MANKIND, thought Zeus, was a failed experiment. The creature had no fur, no claws; he was weak, fearful, inadequate, and generally hopeless: it would be better for his maker simply to cut his losses and start again, learning this time from his mistakes. But Zeus reckoned without his uncle Prometheus, the philanthropist or man-lover. The mischief-making Titan stole fire from Zeus. Then, not content with giving man what he had no business possessing, he proceeded to “place within him blind hopes” and to teach him technology: how to keep warm, to cook, to bake pottery, and to mould metals. People could then begin to live in houses instead of caves, to tame and exploit animals, to mine, to write, to compute, and all the rest.
Man in possession of fire was a thing existing in a state of permanent transgression. He encroached ceaselessly upon the rights of the rest of the universe; his weakness combined with his greed and his technological know-how gave him what the Greeks called daemonic characteristics:he was neither one thing nor the other, a hybristic and troublesome mixture of beast and god. He was a perpetrator of nasty, dangerous, and pollution-causing acts, such as raping his Mother Earth by ploughing her up, and travelling over the seas where only fish belonged. It even occurred to him that he could find out how to fly.
The whole unfortunate yet fiendishly exhilarating saga began when Prometheus deceived the gods and let man get his hands on the secret of fire power-perhaps at the time when flint flakes emitted sparks as they were chipped into the first manufactured tools. The early stages of technological progress we call the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Each of these was characterized by an increase in mastery over heat: human beings found out how to attain and use higher and higher temperatures. Later came insights into the uses of steel, steam, electricity, and nuclear power: all of them manipulations of heat.
Very recently we have begun a new journey of exploration, this time into the realms of cold. Heat is still the essential tool, however, for heat must be used in order to make cold. The science of low temperatures began seriously to affect people’s everyday lives only about a century ago. Within one hundred years, cold (which had previously been almost always synonymous with death, evil, and the inhuman) has become essential to the lives we have chosen to live, in vast agglomerations of people cut off from what we need to nourish ourselves.
Cold preserves food until it is within our reach; cold enables us to get food from anywhere on earth at any season of the year. It therefore helps modern man to reduce the dominance that space and time hold over him. Robbed of cold, a modern city would be beaten to its knees within weeks. Blood banks, sperm banks, cryomedicine, plant libraries, rockets, and satellites are some more of the applications of cold to modernity. It would be wise perhaps to remember that these are all expressions of our need as well as of our resourcefulness.
We now know that it is impossible for anything to get colder than—273°C. (–459°F.). There is a great deal more about cold that we do not know, for cold science is still in its adolescence. The promising young technological giant had humble origins. Our realization that cold could be systematically used, even created, to prevent the putrefaction of meat and other foodstuffs came only after thousands of years of seeking out and saving ice merely to satisfy a desire for cool drinks in summer. Scientific enterprise also received modest but sustained support from the discovery that ice cream, a luxury dessert which had long been known, but only to the rich and by hearsay to everybody else, could in fact be made quite easily and cheaply by—and eventually for-everyone.
The democratization of ice cream depended on far more than cold science, however: it also required a great breakthrough in medical knowledge, as well as deployment of all the technological and social systems and structures which constituted the Industrial Revolution. Ice cream is, therefore, much more than merely its firm, sweet, frozen self. In its present form and widespread availability, it is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. For this reason, and also because of the ancient and still vigorous connotations of milk and of cold, it has become invested, in European and American cultures, with what amounts to mythic power. Ice cream is an appropriate and inevitable symbol of the yearnings, satisfactions, and contradictions inherent in modernity.
A crowd never failed to collect, day after day, outside the window at 164A, The Strand, in London. It was the mid-1840s, and London was a densely populated, dirty, sprawling city, the largest the world had ever known. In the window sat a miracle, or rather the fruit of many miracles, the most perverse and delightful sight many of the crowd could imagine. It was a block of pure ice, and as it melted it was constantly replaced, from within the office building, from an unending supply of similar blocks. The ice had been brought by ship and rail all the way from America, and had successfully weathered a journey lasting over a month. Queen Victoria was pleased to express her admiration, and after that the royal household was always given ice by the American trading company, on request.
The sight of ice was surprising because it was in downtown London in the mid-nineteenth century. For thousands of years people have known how to collect ice from ponds, rivers, and mountain tops, and to save it, packed in heaps and insulated, for hot days when cool drinks are delicious. It has been suggested that mysterious pits found in Iron Age villages in Britain were intended for ice storage, and experiments have shown that they could have been used for this purpose. At the beginning of his great work, The Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel discusses the importance of the presence of mountains throughout the region, and shows how through the ages men have mined the summits of the Alps, the Pyrenees, Taygetus in Greece, and the mountains of North Africa for ice and snow, and carried these treasures down to the hot Mediterranean coasts and plains for sale.
In the fifth or early fourth century BC, Xenophon complained of people who “drank before they were thirsty,”’ and therefore needed such effete titillations to thirst as costly wines and snow in summer. When Alexander the Great besieged the Indian city of Petra he had thirty “cold pits” dug, filled with snow, and covered with oak planks, so that his army could cool their wine and wait out the summer for their victims in relative comfort. Alexander had learned this technique (which was probably also known to the Indians) at his home in Macedonia. Roman emperors had ice broughr to them by donkey-pack, sometimes from as far away as the Alps, over the excellent Roman roads. Seneca railed against the drunken habitués of the “shops and storehouses for snow” in the city of Rome.
The Arab word for “drink” is sharbia, which, as we saw earlier, gave us the word sherbet, so common was it to ice fruit drinks in the middle east. In 1494, the owner of a pilgrim boat received as a gift on his arrival in the Holy Land a sack full of snow, to the surprise and delight of his hot and thirsty passengers. The Turkish Empire was especially addicted to iced drinks, and was so well organized that ordinary citizens and not merely the military or the élite could enjoy them. Merchants sold snow water, pieces of ice, and fruit ices cheaply in the streets of Turkish towns. Boatloads of snow from Bursa arrived frequently in Istanbul (then known as Constantinople) during the sixteenth century, and the Pasha Muhammad received an income of 80,000 sequins for his ice mines in 1578.
Underground ice houses were known in China from at least 1100 BC, when a hymn addressed to the Goddess of Cold included these words:
In the days of the second month, they hew out the ice with harmonious blows;
And in the third month, they carry it to the ice houses
Which they open in the days of the fourth, early in the morning,
Having first offered a sacrifice: a lamb with scallions.
Relays of horsemen brought snow and ice down from the Hindu Kush to Delhi to ice sorbets for the Moghul emperors of India during the sixteenth century. Mrs. Fanny Parkes, a nineteenth-century English-woman,described an ancient Indian method of collecting ice on the Hooghly plain near Calcutta. Shallow lined pits were filled with unglazed pottery pans. When it looked as though the temperature would dip to freezing, a gong sounded and Indians streamed out from the Calcutta bazaars to fill the pans with water. At 3:00 A.M., if ice had formed, the gong was beaten again and the workers got out of bed and knocked the ice out of the pans into baskets, which they carried to the underground ice house. After having been supplied with blankets, shoes, and heavy wooden mallets, they went down into the pit and beat the ice into a solid mass before receiving their pay and returning home.
Insulation was understood very early. Everything from sawdust, leaf matting, and straw to sheepskins and rabbit fur was used to keep the ice from melting. Ice packed together in large stocks, especially in stone-lined vaults, keeps for more than a year without much trouble, provided the ice pit is drained, ventilated, and kept well covered. The Italians and Spanish piled snow in stone wells and cellars under their houses, tamped it down hard, covered it, and saved it for the summertime.
