It couldn’t be otherwise: the first ice cream appeared in China 4,000 years ago . Considered a delicatessen , it was a paste of boiled rice, spices and milk wrapped in snow to solidify it. Little by little fruit ice creams appeared – juice with snow – and in the 13th century the “ice cream cart” could be found on the streets of China. But it was not only in China that snow was used to prepare those refreshing cocktails: throughout the Middle East you could taste ice mixed with fruit juice, sometimes sweetened with honey. We even find a reference to ice cream – although it is more like a slushie – in the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “As a refreshment from snow in harvest time, so is the faithful messenger to those who send it.” Sharbat, a cold fruit and flower petal drink popularized by the Mughal emperors, was drunk all over the East in summer: this is where our ‘sorbet’ came from.
This custom reached classical Greece and from there to Europe. But we owe ice cream as such to the 16th century Italian artist Bernardo Buontalenti, who improved the ‘frozen desserts’ that were fashionable in Florence at the time by enriching them with egg and cream.
Of course, the ice cream masters jealously guarded their recipes. It was no wonder: ice cream was a dessert for rich people because for freezers they used a basement full of ice collected during winter. In 1560 a Spanish resident in Rome, Blasius Villafranca, discovered that he could reach the freezing point of the mixture faster if he added saltpeter to the ice and snow that surrounded the ice cream . Thanks to this innovation, the poor were also able to enjoy it.
And in 1920 the American Harry Burt launched a vanilla ice cream covered in chocolate and with a wooden stick to hold it.
