cream,
(02:50):
and I think she's suspicious of me that. I'm like,
that doesn't work for me. Um. Yeah. When I had
my wisdom teeth ur moved. My dad like woke me
up in the parking lot at the grocery store while
I was, you know, still kind of under some anesthesia still,
He's like, what kind of ice cream do you want?
And I was like, chalker, that's so pathetic. It was
very pathetic. I also feel like I should give a
(03:11):
quick shout out to one of my favorite ice cream
places in the world, which is in Canada. It's outside Vancouver,
I think it's technically in Burnaby called Kaza Gelato, and
they have hundreds of flavors of ice cream, and they
do really wild. That is where I had dirty and
ice cream, which I have to keep on a lid
on it, and they keep it far away from all
the other ice creams because it makes everything smells so bad,
(03:34):
but it's delicious. And that's where I had parent Gorgonzola
ice cream for the first time. And they do dandelion
ice cream almost any flavor I think they've tried to do.
And I love that place, like um, just to me,
it was like going into the factory of dreams at
that point. Yeah, what I can eat all of these things?
Oh my goodness. When I was a kid, there was
(03:54):
an ice cream place at the beach that we went
to every summer and my brother and my cousin and
I would all get these Uh it was bubble bubblegum
flavored ice cream that had little pieces of love that stuff.
It's like Chloe Lee sweet and I love it and
a terrible color, like not a color that's fund in nature,
but delicious. Yeah. Well, and all these things that I
(04:17):
associate with ice cream, a lot of them are things
that are done as a family or in a group,
or it is a very social foods unless you're eating
it by yourself straight from the carton in front of
the television, which I also do. Oh yeah, for sure,
I've definitely done that. Uh. But this all makes us
wonder where did ice cream come from in the first place? Uh,
(04:38):
And this is actually a pretty unresolved question. There are
many different theories. Um. There's a lot of disagreement about
the actual origin point of ice cream, and some of
that problem lies in semantics. Some food historians will qualify
ice cream by a certain set of criteria, and those
may not be the same criteria or definition that another
(04:59):
food you will use. And some people, for example, separate
ice deserts out by the inclusion or exclusion of dairy.
But even then the origins are hazy. Um. There's a U.
S D A standard that's current that says for a
food to qualify as ice cream, it needs to contain
at least ten percent milk fat, a minimum of six
percent non fat milk solids, and a gallon has to
(05:22):
weigh at least four point five pounds. But that's not
really um applicable to the historical record because those were
not in place and we're still trying to trace the origins.
So there are many different and interesting stories that have circulated,
and we won't even cover all of them, but we
will do a list um about the origins of ice cream.
(05:44):
So one of the earliest is a biblical mention. There's
a reference to King Solomon having iced drinks during harvest time,
which sounds like a wonderful idea. UM, but it also
doesn't sound that much like ice cream. But that's mentioned
in the UH and various accounts of ice cream history
is sort of a proto ice cream treat. And Alexander
(06:06):
the Great is said to have enjoyed snow and ice
that were flavored with honey or nectar, which sounds more
like a snow cone, but still is sometimes bandied about
as an potential origin point. I think it sounds like
snow cream, which we talked about in our prior podcast
stuff and people were horrified that people would do that. UH.
In the first century CE, Roman emperor Nero is said
(06:30):
to have gotten his slaves to bring him snow from
the mountains so that it could be combined with fruit,
again similar to the Alexander the Great thing. UH. And
then Marco Polo allegedly brought back a recipe for a
frozen dessert from his travels in Asia when he returned
to Italy. Uh And it's believed that this more closely
(06:50):
resembled sherbet than an ice cream. Uh And some people
say that it's the genesis point for ice cream and
gelato and similar frozen treats develop in Italy in the
mid fifreds. It's possible that Catherine de Medici introduced some
kind of ice cream to France when she married Henry
the Second Yeah, that she carried it over. So those
(07:10):
are all different. I have read different accounts that point
to each one of those things is this is where
ice cream started. But uh and they all may or
may not have truth to them. They're all, like I said,
pointed out in various discussions of ice cream as like
this is our ice cream really got its start. There's
so much variation, and many of them don't involve dairy,
(07:32):
So a lot of people will discount them um or
some people will support them, depending on their beliefs and definitions. Um.