It was of course in hot countries that ice-collecting was not considered too much hard work; in the temperate north, summers were bearable without ice. But in the seventeenth century, when rich Englishmen started to travel extensively in Europe, it began to be thought amusing and profitable for mansion-owners to build themselves ice houses. Water coolers in the shape of ornamental urns with ice compartments became all the rage. Until this time there is little mention of the uses of cold for preserving food, except in China where ice houses had long been depots for keeping fish and fruit. Food in the west was either eaten immediately, or was salted and stored during the winter months.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century ice houses on English estates were fitted with shelving for fruit and later for meat. By the early nineteenth century there were commercial ice houses on all the principal salmon rivers in Britain, so that salmon preserved in ice could be taken to London for sale. Soon after this, ice began to be loaded into the fishing boats as they set out to sea; fish would be packed in ice for transport back to shore and then to its final destination. As iced fresh fish became increasingly available, the long decline in the popularity of dried, salted, and pickled fish began.
In early nineteenth-century Peru, blocks of ice were cut from glaciers by the Indians in the Andes. The blocks were lowered by ropes down the mountains to waiting women and children, who covered the ice with grass and packed it onto the backs of mules, which then began the hurried ninety-kilometre (56-mile) journey to Lima. By the time the ice arrived, at least a third of it had melted. What remained was sold in the streets of Lima by Indians carrying trays of ice on their heads and shouting, Helado! It was bought mainly for making iced drinks and ice cream, which were so popular that people would riot if their ice supply were to be cut off. Even when revolutions flared, no one dared commandeer the ice mules for any task other than their normal duty.
The United States of America was a country with wide extremes of climate. It had a huge hot south, which longed for ice in the summers. Southerners could be provided with ice from the northern regions of their own country, with its unpolluted stretches of water which froze in winter into huge supplies of excellent ice. The challenge of marketing northern ice to the south was to stimulate both trade in ice and solutions to the problems of transporting it. On the western coast of North America in the mid-nineteenth century, Russians in Alaska shipped cargoes of ice to California.
English interest in ice houses had no sooner been aroused in the seventeenth century than the American colonies began to take advantage of the ancient but (in England) newly fashionable expertise. On December 22, 1665, the Governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, was granted “licence to gather, make and take snow and ice … and to preserve and keep the same in such pits, caves and cool places as he should think fit, saving the king’s loving subjects liberty to make and preserve snow and ice necessary for their own proper use.”
Enlightened wealthy landowners in America, as in Britain, continued to experiment with ice houses during the eighteenth century. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both took a keen interest in the building and stocking of their own ice houses at Mount Vernon and at Monticello. By the 1800s, ice had begun in America to descend the social scale: merchants were making profits from supplying solid cold to more and more customers. In 1799, Charleston already had a street market in ice, and ships which had carried southern products to the north-eastern cities would fill up with ice at Boston for the return journey.
One of the earliest uses for ice, in the north as well as in the cities of the American south, was to cool fevered patients in hospitals. In 1805 an outbreak of yellow fever in Martinique inspired one of the pioneers of the ice trade, Frederick Tudor of Boston, to transport the first load of ice known to have been delivered to the tropics. He went on to build an experimental insulated ice house at Havana. He then established a trade in ice with Cuba and with Jamaica, Georgia, and Louisiana. Having enormously improved techniques of ice insulation on ships, he succeeded in landing Boston ice in Calcutta in 1833. Almost half the ice had melted before it arrived, but it could still be sold at half the cost of the native ice from the Hooghly plain.
For over a hundred years, from the early 1800s on, ice-harvesting in Canada and the United States provided employment for fishermen, farmers, and other country people during the winter months. Like hog-killing, corn-husking, and barn-raising, it was often a local, communal effort for the benefit of everybody. The process was soon speeded up, regularized, and simplified by mechanical and organizational means; it could then be operated as a specialized and lucrative industry. The use of ships to transport ice, and later foodstuffs as well, meant that ice had to be provided in uniform blocks so that the cargo would not shift in transit.
Ice surfaces had to be scraped and kept clear of snow as soon as horses could venture onto the pond, so that the ice could thicken without the insulation of snow. When the ice had formed to the desired depth, the surface was marked with a toothed plough in blocks fifty-six centimetres by eighty-one (22 in. by 32). Another plough was then dragged over the grooves, back and forth until the cuts sliced through two-thirds of the thickness of ice. A channel was cleared across the pond by cutting through the ice with picks and handsaws, then lifting the ice blocks out with iron claws. Large sheets of ice were then separated from the field and poled or pulled by horses fitted with spiked shoes, along the channel to the storage area, where they were broken into blocks. These were then hoisted to the ice houses and stacked inside. By this time American ice houses were no longer underground pits, but tall, carefully insulated structures relying largely on the sheer quantity of ice they held to retain the cold.
Everything had to be done as quickly as possible. No water could be allowed to flow into the painstakingly-prepared grooves and to fill them with new ice. The channel had to be kept clear of ice overnight, often by means of towing ice-rafts through the water, up and down all night long. If necessary, ice-cutting would go on till dawn by the light of flares. The working horses wore rope nooses round their necks so that if one slipped into the water channel the rope could be drawn tight: the horse was then incapable of struggling while planks were placed underneath him and a team of men and horses dragged him out.The animal then had to be dried, blanketed, and given strenuous exercise. There were often dozens of horses at work at a time on the surface of an ice pond, necessitating the constant removal (more or less scrupulous) of dung from the ice.
The Norwegians cut ice and sold it to most of Europe during the nineteenth century. In 1822, when the first Norwegian ice cargo arrived in Britain, it caused consternation at the customs house, because it did not fit into classification lists for import duties. By the time it was decided that ice was “dry goods,” the whole cargo had liquefied. After this, in spite of occasional cold winters in Europe, the Norwegian trade flourished. Its interest clashed with American ice after 1844, when the Wenham Lake Ice Company of Boston began shipping ice to Liverpool.
American advertising specialists had already begun to realize how much power could lie in brand names, even for products as natural and as simple as ice cut from a pond. The public was encouraged to think of Wenham Lake Ice as synonymous with an extraordinarily good taste, clarity, purity, and cleanliness. The company’s power and technological mastery was symbolized by the block of ice constantly melting in its office window in the Strand. Norwegian ice continued to be cheaper, however. The American company eventually bought the rights to ice which formed on the surface of Lake Oppegaard in Norway and shipped it to England at the lower price, first renaming their Norwegian property Lake Wenham, so that ice of “extreme purity” could arrive in England under the title which the company had worked so hard to provide with the correct connotations.
By 1832, North American home-owners were accepting ice as a normal household comfort—a luxury in summer, but one which many people could expect to enjoy. In that year Frances Trollope reported from New York, “Ice is in profuse abundance. I do not imagine that there is a home in the city without the luxury of ice to cool the water and harden the butter.” In 1855, a writer in De Bow’s Review called ice “an American institution—the use of it an American luxury—the abuse of it an American failing.” Ir was one of the first “luxuries within the reach of everyone”; among the most successful of the rewards by means of which the Industrial Revolution continues to justify itself.
