ICE cream is one of the globe's favorite frozen desserts.
The average American consumes approximately 23 pounds of ice cream and related frozen desserts per year.
Who invented ice cream?
Although ice cream has a rich history, no specific date of origin nor inventor has been credited with its discovery.
An ice-cream-like food was first eaten in China in 618-97AD.
King Tang of Shang ordered "ice men" to create a dish out of buffalo milk, flour and camphor.
In 200BC, a new kind of ice cream was invented in China when a milk and rice mixture was frozen by packing it into snow.
The explorer, Marco Polo (1254-1324), took a trip Far East and brought back with him to Italy a recipe that now closely resembles sherbet.
France was introduced to similar frozen desserts in 1553 by the Italian Catherine de Medici when she became the wife of Henry II of France.
It was said that Roman emperors would send slaves to the tops of mountains to collect snow to be brought back to villages, flavored, and then served as a kind of ice cream.
In England, King Charles I reportedly paid his private chef £500 to keep his ice cream recipe a secret.
Biblical references also show that King Solomon was fond of iced drinks during harvesting.
Historians estimate that the official ice cream recipe we know today was developed sometime in the 16th century.
When was ice cream sold in the United States?
The first official account of ice cream in the United States came froma letter written in 1744 by a guest of Maryland Governor William Bladen.
The first advertisement for ice cream in this country appeared in the New York Gazette on May 12, 1777.
The International Dairy Foods Association writes that records kept by a Chatham Street, New York, merchant show that President George Washington spent approximately $200 for ice cream during the summer of 1790.
President Thomas Jefferson reportedly had a favorite 18-step ice cream recipe that resembled what we now know as Baked Alaska.
Until 1800, ice cream remained a rare and exotic dessert enjoyed by the country's elite, but manufacturing ice cream soon became an industry in the States.
Ice cream production was pioneered in 1851 by a Baltimore milk dealer named Jacob Fussell.
At the height of the Industrial Revolution, the United States had all the technological advances to mass produce ice cream, including steam power, mechanical refrigeration, the homogenizer, electric power and motors, packing machines, and new freezing processes and equipment.
Today's total frozen dairy annual production in the United States is more than 6.4 billion pounds.
Where does the name 'ice cream sundae' come from?
In 1874, the American soda fountain shop emerged with the creation of the ice cream soda, or soda float.
In response to the religious criticism that was bestowed upon the ice cream soda for being too "sinfully indulgent" to eat on a Sunday.
Ice cream merchants left out the carbonated water and invented the ice cream "Sunday" in the late 1890's.
The name was eventually changed to "sundae" to remove any connection with the Sabbath.
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