And Also I think that in some cases a little
bit of like cultural pride comes into it. There are
people in France that will say it came from France,
people from Italy that will say it came from Italy,
people from China that will say it came from China
(07:52):
where we're about to discuss, because that often gets uh
believed in. But the truth really is probably that there
were many people wanting a delightful, tasty, cool treats, particularly
in hot weather, and so I think a lot of
different techniques and cultural desires kind of went into the
ice cream that we need today and how it developed.
(08:14):
The most favored origin story for ice cream is that
it comes from China. So there are some references to
a milk and rice mixture packed into snow for freezing
as early as two d b C. Then during China's
Tank period from six eighteen to nine oh seven, it's
believed that a version of ice cream was popular with
(08:34):
the nation's rulers, and they actually had dedicated iceman. These
men their entire job was to keep the palace supplied
with ice, and they would bring that ice from the
mountains and then it would be combined with a fermented
milk which is called kumas uh and camphor and flour.
And the dairy element could be sourced from a number
(08:55):
of different animals that could be um, cow milk, goat milk,
or buffalo milk in the amper was used to enhance
the texture and flavor. But that makes me have question
marks in my head and my stomach because it seems
like it would taste like mothball right well. And I
also wonder, um, as we talked about in our episode
(09:16):
on the history of cheese, how a lot of adults
can't tolerate lactose, uh, because they haven't been their their
digestive systems haven't been gradually accustomed to it. In in
Chinese cultures and a lot of Asian cultures, lactose intolerance
is a lot more prevalent, so milk is not a
(09:37):
big ingredient in a lot of Asian cooking. Yeah. So
I kind of wonder whether either the fermenting process took
down the amount of lactose, which probably actually I think no.
I think yeast used in brewing and fermenting does not
eat lactose. I'm super curious about this now me too.
It's fascinating to think about, and I was surprised that
(09:59):
it is the most favored stories since we don't associate
Asia and China specifically with a lot of dairy consumption.
It's kind of interesting, uh, And it could be that
it was so rare that that was part of why
it became a yummy, palatial like special treat, that there
was some level of um um exclusivity to it that
(10:21):
made it appealing. For all we know, it totally upset
their stomach, a special treat that made you feel ill affered.
But once all of these ingredients were combined, they would
pack the mixture into these metal tubes and then submerge
them in an ice pool for freezing, which is kind
of cool to think about. I wonder if anybody does
(10:41):
that style of ice cream making today. I would try
it for sure, even if it does taste like muffles.
I don't know if I would try camphor ice cream.
I would try it. I'm adventurous. I'll try almost anything. Yeah,
somehow I would be more inclined to eat bugs than
camphor ice cream. But then, and there is a lot
(11:02):
of things that happen having to do with um the
area of Turkey and Arab cultures, and how that kind
of slowly gets ice cream and frozen treats into Europe,
Europe and the European countries, and then it kind of
takes a lot of big steps towards being the dessert
that we know today. Arab people's are said to have
(11:22):
drunken iced slushy like sherbet style drink and medieval times, uh,
this was normally fruit flavored, and apparently it spread to
several European cultures because it was so refreshing and tasty. Yeah,
the travelers that would travel around the Mediterranean and do
trades with other countries kind of picked up this habit
of drinking it brought it right back home with them.
(11:44):
And one of the supporting elements for the belief that
ice cream true, you know, true ice cream I'm making
the air quotes originated in Italy, comes from their knowledge
of chilling various beverages in the mid to late fifteen hundreds,
using a slurry of salt, peter and snow to like
submerge things and quickly almost flash freeze them. And we
(12:06):
know this was used for wine to cool it down,
but it's believed that this process may have also been
applied to chilling these slushy sherbets that they had discovered
and picked up as a habit when they were traveling. Uh.