The art of making ice mechanically was advancing rapidly by 1868, but still ice was expensive: a ten-pound (4.5-kilo.) piece of it from a plant cost $1, at a time when the best beefsteak was 2 ¢ a pound. In New Orleans, bouquets of tropical flowers and silk-clad French dolls were being frozen into blocks of ice as table centre-pieces for dinner parties. Mark Twain, who appears to have been entranced by this notion, described in 1883 how these blocks were set on end in a platter, “to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate glass.”
“Heat we have in readiness in respect to fire,” wrote the Renaissance scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon, “but for cold we must stay till it cometh or seek it in deep caves and when all is done we cannot obtain it in a great degree.” It had long been known to alchemists and early scientists that temperatures could be lowered and ice created by means of “frigorific mixtures,” some of which Bacon himself described as employed in making ice for royal households. These included salt and ice, and snow or ice together with saltpetre, calcium chloride, ammonium chloride, and other chemicals. But these methods were costly (common salt, as we have seen, was itself valuable) and could not, therefore, be used “in a great degree.”
Ice would continue to be found, rather than made, until a need for huge quantities of cold became so imperious that cutting, chopping, and lugging could no longer supply enough of it where it was wanted. It was also necessary that the basic laws governing cold should be understood—but even when they were, natural ice was abundant enough to cause people to concentrate their ingenuity on getting, preserving, and transporting ice rather than on creating it. When artificial ice was finally invented, people treated it with deep suspicion: surely “natural” ice was better than “plant” ice? They refused to buy artificial ice if it had air bubbles in it, because these “imperfections” reminded them that the produce was man-made and therefore quite possibly tampered with. (Natural ice itself usually contains bubbles.) Airless ice was clear and therefore looked pure. Ice-makers quickly adapted to consumer preference by simply removing air (which is utterly harmless) from the ice. The age of distrust for food processing had begun, and with it the enforced agility of food processors, who have to keep calming what they see as the unreasonable, even downright ignorant, prejudices of their customers.
Francis Bacon lived to glimpse—though only just—the chief benefit which human beings have so far found in cold. He was travelling in March 1626 near Highgate, north of London, and meditating on reports he had heard that cold could delay the putrefaction of flesh. He saw snow from his carriage window, stopped the driver and sent him to buy and kill a chicken. Bacon stuffed the chicken full of snow, but in the process caught a cold, which led to his death some weeks later.
Fifty years after Bacon’s ill-fated experiment, Pepys expresses in his diary his fascination with claims from Baltic merchants that slaughtered chickens kept in ice could last the winter without rotting. In 1799, the Russians astounded the world with their reports of finding whole mammoths frozen in Siberian ice, their flesh still edible by dogs. Very soon after this date, the essential first steps were taken which would eventually lead to the ability of man to make cold for himself and freeze his own food. The discoveries revealed new aspects of the nature of heat.
Heat had always seemed to be a kind of invisible liquid, which could be forced into substances by association with fire, or transferred from one material to the other on contact. What revolutionary scientific thinkers, such as Joseph Black (in a work published in 1803) and James Joule in the 1840s, made us realize is that heat is a form of energy and not itself a substance, and that temperature is not the same thing as heat. The firsr two Laws of Thermodynamics were formulated: that energy can never be destroyed or created, only transformed; and that some of the heat (energy) in a working machine is alwavs lost as heat to its surroundings.
These ideas were to form the principal foundations of modern refrigeration technology. A refrigerator works essentially by the vaporization and condensation of a refrigerant liquid. Vaporize the liquid and it sucks heat out of its surroundings, or the things in the refrigerator (this is the Second Law of Thermodynamics in reverse); condense the liquid and heat is released—refrigerators being built so that the heat cannot be released into the machine but must escape into the air of the kitchen. It is heat-either a gas flame for absorption refrigerators or electricity to run compression-pump machines—which causes the expansion and condensation of the liquid.
The first ice-making machines, created in the 1850s, were named after the “refrigerator,” more commonly called an ice box or ice cream cabinet, which was already a common article of household furniture. (Many Americans still call a refrigerator an “ice box.”) This was a wooden chest like a large trunk which could be filled with food. It had a tin container at the top to hold ice, and a pan into which water drained as the ice melted. The first model, patented in 1803 by Thomas Moore, a Maryland farmer, had a casing over it made of rabbit skins. Ice boxes were handsome, practical objects (food kept in them, especially fresh produce, did not dry out as food can in modern refrigerators), and, cooled increasingly often by means of ice made artificially, they remained far more common than mechanical coolers until well after the First World War.
The first widely distributed refrigerating machines for domestic use were being manufactured by 1916. They were horizontal at first, like the ice box (the vertical shape prevents the entry of warm air less efficiently, but modern restrictions on space soon overrode this consideration), and until 1928 their exteriors were of dark wood.
A Florida doctor had made the first simple cold-creating machine for air-conditioning his hospital in 1844. The first commercial machine which actually made ice, enormous and weighing five tons, was built in Australia in 1855. The Australians were pioneers in the creation of refrigerating techniques because they soon realized that Europe was the logical market for the vast tonnages of Australian meat—provided the problems of transporting it could be overcome. Australians had no easy access to ice harvests, so they had no choice but to manufacture their own cold. Gradually, with many disastrous failures, refrigerated shipping evolved, and the Europeans at the other end of the long journeys from Australia, New Zealand, and America were persuaded to eat thawed- out meat months old—and to want more of it.
So it was that by the 1880s yet another complex and revolutionary modern structure was in place: world-wide food transport systems, using the preservative properties of cold. In industrialized countries, there would now be year-round availability of meat, poultry, dairy products, and eggs. Even beer could be made in summer and winter alike-provided it was not ale but lager, which is made in cold conditions and lasts (lagern in German means “to lay down” and “to store”). The factory could now begin to impose its unending productivity and invariability upon the ancient cycles and differentiations of rural work and farm produce. The price of food relative to other costs fell in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and agriculture has never again recovered its former societal role or its status.
It is often said that cooking, like the incest taboo, characterizes what almost anybody would recognize as distinctively human behaviour. For some reason, (and whether or not cooking is important just because it involves the use of Promethean fire), the actual taste of edible substances which have undergone fiery treatment pleases us. But it is rather rare in the history of mankind to find people eating food while it is very hot. More rarely still do we hear of people eating anything very cold. It was for cooling drinks as a special treat, not for freezing them, that ice was usually so painstakingly sought. Most people, in most places and times, have preferred eating their food tepid, “slightly hot” and “cool” being the acceptable extremes for temperature.
The reason for this is that health has usually been thought to consist of balance, in temperature as in everything else: the human body should therefore avoid anything much hotter or much colder than itself. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote in his Regimen that “it is dangerous to heat, cool, or make a commotion all of a sudden in the body, let it be done which way it may, because everything that is excessive is an enemy of nature. Why should anyone run the hazard in the heat of summer of drinking iced waters, which are excessively cold, and suddenly throwing the body into a different state from the one it was in before, producing thereby many ill effects?” But he adds, “people will not take a warning, and most men would rather run the hazard of their lives or health than be deprived of the pleasure of drinking iced liquid.” When coffee first arrived in London in the seventeenth century, it was shudderingly described as a drink “of a soote colour, dryed in a Furnace, and that they drinke as bote as can be endured.”
People are often described as having died as a result of drinking cold water. We may suspect that it was the unsanitary contents of the snow water itself which might have killed Don Carlos, imprisoned in the Palace at Madrid, in 1568, but at the time everyone said he should not have taken in so much cold liquid. Water ices and ice cream, of course, are frozen until they turn thick, which makes them colder still and on this view even more dangerous. They were nearly always available only to the few, and eating them was often thought of as an act of bravado: most people regarded them as perilous as well as strange and expensive. As late as 1869, Catharine Beecher warned American women that ice cream reduces the temperature of the stomach and “stops digestion”; it should on no account be served after a heavy meal.
