Every day around the world, people enjoy various gastronomic wonders and achievements, passionately adore food fabricated in a specific way, wonder who invented a dish or how people used to live without it… Do you ever wonder about the origin of the food you eat? Do you ever wonder where ice cream comes from?
The origin of ice cream is not quite precisely determined, which comes as a surprise given its status as a sovereign ruler of summer treats nowadays. What we know for sure is that people started making fruit and crushed ice or mountain snow dessert long ago. It is assumed that China or ancient Persia were the first cultures to worship this dessert. The fact that the first ice cream machines come from China testifies to this, and there is also the opinion that the ice cream recipe was brought to Italy by Marco Polo himself from his travels in China.
As many people think that ice cream originates from Italy, it should be noted that the forerunner of today’s ice cream indeed is an Italian delicacy – sorbet – a dessert made from sweetened water (ice) and mashed fruit.
It is an interesting fact that, apart from many other good and useful things, the dark Middle Ages of Europe expelled sorbet too. You got it right, sorbet was accused of symbolizing sin. During that time, in the Middle East, they devised new ways of freezing – they put fruit juices in barrels submerged in crushed ice. The Renaissance brought sorbet back to the tables, when it was served as a dessert after freezing in metal molds of various shapes, so it arrived on the tables in the form of a small work of art. At the beginning of the 17th century, sorbet was known in all major cities of Europe, and data show that the first cafe confectionery was opened around 1660 in the area of the French Alps. However, it is thought that modern ice cream was officially born in Florence in the 16th century, when milk, cream and eggs were first used to make this delicacy.
Today, in the Italian city of Anzola dell’Emilia near Bologna, there is a world museum of ice cream culture, built by the company Carpigiani – ice cream machine manufacturer. The museum shows the history of ice cream from the first snow warehouses of ancient times, through ice and salt sorbets developed by the Chinese, to the 20th-century technologies. One of the interesting stories in the museum is the one about Cosimo Ruggieri, an alchemist at the Medici court who made ice cream that Catherine Medici took to Paris to impress the French. Also, there is the world’s first written recipe for “shrb”, sugar syrup in Arabic, a treatise by Neapolitan doctor Filippo Baldini “De Sorbetti” on the healing properties of ice cream and 20 old ice cream making machines, including the first automatic machine “Cattabriga” from 1931.
Speaking of the treatise on the healing properties of ice cream, did you know that recent research has shown that this “summer sin” has a beneficial effect on the human body: it contains large amounts of calcium, is rich in vitamins and antioxidants, and if made from coffee and cocoa, is an excellent source of polyphenols that protect your heart….
