Food History

Teaching has started for 2008 and suddenly my life is busier. Not that it wasn’t busy before. What this means, though, is that I sit at my desk and admire the mugginess of the evening and wonder if even ice cream is possible.

Yesterday ice cream was more than possible and the day before, emails about ice cream flooded my inbox. The day before yesterday was pretty lovely, in fact. Cool rain and lots of information on the history of ice cream in the US.

What happened was that Tamara Mazzei emailed me to point out that the custard-based ice creams that our ice cream tester is checking out for the banquet were called French ice cream in her childhood and that the no-egg variety was called Philadelphia.

I found an early 20th century recipe for French and Philadelphia ice creams and, sure enough, the French was custard based and the Philadelphia wasn’t.

Tamara has a research talent, and found me some rather cool articles, too. Not all of them are about the two different ice cream styles she identified, but they each told me something I didn’t know about the history of ice cream in the US.

There was an article on the rise of the soda fountain (New York Times, September 24 1916). It suggested that the rise in popularity of ice cream sodas was directly due to the banning of alcohol. Ice cream and Prohibition linked, I thought – how very apposite.

In the Charlotte Daily Observer of 21 August 1910, we learned that ice cream and frozen custard were not always interchangeable. The heading reads “Frozen custards – they’re often better than ice cream.” My recipes for custard based ice creams comes from about a decade later. I don’t know if there was a change in terminology or (more likely) that there was a range of ways of describing ice cream made with custard. What’s also interesting about this article is that it pints to a very good reason why one should sue a custard base instead of an uncooked base: you need less rich cream for the custard.

The third article was considerably earlier. The Virginia Herald from 10 June (or it could be 6 October – US dates conspire against me sometimes) 1829 has a recipe for ice cream made from a custard base and it calls it ice cream, not frozen custard.

It’s a very easy recipe, too:

“Three quarters of a pound of loaf sugar, one quart of cream, the whites of three eggs well beat up – mix together and simmer it on the fire until it nearly boils, then take it off and strain it, and when cold put it into the mould and churn it until it freezes.” The ice cream can be flavoured or can be adapted to using milk (with more eggs).

The final article is from Kansas in1920 (which is why I saved it until last) and it clearly states that French ice cream is frozen custard and Philadelphia ice cream is frozen cream and that everything else is a variant on one or the other.

Tamara’s work proved that her childhood memory of French vs Philadelphia goes back a fair way. It was certainly extant in the 1920s and possibly much earlier. However, without more evidence we can’t tell if there are boundaries for the description or where the division between the French and the Philadelphian came from. It’s a lovely little study in how to open up an historical query, by adding new sources of information. To say anything definitive, however, we’d need that amount of information by about a hundred.

Tamara and I have worked together on matters historical before and we both know the limits of sources. She wasn’t looking for a definitive historical truth, however, she was looking for the ancestry of her own childhood usage, and she found it. This is important, too. Every query has nuances and shadings – some questions have straightforward answers (did the French vs Philadelphia division go earlier and extend to other parts of the US or were the different types of ice cream called that solely by Tamara’s family, later on?) while others need far more time and effort (what is the history of ice cream nomenclature in the US from, say 1829?).

I love this. I love that interaction with the past can be very tightly focussed or that it can be as broad as a human’s imagination. Why I love researching history doesn’t help you understand the history of ice cream descriptions, however, and I’ve hit teaching time and can’t chase it. I’ll let you know if we choose French or Philadelphian ice cream for the banquet, when we reach that far. And if more information comes my way, I promise to report it.