And they were sometimes called Turkish sorbets, and the word
sorbet is one in different European cultures. As this history
goes on, it really gets traded around in ways that
(12:29):
are not consistent. Different things were being called sorbet that
we would define differently I think today. So that's a
tricky one. If you're reading any of the the passages
or sources we list in the show notes, just know
that sorbet is a word that gets kind of tossed
around without consistency. Yeah. Well, and if you've if you've
ever seen, you know, an old fashioned ice cream maker
(12:50):
do its thing, you can sort of see a seed
of that process and this whole idea of using a
slurry of salt, peter and snow to cool stuff. Now, yeah,
so they were onto it early. Sorbet as we know
it was invented when these icy drinks, uh were made
into hard frozen treats that incorporated sugar. The man who
(13:11):
gets the credit for this was Antonio Latini, who was
working as a steward to the chief Minister of the
Spanish Viceroy in Naples in the late sixteen hundreds. He
further experimented and added dairy to the mix in Latini's
book scalco Ala Moderna, which means carver to the modern.
He included recipes for lemon, strawberry, sour cherry, chocolate, and
(13:33):
cinnamon ice, and a milk ice that's often cited as
the first two ice cream recipe. I would eat any
of those. They sound very interesting. Um. Cinnamon ice sounded
really interesting to me, mostly because my husband really loved cinnamon.
And in sixty six a cafe in Paris opened. Uh.
Sometimes it's called Il Procope, sometimes La Procope, sometimes Cafe Procope,
(13:55):
but it's proprietor was actually Sicilian. It was a man
named Francesco Procopio de Cotelli uh, and it offered a
variety of ice treats, and some historians credit him with
bringing gelato to France, but others say his cafe only
offered very cold beverages. So there's some discrepancy about what
was really on the menu and whether he was importing
(14:18):
ice cream to France. Um. But what's really interesting is
that that cafe is still open today, so you can
go visit it. It really has the established six six
sign above it, and you can go. Let's go now,
all right, get in the car. The friench had already
been experimenting with ice cream like treats, specifically a concoction
(14:39):
called fromage, which is very similar to ice cream. This
was not made with cheese, even though it has the
same word as cheese. It's not completely clear why the
two words share the same name, but it's possible that
the frozen dairy dessert was chilled in cheese molds. As
fromage developed and started to be referred few as nij
(15:00):
which is the French word for snow, and then gloss,
which is what it's now called today, it became incredibly
popular throughout the country and in six which was the
same year Latini's Cookbook for Ices came out, a French
cookbook for similar desserts entitled La Maison regulas which is
a well ordered home, was written by Nicholas Audeger, and
(15:23):
it was touted as being quote the true method for
making all sorts of water essences and liqueurs strong and
refreshing in the Italian style. Odeja's book was much clearer
in its recipes and instructions, and its spelled out exactly
how to make crame glass a which is frizzing cream.
The use of a bucket inside of another bucket, with
(15:43):
the gap between the two filled with ice and salt
is described, as well as the method for stirring the
mixture in the interior bucket as it freezes until it
has the consistency of snow, which is really how I
scream still gets made as you're making in a funky
science experiment, which or if you're in a factory, but
(16:04):
when people have their home machines, that's it's really the
same deal going on. Um and Audi's book you can
actually read online if you are fluent in French. We
will have that link in the show notes. Uh, my
French is not good enough to follow a recipe of
that nature. It's kind of mediocre. But then sort of
an interesting thing happened, and this is sort of the
(16:26):
point where it becomes a very American treat. So while
ice cream existed in Europe for many years prior, and
the recipes and the love of the treat traveled across
the Atlantic with the colonists in the seventeen forties, there
is also this kind of wacky mythological tale that attributes
the invention of ice cream to Martha Washington. Uh. The
(16:48):
story claims that she left a bowl of sweet cream
outdoors overnight and accidentally stumbled upon the creation when she
discovered the forgotten dish which had frozen the next morning.
