The History of Ice Cream

Ice cream used to be so much more difficult to make when there were no such things as refrigerators. Frozen ice would be collected from rivers or lakes, and then kept in a whole in the ground or in wood framed ice houses. When it came time to make the ice cream it had to made by hand. The ice cream would be put in a large bowl with ice and salt. The name for this was the pot-freezer method.

A hand cranked churn was eventually patented in order to make the ice cream. Nancy Johnson claimed the first US patent for the churn, in 1843. The hand cranked churn made the making of ice cream a lot faster, and also gave a smoother texture. Ice cream was generally made by small businesses at the start. Jacob Fussell was the first American to start the production on a larger scale. In 1851, Fussell built his first ice cream factory in, Seven Valleys, Pennsylvania. Due to the ice cream being manufactured at a high level the cost diminished, and the product became much more popular.

Carl Von Linde invented industrial refrigeration that would be of great benefit to the ice cream industry, in the 1870's. The updated process freezer was produced around 1926, allowing production on a more modern level. Soft ice cream was developed by British chemists when they found out how to double the air in ice cream, making it a softer consistency. The first ice cream chocolate Eskimo Pie was made in 1934 by Chris Nelson, a ice cream shop owner from Onawa, Iowa. He got the idea from watching a customer try to decide between a chocolate bar and an ice cream. Ice cream sundaes came about in the 19th century, many lay claim to the invention, but there is no proven inventor of this dessert.