Frozen Desserts

There are many stories which surround the evolution of ice cream. It is likely that ice cream was not invented, but rather came to be over many years. The Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar is said to have sent slaves to the mountains to bring snow and ice to cool and freeze the fruit drinks he was so fond of. Centuries later, the Italian Marco Polo returned from his famous journey to the Far East with a recipe for making water ices resembling modern day sherbets.

Some myths are that Italian chefs of Catherine de'Medici took ice cream to France when she went there in 1533 to marry the Duc d'Orleans, or Charles I rewarding his own ice-cream maker with a lifetime pension on condition that he did not divulge his secret recipe to anyone, thereby keeping ice cream as a royal prerogative.

There is no historical evidence to support these stories and there is no mention of these stories before the nineteenth century.

We do know that in 1774, a caterer named Phillip Lenzi announced in a New York newspaper that he had just arrived from London and would be offering for sale various confections, including ice cream. Dolley Madison, wife of U.S. President James Madison, served ice cream at her husband's Inaugural Ball in 1813.

The first step towards giving us the kind of ice cream we enjoy today was made by Nancy Johnson (USA) who invented the hand-crank freezer (1846).

Commercial production was begun in North America in Baltimore, Maryland, 1851, by Mr. Jacob Fussell, now known as the father of the American ice cream industry.

	Milkfat:	Total milk solids:	Stabilizer	Weight per gallon	Food solids per gallon
Frozen Custard	10.0% minimum	20.0% minimum	0.5% maximum	4.5 lb. minimum	1.6 lb. minimum
Egg Yolks per 90 lbs.		No standard. State standards may vary from 1.5 to 5.0 dozen minimum where they exist
Solids		1.4% minimum