And of course there's this company really untrue. We have
instances of ice cream going on way before that, and
there's actually the first account of ice cream in America
is in a letter from seventeen forty four which was
(17:10):
written by a guest of William Bladen, who was the
governor of Maryland, um. And this guest was writing of
the time that he visited with the politician and what
was served while he was there, and ice cream was
one of the things. So even though Martha Washington did
not invent ice cream, George Washington did love it. Like
(17:31):
that's an understatement. I think he really super loved it.
In the seventeen eighty four ledger for Mount Vernon, there's
a record of an ice cream machine being acquired for
the sum of one pound, thirteen shillings and threepence, And
even with his own ice cream turns at home. In
seventeen ninety, George Washington is said to have spent two
hundred dollars over the course of one summer on ice
(17:52):
cream at a local shop, which is apparently close to
a hundred thousand dollars of today's money may have contributed
to the wooden teeth mythology. Well. And it's funny. When
I was talking to my husband about this, because I
was blathering on about how interesting I found it, he
wondered if it wasn't because he had the wooden teeth.
Ice Cream was a yummy thing he could easily eat
(18:12):
because it would melt in his mouth. I think everyone had.
I mean, definitely everyone had terrible teeth at the time,
but George Washington's terrible teeth are are infamous. Shortly after
Washington's death, an inventory of Mountain Vernon was made and
numerous ice ice cream supplies turn up. In that inventory.
There were two Pewter ice cream pots, as well as
(18:35):
numerous special ice cream serving dishes. Ice Cream was a
favored treat for both the company, who would you know,
arrive and stay there, and for the family in residence. Yeah.
When they had state dinners, you were pretty much going
to get ice cream as dessert. Uh. It was really
like I can't stress enough how much George Washington loved it.
But he was not the only person. Thomas Jefferson had
(18:58):
his own recipe for vanilla. Uh that he had handwritten
now and he served it with Savoy cookies. And you
can actually see that handwritten recipe online. It's part of
the American Treasures of the Library Congress, and we'll link
to that in our show notes. And he is Jefferson
is said to have maintained multiple ice houses so that
he could constantly be storing ice for making more ice cream,
(19:19):
as well as storing his ice cream once it had
been made. That he was just stockpiling ice cream supplies
and ice cream. I'm also in favor of a giant
ice cream stockpile. The Lincoln's were also big fans Mary Todd.
Lincoln would frequently host strawberry parties, which would get together
centered around dessert service and co starring with the ice
(19:41):
with the strawberries was ice cream. Yeah. So uh. Ice
Cream has a very favored history with American presidents and
even more modern presidents have definitely sung the praises of
ice cream. And we all love it. It's good, I'm
telling you, uh. And perhaps because of the popularity with
the early political leaders, ice cream was enthusiastically embraced in
(20:03):
the US, But up until the early eighteen hundreds it
was kind of a fancy pants dessert for wealthy people
and high society types. Yeah, if average people cannot afford
to keep things cold and uh and to get all
the ice in, the sugar and everything else that are
needed to make it, then it does make it a
very exclusive food. Yes. And then when you think of
(20:26):
people maintaining multiple ice houses to keep their stockpile, that's
not something most people would have had access to. But
the insulated ice house was invented around the turn of
the century, so that meant that more people could have
ice cream on hand, whereas prior to that, only wealthy
people could really maintain an ice house because they would
have to have a constant ice coming in and constant
(20:48):
management of the situation in the temperature. Yeah, it really
It reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about why
sweet tea is so popular in the South. It had
to do with if you could afford the sugar and
the ice needed to make sweet tea. You're doing all right? Yeah,
it's a little bit of a calling card of your aristocracy.
Would you like to come over and have sweet tea
(21:09):
on my part? The money for that on the veranda
In the early New Jersey housewife Nancy Johnson made ice
cream in the normal way in a metal bucket packed
with ice and salt. It was great, but this was really,
as we've talked about, at time consuming and it's hard
to keep things consistent when you're having to stir them constantly.
