The United States makes over 1.6 billion gallons of ice cream a year. That’s enough for every man, woman, and child in America to eat 184 single scoop cones: one a day for each of us for almost six months!
Kids between the ages of 2 and 12 are the biggest ice-screamers, eating more than half of the ice cream sandwiches, bars, and prepackaged cones made each year.
Iced dairy products made from the milk of horse, buffalo, yak, camel, cow and goat first appeared during the Dynasty in China (618-907 A.D.). King T’ang himself relished an iced-milk dish called kumiss. The frosty concoction included rice, flour, and “dragon’s eyeball powder” – – better known today as camphor, a chemical taken from the wood of an evergreen tree.
Café Procope became the world’s first restaurant to serve ice cream when it opened its doors in 1686. The Paris café dished up chocolate, vanilla and strawberry – – considered exotic flavors back then. Today, you can still buy your old favorites there, more than three hundred years after the first scoop was served!
The first recorded reference to ice cream in the New World was found in a journal entry dated 1744. It described a dinner party at the home of Maryland’s governor, Thomas Bladen, who served a dessert of ice cream made with milk and strawberries.
American presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all loved ice cream. During the summer of 1790, Washington ordered $200 worth of the depcious dessert: the equivalent of $96,400 today!
Nancy M. Johnson received a patent for the first hand-cranked ice cream freezer in 1843. She later sold the patent for a mere $1500.
Jacob Fussell, considered to be the Father of the Ice Cream Industry, opened the first commerical ice cream plant in America in 1851. At that time, the average American ate less than one teaspoon of ice cream a year.
Some sources say the ice cream soda was created by two newsboys in 1872 at a candy shop in New York City, when they asked the fountain dispenser to plop a scoop of ice cream and a spce of pineapple into a glass of soda water.
A teenager named George Hallauer accidentally invented the ice cream sundae in 1881 when he asked a soda jerk to pour chocolate syrup – – used in making ice cream sodas – – into his bowl of vanilla ice cream.
The ice cream cone was invented in 1896 by an Itapan immigrant named Italo Marchiony, who sold ice cream from a cart on the streets of New York. He received a patent in 1903 for the machine that made these delicious, edible holders.
FACTOID: Who made the first Eskimo Pie??? The idea for the Eskimo Pie bar was created by Chris Nelson, a ice cream shop owner from Onawa, Iowa. He thought up the idea in the spring of 1920, after he saw a young customer called Douglas Ressenden having difficulty choosing between ordering an ice cream sandwich and a chocolate bar. Nelson created the solution, a chocolate covered ice cream bar. The first Eskimo Pie chocolate covered ice cream bar on a stick was created in 1934…. Originally Eskimo Pie was called the “I-Scream-Bar”.
In 1904, at the St. Louis World’s Fair, the ice cream cone was popularized by Ernest Hamwi, a waffle vendor. When the ice cream salesman in the booth next to Hamwi’s ran out of serving dishes, Hamwi rolled a hot waffle into the shape of a cone, and offered it in place of a dish. The World’s Fair “cornucopias” were an instant hit.
In 1921, the Commissioner of Ellis Island issued a delicious decree: all immigrants arriving in this country would receive a free scoop of ice cream with their first American meal.
During World War II, cone manufacturers had trouble getting wheat flour since it was needed to make bread and other food products for American soldiers overseas. Several companies in Philadelphia solved this problem by making ice cream cones out of crushed, sweetened popcorn!
An ice cream shop in Venezuela, Helados Coromoto, is listed in the Guinness book of World Records as serving the most flavors: 550! The specialty of the house is pabellon criollo, which is similar to the national dish of shredded beef, black beans, rice and plantains (a type of banana).
12 pounds of milk are needed to make one gallon of ice cream. It takes about 50 licks to eat a single scoop ice cream cone.
The largest ice cream sundae in the world weighed in at a whopping 54,914 pounds. It was made by Palm Dairies Ltd. of Alberta, Canada, in 1988.
You would need a tower of 1,209 Eskimo Pies, stacked end-to-end, to stand as high as the Washington Monument. It would take a chain of 3 billiion Eskimo Pies to reach the moon.
According to the International Ice Cream Association, more ice cream is sold on Sunday than any other day of the week.
