Vanilla was Jefferson’s favorite ice cream flavor. He had discovered vanilla beans while in France and brought back two hundred of them, many of which he consumed in ice cream. Among the subjects of his letters to friends in France are pleas to send him more vanilla beans. It is sometimes said that Jefferson introduced vanilla beans to America, but given their popularity in much of Europe, this seems a dubious claim, though he does say in a letter that there were no beans available in America. Jefferson food introductions rank only slightly below those of Marco Polo and Catherine de’ Medici in the field of erroneous food mythology.
Jefferson liked to serve ice cream on sponge cake with a lightly baked meringue on top. This dish has endured, with slight variations and different names in America and France, where it was called a Norwegian omelet because Norway is a cold place. In the late nineteenth century, when ruthless, ostentatious millionaires were dining at showy palaces, Charles Ranhofer, formerly of Delmonico’s and one of New York’s most famous chefs, gave this hopelessly complicated recipe for a simple dish that he called Alaska-Florida because it was both hot and cold. It was one of forty ice cream recipes that he presented in his 1898 book, The Epicurean:
Prepare a very fine vanilla Savoy biscuit paste. Butter some plain molds two and three quarters inches in diameter by one and a half inches in depth; dip them in fecula or flour, and fill two thirds full with the paste. Cook, turn them out, and make an incision all around the bottom. Hollow out the cakes and mask the empty space with apricot marmalade. Have some ice cream molds shaped as shown [cone shaped], fill them halfway with uncooked banana ice cream and halfway with uncooked vanilla ice cream. Freeze, unmold, and lay them in the hollow of the prepared biscuits; keep in a freezing box or cave. Prepare also a meringue with 12 egg whites and one pound of sugar. A few moments before serving place each biscuit with its ice on a small lace paper and cover one after the other with the meringue pushed through a pocket channeled through with a socket [a pastry bag with decorating nozzle] beginning at the bottom and diminishing the thickness until the top is reached. Color this meringue for two minutes in a hot oven, and when a light golden brown, remove and serve at once.
A 1912 book, Ice Creams, Water Ices, Frozen Puddings, Together with Refreshments for All Social Affairs, by Sarah Tyson Rorer, a popular Philadelphia food writer, simplified the recipe into a dish that became popular in America. She called it Alaska Bake:
Make a vanilla ice cream, one or two quarts as the occasion demands. When the ice cream is frozen, pack it in a brick mold. Cover each side of the mold with letter paper and fasten the bottom and lid. Wrap the whole in wax paper and wrap it in salt and ice. Freeze for at least two hours before serving time. At serving time, make a meringue from the whites of six eggs beaten to a froth; add six tablespoonfuls of sifted powdered sugar and beat until fine and dry. Turn the ice cream from the mold, place it on a serving platter, and stand the platter on a steak board or an ordinary thick plank. Cover the mold with the meringue pressed through a star tub in a pastry bag or spread it all over the ice cream, as you would ice a cake. Decorate the top quickly and dust it thickly with powdered sugar; stand it under the gas burners in a gas broiler or on the grate in a hot wood or coal oven until it is lightly browned, and send it quickly to the table. There is no danger of the ice cream melting if you will protect the underside of the plate. The meringue acts as a nonconductor for the upper part.
Six years later, Fannie Farmer, an administrator and later director of the Boston Cooking School, which tried to simplify cooking for working women, wrote a recipe labeled simply “Baked Alaska.”
New York was probably America’s first ice cream town. The first ice cream parlor opened there in 1776, and numerous ice cream parlors opened in British-occupied New York during the Revolution. New York not only had ice cream parlors and confectionary shops that sold ice cream, but even had ice cream gardens.