Nowadays very few people take this aspect of ice cream eating seriously. We know that ingesting ice cream makes the body warmer rather than cooler, because of the work it must do to balance the temperatures.But this heat is not a cause for discomfort, and not enough to spoil the delight of a cold treat on a hot day. Eating cold, and also eating very hot food compared with what our ancestors would have found acceptable, is now one of the ways we experience culinary variety. We have all learned at an early age that the cold of ice cream is not very dangerous, and it is strange now to almost nobody. The great change in taste and attitude in our culture is not the least of the revolutions which the understanding and control of cold have wrought in our lives.
The water ices of the Turks and Arabs were soft and semi-liquid, rather like slushy Italian granita. They were often eaten between courses, as soup is in China, to refresh and clear the palate. The sherbets which were sold in European cafés from the seventeenth century onwards, either by Middle Easterners or by Europeans dressed up as Armenians, Arabs, and Turks, were often heavily laced with liqueurs and served frankly as cold drinks. Still they were regarded as exotic and new when first tasted in Europe. They arrived in force at the same time as did the appetite for lemonade, which often contained alcohol as well as sugar, and which was also kept cold with floating lumps of ice.
Three more new and exotic drinks, hot ones this time, were alcohol-free: tea, coffee, and chocolate. The fashion in Europe for taking these coincided with and helped to further a dawning revolution in human mores. The consumption of non-alcoholic drinks, adopted by the upper classes as an essential component of social gatherings, meant that men and women could, without impropriety, consort as they had never done before. They could meet in public places and talk. The public places were chocolate-houses and cafés, and the first of these to achieve influential and lasting fame was the Café Procope in Paris. Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, who founded the Procope in 1686, was of course Italian, probably from Sicily, via Florence.
The French had by this time been learning about food and drink from the Italians for a century and a half. The Italian Renaissance had had its effect upon cuisine as much as upon the other arts. In 1533, when fourteen-year-old Catherine de Médicis came to Paris to marry the Duc d’Orléans, later Henry 11, son of that admirer of all things Italian, François 1, she brought a retinue of cooks with her whose culinary expertise and ultra-modern attitudes astonished the French court. One of the cooking specialists later brought to France by Marie de Médicis when she married Henri IV in 1600 was Bernardo Buontalenti (some say Buontalenti came seventy-seven years earlier, with Catherine de Medicis). He showed off an Italian speciality (although we have no reason to believe that the French had not heard of it before): iced confections made with cream, called gelati.
It was said that Marco Polo had learned about freezing sweet cream when he was in China, and there is independent evidence that the Chinese emperors ate sweetened ground rice mixed with milk and frozen in porcelain bowls. The Indians too have an ancient iced dessert (kulfi) made with milk boiled down until it thickens, and frozen in porous earthenware. Certainly, Italians knew all about storing ice for culinary use. “The meanest person in Italy who rents a house has his vault or cellar for ice,” according to the eighteenth-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and the custom was by no means new. It has not been ascertained (and perhaps it cannot be) whether the Italians were inspired by travellers to ice sweetened cream, or whether they thought of it for themselves.
The French nobility ate places on special occasions. At one dinner given by Louis xrv, the great Vatel (the maître d’hôtel who was further to immortalize himself by committing suicide when he feared that the fish would not arrive on time for dinner) “caused to be placed before each guest, in silver-gilt cups, what was apparently a freshly laid egg, coloured like those at Easter. But before the company had time to recover from their surprise at such a novel dessert, they discovered that the supposed eggs were a delicious sweetmeat, cold and compact as marble.” This was probably ice cream, and certainly (like the death of Vatel) the stuff of which culinary myth is made: ice-cold sweets disguised as eggs were extravagantly perverse and definitely not food for ordinary people.
Procopio dei Coltelli, after having been a prosperous limonadier for many years in Paris, acted in 1686 on one of those insights which occasionally enable businessmen both to understand and to promote previously latent social trends—and to make themselves fortunes. “Procope,” as the French called him, saw that cafés, one of which he already owned, were a little primitive, dull, and limited; the cabarets populaires, on the other hand, were fun, but rough and wild. Neither kind of establishment could be frequented by respectable women. So Procope opened a new house in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, now rue de l’ancienne Comédie: Procope’s was opposite a theatre, an important ingredient of his success.
He provided his café with high-class décor: expensive and impressive mirrors, chandeliers, and marble tables. All of these, together with the hundreds of coloured liquids in gleaming bottles, are still part of the traditional appearance of Parisian cafés. He set himself up as distiller, apothecary, liquoriste, and grocer, providing also, as all the cafés did, the news of the day displayed on the pipe of the stove which heated the establishment. People would come to his café to meet their friends, gossip, and talk politics. He sold liqueurs and sherbets, but also perfumes, jams, conserved fruits, coffee, chocolate, and, most luxurious of all, ice creams, which could be bought and decorously eaten as only the nobility had previously eaten them, from silver dishes in the most exquisite café in Paris. There were water ices, many of them perfumed with flowers (as they still are in Iran and other parts of the Middle East), “iced cheeses” incorporating sweet cream and egg-yolks, and glaces, with less egg than the frontages glacés. To this day French ice cream is often distinguished from others by its egg-yolk base.
There were soon many different ways of eating ice cream in France: the bombe, made in a spherical metal mould (now it comes in a simple bowl shape) containing a thick rind of water ice with a lighter-textured cream centre; the many coupes glacées composed of one or more ice creams with fruit and crème Chantilly, or whipped cream sweetened and flavoured with vanilla, each combination bearing an honorific title; mousses (where the cream is first whipped and then frozen); parfaits (originally flavoured only with coffee); and the elaborate ornamental iced confections of classic French cuisine. The omelette à la Norvégienne (Norway was the chief purveyor of ice in Europe) was hot meringue enclosing ice cream; in 1868 Americans rechristened this perverse frivolity baked Alaska.
From 1804, yet another two Italians, Velloni (one of the first of the full-time Parisian glaciers or ice-cream makers), and after him Tortoni, ran the Pavilion du Hanovre, with gardens, balls, concerts, and firework displays among the many entertainments. At this restaurant was born the famous biscuit Tortoni, a frozen cream mousse with macaroons, almonds, and rum. At Tortoni’s, women were banished again, being allowed only to sit outside the establishment, in straw chairs, to take the ices.
The history of ice cream in England appears to begin with the eating of “creme ice” at the court of Charles I; a probably apocryphal story relates that Gérard Tissain, the French chef who made ice cream for the King, was given a pension of £20 a year to keep the formula secret. When the King was beheaded in 1649, a group of noblemen bought the coveted information from the chef. The English had, in fact, always been fond of creamy desserts: custards, syllabubs, trifles, fools, and “whitepots” made from milk products which the English called “white meats.” There is even a record of “creme frez” (is that fresh or frozen or with strawberries?) being served at the coronation banquet of King Henry V. At the end of the seventeenth century the new interest in ice houses, in combination with the traditional English taste in puddings, must have made ice cream seem as much a natural development as an exciting Continental novelty. As we shall see, the creaminess of ice cream—the milk component—has always been considered more important in Britain and America than in continental Europe.