(21:32):
So she invented the hand cranked ice cream churn, and
her new artificial freezer was patented on September and the
basic design continues to be popular now with pretty minimal changes. Yeah,
ice cream churns that you by now are so similar
to that original one. Obviously the components are made of
more modern materials, but yeah, but you can also still
(21:57):
buy hand cranks. There. You take a little more work
earned that ice cream, which is probably good, but um, yeah,
it's it's retained its function and it's continued to be
about that same thing that the Italians were doing with
ice and salt mixed together, surrounding this thing, surrounding the
dairy buckets so they could kind of quickly freeze it.
(22:21):
So little change, don't mess with perfection. The first commercial
ice cream factory was opened in eighteen fifty by Jacob Fussell,
and he was a dairyman from Baltimore and he wanted
to make use of the surplus cream that his dairy
was producing, which you know, once they had cleared that off,
they had to use it very quickly. So it went
into making ice cream and so I scream. At that point,
(22:43):
you know transition. It became not just a home main
treat that you would be using your hand crank for,
but an actual industry, which as we know, has flourished. Yes,
eighteen seventy four saw the first ice cream soda shop
in the United States, as well as the origin of
the soda jerk. So the late Victorian and Edwardian Eras
saw a real explosion in ice cream popularity. By the
(23:06):
nineteen teens, all of America was covered in ice cream shops.
And another thing that may have contributed to ice cream
sort of being so associated with the US is that
during World War Two, ice cream was like a huge
part of the morale efforts of the U. S. Armed Forces,
Like it was literally listed as a line item in
their morale budget, like that they had to have rations
(23:28):
of ice cream for the soldiers. The military served ice
cream for the troops, and they even established this blows
my mind in the most wonderful way a floating ice
cream parlor in the Western Pacific that would serve the soldiers.
So it was like a floating treat factory. It was
on a barge and it had to be towed by
other ships. It wasn't self powered, but its only job
(23:50):
was to produce ice cream for soldiers, uh, which is
really fascinating and interesting. Uh. And it was quite expensive apparently.
And when the war conclude, ice cream was a huge
part of the festivities. From the end of the war
through the seventies, prepackaged ice cream started to grow as
something you could buy at the supermarket. And it's the
(24:12):
planted most of the quaint ice cream shops that had
become popular in the early nine dreds. Yeah, and of
course that sort of started this big shift that we've
witnessed in the last couple of decades where some people
would say the quality goes down when you're getting um
ice cream at the supermarket. But then there has also
been this sort of growth of the boutique industry of
(24:33):
these smaller ice cream shops again that are kind of
more specialized. There are artisan ice creams now. I've visited
two of such shops over Fourth of July weekend, when
it was extremely hot in Boston. Yeah, a good fresh
ice cream, like a homemade ice cream is good stuff.
Uh yeah, And we have these specialty shops all over
(24:56):
the US now and in other countries as well. But
of course we owe all of these yummy treats. Were
enjoying with all of our mix ins to China or
Nero or Marco Polo or King Solomon, depending on whose
version of the story you believe in which definition you
hadhere to in terms of historical context, ice cream, I
(25:17):
love it. I was just immensely relieved the time this
particularly like I can understand how it became a popular
thing to serve ice cream during the harvest or to
people who were traveling in hot weather. Um, just because
of having walked to a place in the ninety degree
heat and then walked back while drinking a frozen drink
(25:42):
and man with a different experience, the trip back was
so much better than the trip out, and the whole
all I had been able to think was it's so hot.
It's so hot, And then on the way back, I
was like, I'm drinking delicious. This was this was a
like a survey that was yeah, a frozen tree, It's
shocking how effective they are and just kind of cooling
(26:04):
you down. I meking you feel good on a day
that is sweltering. We um. Anybody that runs knows probably
about the Peach Tree Road Race, which is a huge
race here in Atlanta on the fourth of July. It's
like up to sixty runners now, so it's quite mammoth uh.
And after you finish, you kind of have to go
through this cattle shoot set up where they march everybody
(26:24):
up this one street to get back to public transportation.