For three years in the 1790s, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, one of France’s first great food writers as well as one of the most enduring, lived in America. He took a great deal of interest in the lives of other French exiles, of which there were many—they had fled the turmoil following the French Revolution. In New York, Brillat-Savarin found a Captain Joseph Collet, who had opened an ice cream parlor and “earned a great deal of money in New York in 1794 and 1795, by making ices and sherbets for the inhabitants of that commercial town.” Then he added a sexist comment that was not surprising for a writer who once observed that women were instinctively prone to gourmandism because it was good for their looks: “It was the ladies above all, who could not get enough of a pleasure so new to them as frozen food; nothing was more amusing than to watch the little grimaces they made while savoring it.” Sexism aside, it would be amusing to watch the initial response of anyone tasting a frozen dessert for the first time.
In 1797, Brillat-Savarin returned to France, but Captain Collet stayed in New York and opened a boardinghouse, the Commercial Hotel, with a café. In 1835 he sold it to the two Swiss Delmonico brothers, whose famous restaurant had been lost in a downtown fire. In 1824, the Delmonicos—one a wine merchant and the other a pastry maker—established a café in the heart of the business district on Williams Street. It became known as a sophisticated European place, famous not only for ice cream but also for cakes, chocolates, foaming hot chocolate, and Cuban cigars (the wine merchant Delmonico had also been in the Havana tobacco trade). And it was in the café that the New York business lunch was invented.
Around the same time, ice cream was also becoming popular in Philadelphia, most notably at Grays Ferry and Gardens, one of Martha Washington’s favorite establishments—she apparently shared her husband’s enthusiasm for ice cream. It is sometimes claimed that ice cream was first served in Philadelphia on July 15, 1782, at the French mission, where George Washington was an honored guest. The first known house to sell ice cream to the general public in Philadelphia was founded in 1800 by a Frenchman, Peter Bossu.
In 1818, Eleanor Parkinson opened a confectionary next to her husband’s tavern. The confectionary and its ice cream became so successful that the couple eventually closed the tavern. The Parkinsons’ café is sometimes credited for giving Philadelphia a reputation for ice cream. Eleanor promoted this idea in her cookbook, in which she stated, “Philadelphia has for a long time enjoyed a pre-eminent reputation in the manufacture of these delicious compounds.” “Long time” would be a relative term.
Augustus Jackson, a black cook who had worked in the White House in the 1820s, where he developed improved techniques for making ice cream, opened his own ice cream parlor in Philadelphia, his native town, in 1832. Philadelphia later became famous for its many black-owned ice cream parlors. Jackson’s ice cream was said to be the best, and he was particularly celebrated for his variety of flavors. Since ice cream was mainly a summer food, many of the ice cream parlors in Philadelphia, as in New York, were outdoor cafés.
An inglorious moment in American ice cream history involves General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, celebrated for defeating the Shawnee, Lenape, and Miami Indians and driving them off a broad swath of the Midwest to open it for white settlers. After his decisive victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, just outside of what is today Toledo, Ohio, he served the troops ice cream, a rare treat that he claimed the army had not “seen since it left the East.”
In 1843 the ice cream industry was radically changed by a forty-eight-year-old woman, Nancy Johnson, who invented a hand-cranked ice cream maker. The machine was a wooden bucket filled with ice and an inner metal cylinder, which held the unfrozen ice cream. The handle, which ran through a hole in the bolted-down lid, turned the mixture as it froze. The cylinder even had two compartments, so that it was possible to freeze two flavors at once. The tool became the standard ice cream maker for decades and moved ice cream from the exclusive treat of manor houses with their own icehouses to a popular item. But Johnson, better at engineering than business, never made much money from her invention.
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p; A similar machine, the ice pail maker, was patented in London in 1853 by William Fuller. His patent was later than Johnson’s, but he was listed in a directory as an “ice pail maker” in 1842, the year before Johnson’s invention. Fuller also had many ice cream recipes, most of them extremely rich in egg yolks, though he did have one recipe that called for only beaten egg whites. In 1843, the same year as Johnson’s invention, another Londoner, Thomas Masters, claimed to be the inventor of the first ice cream maker. An advantage of his machine was that it was propped up on a stand so that the user did not need to lean over. Three more ice cream freezers were invented in 1848, one a hand-crank machine designed for professionals to make large batches.