Coffee houses in England never became as elaborate as those in France which followed the tradition started by Procope. In 1662, a man was selling in London “sherbets made in Turkie, of lemons, roses and violets perfumed; and Tea or Chaa, according to its goodness.” But I have found no record of English coffee houses offering ice cream. It was England, however, which produced the first cookery books for the middle-class housewife, as opposed to those intended for professional chefs employed by the nobility. One of the earliest of these, the Compleat Confectioner of Hannah Glasse (1760), explained how to make raspberry ice cream: a tiring and costly business, involving the shaking by hand of a pewter pot of the cream and fruit mixture over another pot containing salted ice, then letting it rest and periodically stirring it until the ice cream thickened. The first recorded use of the English phrase ice cream (previously cream ice and iced cream) occurred in 1672.
In Vienna, ice cream quickly became a common treat for the rich in the eighteenth century, eaten “winter and summer” as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reported in 1716. Beethoven complained of the warm winter of 1793–94; “The Viennese are afraid it will soon be impossible to have any ice cream, for as the winter is mild ice is rare.”
Italian coffee houses followed the French model, and sold gelati. A great many of them were opened, including two in the Piazza San Marco in Venice: the Caffè Florian, founded in 1720, and Quadri in 1775. Both of these, like Procope’s, are still doing business today. Italian iced desserts included granita and gremolata (granular water ices), coppe, like the French coupes, Neapolitan cassata (an ice cream mould with diced fruit, nuts, and macaroons) and spumone (several layers of sherbets, ice creams and fruit in an oval mould), as well as the huge class of semifreddi, or “half-cold” iced confections.
Ice cream was known in North America at least as early as the 1740s, when a guest of Governor Bladen of Maryland wrote in a letter: “We had dessert no less Curious; among the Rarities of which it was Compos’d was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most deliciously.” George Washington was an early American ice cream aficionado, having spent rwo hundred dollars on what must have been a great quantity of it at an ice cream dealer’s in the summer of 1790. He also owned “a cream machine for making ice.” Brillat-Savarin, the gastronome, tells how a French captain named Collet made and sold ices in New York in 1794 and 1795. He describes with satisfaction the surprise of American women at this technological and masculine feat: “nothing could be more amusing than the little grimaces they made when eating them. They were utterly at a loss to conceive how a substance could be kept so cold in a temperature of ninety degrees.”
Dolley Madison used ice cream to make her famous White House dinner parties special; a guest enthusiastically described one such occasion when “an Air of Expectancy” which Mrs. Madison had propagated among those present was gratified by the sight, in the centre of a lavishly set table and high on a silver platter, of “a large, shining dome of pink Ice Cream.” Mrs. Madison is said to have ordered custard pies for her husband’s Second Inaugural Ball in 1813. They arrived frozen. One of the guests, horrified at biting into ice-cold custard, shrieked “Poison!” and the cook was seized by security guards. Mrs. Madison, with great aplomb, ate one herself and declared it delicious. This story (true or not) resembles one myth which often recurs in the history of gastronomy: that of the Accidental Discovery, preferably by a Famous Person, of a new combination of ingredients or a new way of cooking or eating them. Mrs. Madison was both breaking a taboo and creating taste. According to the first-century Greek writer Athenaeus, King Ptolemy of Egypt claimed to have demonstrated to his troops that an icy stream could be drunk without fear by coolly tasting it himself.
In 1846, an American named Nancy Johnson invented a machine for making ice cream which not only simplified the process but greatly increased control over the finished product. This was the portable hand-cranked ice-cream churn which beat the mixture of cream and flavourings with a paddle (known as a “dasher” on the analogy with butter churns) as it froze. The canister of cream sat in a wooden bucket full of the ancient “frigorific mixture,” ice and salt. About twenty minutes of cranking is enough to thicken the ice cream. The stirring prevents the formation of large ice crystals and encourages the creation of tiny “seed” crystals in the mix; the cream, milk, eggs, and honey also coat the crystals and impede their growth by preventing water from adhering to their surfaces. The smaller the crystals, the smoother-tasting the ice cream. (Iced sherbets and creams made by stationary freezing generally require the addition of gelatin or egg-whites to inhibit crystal growth.) There is with the cranking method a single consistency throughout, and no lumps can form. At the same time the dasher incorporates just the amount of air required to loosen up the mix and help it melt quickly and deliciously on the tongue.
The invention of this machine marked a revolution in the history of ice cream: from this time on anyone could make the very best quality ice cream at home—especially since rock salt, which came to be commonly called “ice cream salt” until the early twentieth century, had become a cheap commodity. The visits of the ice man, with his horse and cart and his iron claw to heave blocks of ice, often meant the promise of a family treat: ice cream quickly became part of American folklore, as did the ice man himself. The new machine also made it possible to mass-produce ice cream and to sell it commercially. Until the 1880s even factory ice cream was turned out the same way as home-made: in hand-cranked freezers.
Just why is it that salt makes ice cream freeze—the very salt that is used to get rid of the ice on sidewalks? What takes place within the ice-cream machine, isolated from the surrounding air by its wooden bucket (plastic in modern versions of this system), is extremely complicated. Essentially what happens is that the addition of salt to the mixture of ice and water upsets the equilibrium of energy exchanges between ice and water (the movement and slowing of molecules) which naturally occur within half-frozen liquid.
The electric field of water molecules breaks up salt crystals into positive ions (sodium) and negative ions (chloride) and causes clusters of water molecules to form which cannot stick to ready-formed ice. Molecules still leave the ice as they have been doing, but new ice cannot form: the equilibrium is broken and the ice melts. The energy required for melting has to come from the kinetic energy of the water or liquid-phase molecules; they slow down and the temperarure drops to below 0°C. (32°F.), even though ice is melting and not forming. Therefore, when energy (heat) moves out of the ice cream mixture and into the brine through the metal canister (for heat always moves from the warmer to the colder, and it moves easily through metal), the salty water stays cold even though energy is being added to it. When salt is sprinkled on sidewalk ice, on the other hand, it simultaneously melts the ice and drives down the temperature of the resulting water; but this temperature is quickly raised again to its previous level by the sidewalk itself and the circumambient air.
When the crank begins to stick, the ice cream is frozen, but still soft. Now the dasher is removed from the canister: the moment of magic when some lucky person is allowed to lick the dasher and know the quality of the ice cream. Next the repacked canister may be lowered back into the brine, the whole churn wrapped in a blanket for extra insulation, and the ice cream left to harden or “ripen” for an hour or so before being dished out (it should not become too hard: to solidify ice cream is to deaden a great deal of its flavour). The very best thing to do with ice cream when it is ready is to eat it at once—all of it. Keeping it always reduces the quality of its texture, consistency, and taste.
Ice-cream vending in the streets is recorded as early as 1828 in America, when “a group of boisterous fellows with kettles in their hands” yelled “I scream, Ice Cream” to attract customers in the streets of New York. Italians had introduced the idea to Britain by 1850 at the latest, when Carlo Gatti was peddling ice cream to Londoners from a painted cart. He was so successful that he and others brought many more Italians over to join them. These immigrants were grossly exploited labour, often lodged in poor conditions and paid little; during the winter they often worked as hurdy-gurdy men. Every morning in summer they cranked and froze the ice cream mix they had made the previous night, and went their rounds in London, Glasgow, Manchester, and other growing industrial cities crying, “Gelati, ecco un poco!” It is thought to be because of their cry that ice-cream vendors were called “hokey pokey men” and the ice cream they sold “hokey pokey,” a term which became common also in America.