And smartly, a few years ago, we have a local
um ice cream popsicle it's not all ice cream, but
a popsicle vendor called King of Pops, and they had
the very smart business idea to start setting up rolling
carts along that route because you can't go off of
that route, like they kind of keep you cordoned in
(26:45):
and police block off other streets so you can't kind
of verge out and have a mass. So it's just
like all these people marching by, and it's so hard
to resist. You just pull out your money or your
credit card and you're like, yes, please give me the
pops And it makes it so much better at that
if you were just walking without them. Yeah, we were
walking to Fenway Park on the fourth where people ate
(27:05):
lots of ice cream to keep cool. Um, And I
was thinking about the pahgre Ray Race and how it
must have been miserable. Yeah. I did not run it
this year. I usually do, but I opted not to
this year. Um, partially because I thought about that horrible
march back to public transportation, and I dislike it so
much that I was like, that's let somebody else have
(27:27):
the entry. There's like a whole lottery system to even
get into the race anymore because it's gotten so big. Uh.
And apparently there was so much rain this year that
the park that you kind of have to travel through
to get done, get your stuff and then leave was
covered in mud. So I was glad I missed, but
kudos to everybody that ran it because it was sweltery
(27:48):
and muggy. I ran just not there. But I did
not have ice cream afterwards, So that's my punishment, like now,
and I did not have ice cream at Fenway Park,
just because when the ice cream was coming by, it
was late enough in the game that we were starting
to think about when you're gonna leave yet, at which
point I did get a frozen coffee drink yum, also delicious. Uh.
(28:13):
So that is the scoop on ice cream, not to
make a pun. Uh. Do you also have some listener mails?
I do, indeed. Uh. This one is from our listener Lou.
And she has to make lots of small car trips
and so she listens to our podcasts during those to
make time pass. She says, I was so excited when
I heard the Kellogg episode because my great grandmother went
to Battle Creek Sanitarium recently. My grandmother and I were
(28:35):
going through boxes of family things and found a scrapbook
that my great grandmother had made while she was there
from about nineteen eighteen to ninety one. It's filled with
pictures of Dr Kellogg and men used from the cafeteria,
all vegetarian, and even her class schedule. It was a
pretty big deal for a woman of her time from
West Virginia to be able to go to school, so
she was very grateful to Kellogg. She went from there
(28:57):
to work as a dietitian at Bellevue Hospital. Thank you
for the work that you do. That's really really cool. Uh.
And I actually wrote back to Lou, and I hope
she writes to me back, because I was wondering if
she had ever heard any insights on nutrition through kind
of the family um storytelling lines, because you know, to
think about how nutrition must have been viewed then versus
(29:20):
the subsequent years after she left the Kellogg Sanitarium, and
how many fads started to happen in different weird things
in the Uh. You know, vegetarian diet had not really
been adopted all over the place at that point, so
to have gotten an early exposure and then seen it
kind of grow slowly in popularity must have been really fascinating.
I love it's so cool to have that connection to history,
(29:43):
and especially because they have, you know, all of these
mementos from the sanitarium her great grandmother kept. So cool. Yeah,
well it's not maybe the most widely known place. It
didn't make a name for its out, so yeah, that's
pretty neat. Uh. If you have any connections to history,
or you just want to write as about anything else,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(30:03):
You can also connect with us on Twitter at missed
in History or Facebook dot com slash history class stuff.
You can visit our tumbler, which is missed in history
dot tumbler dot com and you can find us on Pinterest.
If you would like to learn more about what we
talked about today, you can go to our website and
type in the words ice cream in the search bar
and you will get how ice cream Works, which also
(30:24):
includes a recipe for how to make your own ice
cream very quickly. I believe it's the baggums it it
is the bag which who doesn't want to do that?
Let's do that right after this And you can learn
about that and any number of other things at our website,
which is how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
(30:46):
works dot com. Audible dot com is the leading provider
of down notable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
Audible has more than one hundred thousand titles to choose
from to be downloaded to your iPod or MP three player.
(31:09):
Go to audible podcast dot com slash history to get
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