The principle in all these machines was always the same. Ice cream that was frozen without being churned would be dense, hard, and inedible. It was the motion that aerated the cream as it froze, giving it the light texture that makes it ice cream.
In 1844, Masters, the inventor of the London ice pail, published a book titled The Ice Book: A History of Everything Connected with Ice, with Recipes. This is his recipe for Howqua’s tea ice cream:
One pint of cream, half a pound of sugar, one ounce of tea, or a sufficient quantity to make one cup. Mix with the cream; freeze. One quart.
And ginger ice cream:
Bruise six ounces of the best preserved ginger in a mortar; add the juice of one lemon, half a pound of sugar, one pint of cream. Mix well, strain through a hair sieve; freeze. One quart.
Ice cream in America became a fast-growing business, especially because it was often more profitable than selling milk. Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most popular women’s magazine during the Civil War in both the North and South, regularly ran ice cream recipes. As early as 1850 they wrote that “a party without [ice cream] would be like a breakfast without bread or a dinner without a roast.” Godey’s and most other nineteenth-century recipes usually ended by telling the reader simply to freeze the ice cream. But the freezing was the great trick. This is Godey’s 1860 recipe for frozen custard:
Take one quart of milk, five eggs, and a half pound of sugar; beat the eggs and sugar together; boil the milk and pour it on to the eggs and sugar, beating it at the same time; put it on the fire again, and keep stirring to prevent its burning: soon as it thickens, take it off and strain it through a half sieve, when cool, add the flavor and it is ready for freezing.
And this is their 1862 “pine apple” ice cream recipe:
Pare a ripe, juicy pine apple, chop it up fine and pound to extract the juice. Cover it with sugar and let it lie for a while in a china bowl. When the sugar has entirely melted strain the juice into a quart of good cream, and add a little less than a pound of loaf sugar. Beat up the cream and freeze it in the same manner as common ice cream.
In 1871, in her bestselling cookbook Common Sense in the Household, Marion Harland, a Southerner whose real name was Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, wrote about how to make “Self-Freezing Ice-cream.” The recipe makes clear that the really precious ingredient was the ice. It also makes clear that self-freezing, without a crank or similar device, was hard to do:
1 quart rich milk
8 eggs—whites and yolks beaten separately and very light
4 cups sugar
5 pints rich sweet cream
5 teaspoonfuls vanilla or other seasoning, or 1 vanilla bean, broken in two, boiled in the custard, and left in until it is cold.
Heat the milk almost to boiling, beat the yolks light, add the sugar and stir up well. Pour the hot milk to this little by little, beating all the while; put in the frothed whites, and return to the fire—boiling in a pail or sauce pan set within one of hot water. Stir the mixture steadily for about fifteen minutes, or until it is thick boiled custard. Pour into a bowl and set aside to cool. When quite cold beat in the cream. And the flavoring, unless you have used the bean.
Have ready a quantity of ice, cracked in pieces not larger than a pigeon egg—the smaller the better. You can manage this easily by laying a great lump of ice between two folds of coarse sacking or an old carpet, tucking it in snugly and battering it, through the cloth with a sledge hammer or mallet until fine enough. There is no waste of ice nor need you take it in your hands at all—only gather up the corners of the carpet or cloth, and slide as much as you want into the outer vessel. Use an ordinary, old fashion, upright freezer [a metal cylinder] set in a deep pail; pack around it closely; first a layer of pounded ice, then one of rock salt—common salt will not do. In this order fill the pail but before covering the freezer lid, remove it carefully so that none of the salt may get in, and with a long wooden ladle or flat stick (I had one made for this purpose) beat the custard as you would batter for five minutes without stay or stint. Replace the lid, pack the ice and salt upon it, putting it down hard on top; cover all with several folds of blanket or carpet, leave it for one hour. Then remove the cover of the freezer when you have wiped it carefully outside. You will find within a thick coating of frozen custard on the bottom and sides. Dislodge this with your ladle, which should be thin at the other end, or with a long carving knife working every particle of it clear. Beat again hard and long until the custard is a smooth, hard congealed paste. The smoothness of the ice cream depends on your action at this juncture. Put on the cover, pack in more ice and salt, and turn off the brine [melted ice and salt]. Spread the double carpet over all once more having buried the freezer out of sight in ice, and leave it for three or four hours. Then if the water has accumulated in such quantity as to buoy up the freezer, pour it off, fill up with ice and salt, but do not open the freezer. In two hours more you may take it from the ice, open it, wrap a towel wrung out in boiling water about the lower part and turn out a solid column of cream, firm, close-grained, and smooth as velvet to the tongue.