Selling ice cream in the streets testified to the increasing ease with which ice could be obtained, and to the growing general popularity of ice cream. The dessert once the glory of banquets at court could now be carried about and shamelessly eaten by anybody in the street. Many are the claims to the invention of the first ice cream cone. The French and the Germans say they had metal and paper cones in the mid-nineteenth century. Carlo Gatti himself is said to have invented an edible horn or cornet (corno in Italian) for holding ice cream, by twisting pastry round his finger and baking it. A Syrian immigrant to the United States called Ernest A. Hamwi rolled up thin Persian waffles called zalabia and topped them with a ball of ice cream (a combination thought of on the spot and because of an accident—again that recurring theme) at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. He sold his confection as “the World’s Fair Cornucopia.” Other American inventors disputed his claim to be first.
The truth is almost certainly that containers and “holders,” both edible and inedible and for many different kinds of food, already existed in most culinary traditions. This is not to discount the brainwave which discerned and immediately satisfied a wholly new requirement, that ice cream should become, at least on occasion, both portable and spoon-free. An automatic cone-rolling machine was invented in 1909; by 1924, 245 million cones were being produced per year in the United States alone, even though the cone had to share the field with other containers of individual ice cream portions.
No biological fact exerts for people a fascination which can compare with one that can underscore and therefore encourage an existing social trend. With the dawning, in the early twentieth century, of the age of self-sufficiency for the individual and the severing of social bonds, one decades-old campaign for better public hygiene at last began to make an impact: the old communal tin drinking-cups at public water-fountains began genuinely to seem both old-fashioned and insanitary. The Individual Drink Cup Company of New York was ready, as early as 1909, to cash in by supplying endless quantities of paper cups, one for each person whenever he felt like a drink. So successful was its clean white throw-away invention that the company could soon dispense with a title explaining its raison d’être: the name Dixie Cup was adopted instead because the sound of it was patriotic, musical, snappy, clean, and modern. The company doubled its profits in 1923 by developing a special version of its cup, each one to hold a single portion of ice cream. The cup had a round lid with a tongue to help pull it off; it was as deep as it was wide. Now you could either eat your ice cream, in a relaxed but still fastidious frame of mind, with a flat wooden spoon; or less delicately, more self-sufficiently, and in larger mouthfuls, by bending your lid into a scoop and digging the ice cream carefully, with an inimitably delicious hollow scraping sound, out of your own individual tub.
In 1919 a means was found of making a chocolate coating adhere to ice cream, and the result was marketed as the I-Scream Bar. Later the name was changed to Eskimo Pie, and the bar was provided with a holder and wrapper combined, made of disposable silver foil. The idea of the Good Humor Bar, an ice-cream block on a stick like a lollipop, was conceived in 1920; it was named and first sold by a man who adhered to the ancient belief that the humours of the mind could be controlled and improved by what one ate. Harry Burt Sr. made marketing history by having Good Humor Bars sold from vans equipped with bells to announce their presence, by an army of men in white uniforms with distinctly military-looking caps and belts. The Good Humor Man became a well-known and reliably invariable visitor to neighbourhoods all over North America. He had a strict code of rules and manners which his company had recorded in a manual; if he broke a rule he could lose his place in the ranks. The merchandising style of giant chain companies like McDonald’s owes a great deal to various aspects of the Good Humor concept.
Pedal tricycles were one of the chief methods of ice cream vending in Britain. Thomas Wall, whose sausage and meat—pie business had been slow during the summer months, largely because refrigeration had not yet become efficient enough or universal enough, started mass-producing and street-vending ice cream in 1922. The Wall’s ice cream man’s slogan was “Stop Me and Buy One.” The British launched into ice cream eating with unprecedented fervour. They began to forsake traditional English steamed puddings and tarts for the new, cold, and easy technological treat. By 1939, Wall’s was the largest ice-cream manufacturer in the world, as it still is today, after the company’s expansion into markets in western Europe and North America. Both Wall’s and Eskimo Pie pioneered the use of solid carbon dioxide (“dry ice”) to transport ice cream. This gas turns directly into a solid when frozen, and evaporates (with no messy melting stage) as it heats up. Its use greatly facilitated both street vending and the centralization of ice-cream manufacturing.
Ice-cream parlours opened in many cities of the United States during the nineteenth century; these echoed the tradition of Procope and his successors in France, Italy, Austria, and other European countries, where ice cream was decorous and to be eaten in appropriately elegant surroundings.Ice cream also came to be considered the sine qua non of American festive occasions. Brillat-Savarin was responsible for the repellent aphorism that “the dessert [the whole final section of a French meal] without cheese is a beautiful woman without an eye.” An American magazine editor wrote in 1850, “A party without ice cream would be like a breakfast without bread or a dinner without a roast.” The American comparison is less savage, but sufficiently earnest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was to complain of ice cream’s role as a lazy social standby. “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend,” he wrote, “so we buy ice cream.”
In 1851, Jacob Fussell, a Baltimore milk dealer who had noticed the rising fortunes of ice cream, decided to turn his cows’ summer cream surplus into ice cream. This meant making as much ice cream at a time as he had extra cream; it was a much larger quantity than that of the confectioners and hotel managers who made only small quantities of it as required. But Fussell sold it at a much lower price-and found he could hardly keep up with the demand. He soon gave his company up to full-time ice-cream making (all hand-cranked), opened up plants in Washington, Boston, and New York, and then expanded to cities west and south. The first large-scale ice-cream manufacturing business had begun; Fussell has a plaque commemorating his achievement on the site of his factory in Baltimore. The young industrialist was greatly encouraged by a new craze which was to last until the 1950s: in 1874, cream sodas (an invention dating back to 1832) became ice-cream sodas; soda fountains and drugstores were from now on obliged to stock ice cream.
Meanwhile, ice-making machines were beginning to change the patterns of food preservation and transport, for artificial ice can be made where and when it is wanted. The Boston ice-harvesting business peaked in about 1870; thereafter “homegrown” or “natural” ice began to lose out. By 1914 the industry was broken, never to recover, although ice-harvesting operations continued into the 1920s. When it became common for many people to possess their own refrigerators, which happened first in North America, ice cream could be marketed in half-gallon bricks, to be taken home and kept cold until it was eaten for dessert. A new battle began: to transform the image of ice cream from something special, eaten as a treat, out of doors, or in fancy cafés and parlours, into something ordinary, a part of everyday home fare.
Ice cream, as its English name shows, is made with milk products,and ever since the seventeenth century in Europe (just when ice cream was becoming well known) milk had been suspected of being often disease-ridden, especially in the big cities. Milk, as we now know, is nutritious not only for human beings but for micro-organisms as well. The revelations of germ theory, and the elimination of infection in food by heat treatment, resulted from the investigations of Louis Pasteur into the fermentation of wine and beer in the 1860s. Milk was not systematically pasteurized in North America and England until the end of the nineteenth century. Before that, people preferred to add chemical preservatives and disinfectants to milk; it was simpler than keeping their animals and operations clean and free from contamination, and it avoided the nuisance of having to heat the milk. Ice-cream manufacturers relied also on the widespread belief that bacteria would die in cold, as they had been shown to be destroyed by heat.
As ice cream was eaten more and more frequently and widely, it was realized that it might well be a cause for outbreaks of disease. There was a terrifying “vanilla ice cream poisoning” in Norway as early as 1848; diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever, and intestinal diseases also pointed to ice cream as the culprit. In the early 1920s many careful scientific tests were carried out on ice cream, and it was discovered that pathogenic bacteria were not easily killed by freezing: some survived a temperature as low as—250°C (—418°F) for ten hours with almost no effect; others grew and multiplied in deep cold. In fact, an ice-cream mix was shown to be even more conducive to bacterial growth than plain cream or milk.
After this, laws were passed that all commercially produced ice cream should be pasteurized before freezing. Pasteurizing destroys 20 per cent of the vitamin C in milk; some say that the treatment spoils the taste of milk by robbing it of irreplaceable volatile elements. Ice cream is now eaten on such a large scale, however, that the risk of disease outweighs other considerations. Today, a phosphatase test is routinely made on ice cream to ensure correct pasteurization, because the process destroys phosphatase in milk. Routine testing of cows for bovine tuberculosis is an important aspect of modern safety precautions for milk. Stringent regulations have to be enforced, in addition, to prevent re-contamination of pasteurized ice cream, and to keep as germ-free as possible utensils, employees, vendors, scoops, and barrels, and even the air which comes in contact with ice cream.
Dangerous ice cream might have been sold without hygienic supervision from city carts in the nineteenth century, but it was always prized as innocent: ice cream, after all, was not liquor. As the Prohibition era got under way in the United States, triumphant lists were compiled in the dairy trade journals of American breweries which had converted to the production of ice cream. The Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers sang at their conventions in the 1920s the following verses, to the tune of “Old Black Joe”:
Gone are the days when Father was a souse,
Gone are the days of the weekly family rows,
Gone from this land since prohibition’s here –
He brings a brick of ice cream home instead of beer!
Chorus:
He’s coming, he’s coming; we can see him coining near –
He brings a brick of ice cream home instead of beer!
Ice cream was a frivolity, however, and in the 1890s visits to soda fountains, and “sucking soda” in particular, were frowned upon in North America as unsuitable behaviour on Sundays. Ice cream merchants responded by selling a soda-less ice-cream concoction which they called a “Sunday.” It is believed that the name was changed to “sundae” either to avoid any appearance of mocking the Lord’s Day, or to persuade customers that the dish did not have to be eaten only once a week.
The ice-cream industry entered an entirely new phase in 1932, when Clarence W. Vogt invented the continuous ice-cream freezer. A pasteurized ice-cream mix is first homogenized so that the fat will not churn into butter. Then it is fed into this machine and quickly frozen, while being agitated, to a slushy consistency. A controlled quantity of air is pumped into the slurry, and the temperature lowered still further; the whole process can take a matter of seconds, although the mix is best left to settle between the two phases. Ice cream is extruded continuously from the machine onto a conveyer, then passed through a hardening tunnel, and mechanically cut and packaged. It is never touched or handled in any way, and the rapidity of the freezing helps ensure that the ice cream is smooth, because crystals have no time to grow. Speed and total control over the behaviour of the ingredients were at last within the ice-cream manufacturer’s grasp. With the new technology in place, the giant ice-cream corporations became locked into fierce competition over prices: the public would buy whichever ice cream cost less.
Soda fountains, and the soda jerks who plopped balls of ice cream into fizzy glasses, with their colourful cries, personal style, and icecream-tossing skills, were quickly phased out. They had come to seem overdone, not predictable enough, not “cost-effective.” Ice cream had been a Sunday afternoon treat, something one went “out” to eat. Now one bought ice cream in half-gallon (1.9-litre) blocks at the supermarket and took it home for supper, or routinely stopped by at one of the new chain stores where scores of ice cream flavours were laid out for the choosing. The sheer number of possibilities, ranging from chocolate to chili con carne flavour or marshmallow, made the act of selecting a cone a direct and awesome intimation of the power at the heart of technological empire: it offered not only quantity, but a range and availability which outstripped both need and imagination. The parent company underwrote the quality of the ice cream which it supplied to all its franchises, as well as the expertise that went into its invention and production; every member store was like every other.
In the early 1950s, soda fountains dried up at the rate of twelve hundred per year. Universal domestic refrigeration and the use of cold for transport changed ice-cream making from a seasonal and local operation into a year-round proposition, with nation-wide marketing. Between 1957 and 1969, 1,656 Norrh American ice-cream plants closed; big companies became huge corporations. Ice cream had become something constantly in stock, taken for granted, and above all, cheap.
Ice cream in its natural state is a complex emulsion composed of solids (ice crystals), liquids, and air; also locked into the system are scattered fat globules, sugar, and egg and milk proteins. It had never been cheap to make; and as technology made the work easier, so the ingredients became more costly. The companies therefore, with the general goal of making ice cream more frequently consumed and easier to afford, moved beyond machine technology and sought the assistance of chemistry. The cream gave way to milk, and fresh milk was replaced by dried milk, concentrated skim milk, cheese whey, casein, and other milk fractions and derivatives. “Inert fillers” and “bulking agents” stood in for the substance of cream. Emulsifiers smoothed and “texrurized” the result. Canadian scientists perfected the use of stabilizers. These are gelatins, and also chemicals derived from vegetables and from wood which have the property of thickening instead of relaxing as temperatures rise, so that the ice cream refrains from either dripping or melting.
One typical brand of ice cream at present on the market is composed of milk fat, nonfat milk, corn syrup, cheese whey, monoglycerides and diglycerides, carob bean gum, cellulose gum, guar gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan, natural and artificial flavour, and artificial colour. By U.S. law at least 10 per cent of the mix must be milk fat by weight, and 2.7 per cent protein; a gallon (3.8 litres) of it must weigh at least four and a half pounds (2 kilograms), exclusive of micro-crystalline cellulose used as “fillers.” Air bubbles (which are known in the trade as “overrun”) can make up as much as half the volume of the ice cream. The standard is important, because all those gums could hold much more air than that. These rules were laid down in 1960, after a monumental battle: it took over fourteen years and thirty-eight thousand pages of hearings for an agreement finally to be reached between the American government and the ice-cream industry.
That there is a minimum milk component at all for ice cream seems outrageously backward to many food technologists. They complain because it “ties producers to particular ingredients” and “hampers flexibility.” The dairy industry, in this as in the butter-versus-margarine controversy, has insisted on protection, and played on the automatic revulsion which any consumer feels when reading on his ice-cream package a list of polysyllabic chemicals instead of cream, sugar, eggs, and fruit.
Pleasure can be derived from the discovery that one has been deceived. Food is often served in disguise, or rigged to surprise the guests: an egg in its egg-cup might turn out really to be ice cream, or a pie to contain twenty-four live blackbirds. But the fun comes from a spirit of play: participation, sharing in the delight, is the essential factor. Admiration for skill was another component of such amusements, but admiration is a personal matter, and it is impossible to proffer it where there is a lack of trust. Today technology has tremendous prestige, but if its aim is perceived as being deception solely in order to turn a profit—in other words an impersonal “they” might enjoy it, but at our expense—our reaction turns quickly to contempt and anger, no matter how clever the trick. In addition, human beings have always been peculiarly sensitive about what they eat. To consume processed food is to hand over total control of one’s diet to absolutely unknown other people. Trust, in these circumstances, is fragile. People today instinctively prefer that things should be what they look like.
This attitude could not be more irritating to those who have with great difficulty won the power to replace all the ingredients in food while maintaining a façade which looks surprisingly like the original. They are making food cheaper for us: why are we not grateful? Why should ice cream have cream in it just because it is called ice cream? And why is it that people would not buy it, in spite of the low price, if it were called iced milk derivatives with chemicals?