This technique of combining salt and ice for freezing is an old one. In 1589, Giambattista della Porta wrote of using saltpeter and ice to freeze wine. A Neapolitan, he was known as the Professor of Secrets, and he gave demonstrations that resembled magic acts. The inquisition in Spanish-ruled Naples questioned him. One of his acts was to chill wine by moving it into what he called a magic elixir. But he revealed the trick along with others in his 1589 book. Salt has a lower freezing point than water and so lowers the freezing point of the ice. This appears to melt the ice, but while the ice turns to liquid, the cold temperature is maintained, creating, in effect, liquid ice, which is much easier to move the ice cream freezer in. Later freezers would use this technique to create a coolant that could move through tubes.
The first book containing only ice cream recipes, a sign that ice cream had arrived, came out in France in 1768. It was written by Monsieur Edy, who did not give his first name, and provided about two hundred pages of ice cream recipes.
The soda fountain began in Philadelphia at the corner of Sixth and Chestnut streets. Its owner was Elias Durand, a Frenchman who had been an apothecary in Napoleon’s army. He had originally intended his place, opened in 1825, to be a pharmacy, but customers were attracted by the sparkling water he sold, and the store became a place to gather and have a glass of soda. People started adding flavors to soda, and a trend for soda and fresh cream began. Then in 1874, Robert M. Green added ice cream to the sparkling water he sold at his store. His counter income went from $6 daily to $600; the ice cream soda had been born.
Philadelphia, a city that liked to brand its food—Philadelphia cheese steak, Philadelphia cream cheese—became even more famous for its ice cream. Sarah Rorer in her 1912 book used the phrase “Philadelphia ice cream.” Rorer was one of the founders of the Ladies’ Home Journal and an influential writer on food and nutrition, as well as the founder of the Philadelphia Cooking School. Her Philadelphia ice cream used no eggs or other thickener, and she insisted on using the freshest ingredients. Or so she said. She sometimes used canned fruit and recommended using canned condensed milk if no high-quality cream was available. To prevent the eggless beaten cream from becoming whipped cream when fresh cream was used, she a
dvised scalding half the cream and, once it was cold again, adding the other uncooked half. She emphasized that eggless Philadelphia ice cream had to be frozen very slowly, and offered many different and often interesting flavors. This one is for apple ice cream:
4 large tart apples
2 quarts cream
½ pound of sugar
1 tablespoonful of lemon juice
Put half the cream and all the sugar over the fire and stir until the sugar is dissolved. When the mixture is perfectly cold, freeze it and add the lemon juices and the apples, pared and grated. Finish the freezing and repack to ripen.
The apples must be pared at the last minute and grated into the cream. If they are grated on a dish and allowed to remain in the air they will turn very dark and spoil the color of the cream.
A man named Ed Berners ran an ice cream parlor in Two Rivers, Michigan, and according to this often-repeated and hard-to-believe story, in 1881 a customer named George Hallauer came in and asked for some chocolate sauce on his ice cream. Supposedly no one had ever thought of adding chocolate sauce to ice cream before. In any event, a lot of people around Two Rivers followed suit, and soon there was ice cream with cider, ice cream with chocolate and peanuts (called a “chocolate peany”), and ice cream with many other different toppings. This story gained popularity when H. L. Mencken, one of the most respected figures in the history of American journalism, retold it in his most famous book, The American Language. But he told it only as a story he had heard—he never investigated it. Did Ed Berners, who, according to birth records, would have been eighteen years old in 1881, really own an ice cream parlor?
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