In Anglo-Saxon countries, ice cream has always represented a kind of apotheosis of milk. The northern, butter-loving cultures reserved a special awe for milk; it is a food more than a drink, and it is innocent, pure, white, and wholesome. To freeze cream with fruit and sugar is to add an extra dimension of delight to the solid worth of milk. Ice cream has been heavy artillery to throw into the battle against liquor, a sound and tasteful alternative to the empty vulgarities of junk food, a country and childhood tradition to console our jaded and nostalgic city existences. In most of continental Europe, ice cream delivers an entirely different message. It has never lost its élite status: in Rome or Paris or Vienna ice cream is a very elegant dessert, served in an expensive café from tall coupes and tulip-shaped glasses, or moulded in layers into fancy shapes. Even when served in cones on the street, flavours are sharp and fruity, colours brilliant, and the milk component can be left out altogether without prejudice to the product’s image.
In North America and in Britain, on the other hand, ice cream tends to come in pastel colours, pale because of the creamy white of milk. In 1942, the British decided to ban ice cream as part of the war effort, largely because it was perceived as a luxury item and austerity was the mood required. Yet even before the war, ice cream in Anglo-Saxon countries had come a long way towards achieving exactly the opposite image. It has concentrated deliberately on becoming democratic, universally eaten, and cheap. It is not merely a dessert, but an extraordinarily pleasant way of consuming semi-sacred milk. Its image is customary and comforting rather than exciting and sophisticated. In spite of their excellence and the admiration they inspire, French glaces and even Italian gelati are eaten in nowhere near the quantities reached by ice cream in “milk” cultures.
North Americans in particular have adopted ice cream as a food central to their mythology, a symbol almost of national identity. It was the Americans who had, in the nineteenth century, led the world in learning to enjoy the benefits of ice. They were the first, too, to insist on ice cream for everybody. From 1921, immigrants to the United States were served ice cream on their arrival at Ellis Island; it is related that many of them used knives to spread it on their bread. The story was repeated with delight by Americans because it seemed to show how distinctively American ice cream was in its luxurious modernity. It was classified as an “essential foodstuff” in 1917, and the U.S. Secretary of War considered it indispensable for the morale of the army.
During the Second World War the Japanese discouraged the eating of ice cream as behaviour which betrayed pro-western, and specifically pro-American, sympathies. The Japanese themselves, like the Chinese, will eat ice cream, but they do not like drinking large quantities of milk because the lactose is difficult for them to digest; in any case, in the view of their war commanders, the sweetness and the association of milk with babies made ice cream children’s food, entirely inappropriate to men of military prowess. Americans, meanwhile, were forced to cut back on ice cream for economic reasons. They expressed their relief and joy at the end of the war by embarking on the largest ice-cream-eating splurge in history; over nineteen litres (20 quarts) of it were eaten in 1946 by even,’ man, woman, and child in the country.
One American commander, General Lewis B. Puller, expressed the opinion that his marines would be tougher and more aggressive if they were given beer and whiskey instead of being molly-coddled with ice cream and candy. The Pentagon disagreed: during the Korean War American troops abroad were supplied with ice cream three times a week. Koreans did not eat it; Americans considered it a treat, an expression of their common identity and distinctiveness in a foreign land, and a sign that they were being remembered and cared for at home. When the American aircraft carrier Lexington was sinking, the crew brought all the cans of ice cream they could find out of the hold and gorged on the contents till it was time to go overboard.
To the connotations of purity which pertain to milk, ice cream adds the idea of cleanliness which we assume to be inherent in snow and in cold generally. Snow, like milk, is white, and everywhere thought of as a symbol of purity. Chinese texts of the T’ang period allude to the rare simplicity and cleanness of heart of the true Confucian gentleman, with whom they compare a fine jade vase full of snow. We have seen, however, that eating cold has been thought until recent times to be dangerous behaviour; when people die they turn cold, and evil is often pictured as exerting an icy grip. We probably still need to be reassured at some level about our new-found pleasure in eating frozen food.
We have also seen that milk has often been far from clean, even though cold does keep it from turning sour. Today, when the necessity of keeping milk contamination-free is better understood than ever before, we surround milk, milk products, and ice cream with symbolic affirmations of cleanliness. White-uniformed staff wielding scoops filled with antifreeze (the very word “scoop” sounds cold, clean, and delicious), gleaming stainless steel, polished marble, clear glass, and white enamel surfaces all assure us that the ice cream is technologically under control and safe, and simultaneously surround it with visual representations of the simplicity and purity which we desire. When one manufacturer recently tried using real vanilla beans in his ice cream, they showed up as flecks in the mix. The idea had to be discontinued because even that part of the market prepared to pay for the real thing rejected ice cream which did not look immaculate. (The incorporation of identifiable, or customer-chosen, additions such as broken cookies or fruit, may be perfectly acceptable.)
Ice cream is itself a technological feat, one of the triumphs of Promethean wit; if any society other than ours had invented it, they would have celebrated it in mythic legend, in painting, and in song. The ready availability of it presupposes all the organizational systems of a modern industrial civilization. Mechanical continuous freezing, pasteurization, and mechanical packing all contribute towards keeping the product “untouched by human hands” and therefore pure. Technology means safety. This is especially important in the case of ice cream, which, like any powerful mythic token, is potentially dangerous as well as beneficial.
No wonder then that people feel betrayed and more than reasonably irritated when they discover that technology has not contented itself with creating and preserving ice cream, but has reached a long arm into the image of innocence itself and subverted the very substance of what we trust it to protect. The gums, the cellulose, the casein, and the whey might look quite a lot like ice cream, taste fairly pleasant, and last indefinitely—but how can we be expected to approve of a symbol of purity which is shown to be an impostor, or an expression of simple verity which turns out to be an illusion?
Antonin Carême, the great French chef, is reputed to have remarked in the early nineteenth century that “the fine arts are five in number:painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture. And the main branch of architecture is confectionary.” This statement certainly suited Carême’s approach to his art: he meticulously designed on paper and then erected extraordinary’ edible edifices called pièces montées, entirely in order to delight dinner guests before they happily demolished them. Ice cream was an ideal medium for these miniature temples and monuments: it could be moulded to any required shape and then frozen, and its brilliant fruit colours were an asset to any design.
The fashion for elegant moulded ice-cream “pieces” lasted into the twentieth century. Albertine tells Proust’s Narrator, in words which he considers “a little too well contrived” as well as enfuriatingly sexy, that she wants her ice cream “cast in one of those old-fashioned moulds which have every architectural shape imaginable; whenever I eat them, temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, a sort of picturesque geography is what I see at first before converting its raspberry or vanilla monuments into coolness in my gullet.” And she continues describing ice-cream pillars, lemon-ice mountains, and strawberry Venetian churches for quite some time. Today we hear less of moulded ice extravaganzas, but the French and the Italians still enjoy producing complex ice cream follies.
In Anglo-Saxon countries ice cream is served in deliberately simple shapes, with emphasis upon its ability to stand free. The preferred form is rounded, by means of the scoop. A curled blob of ice cream (unless it is too mechanically smooth and over-doctored with emulsifiers) will crack deliciously and present a slightly rough and frosty surface which anyone with experience will immediately want to lick. Simple domed shapes are expressive of the generally mammary, motherly, babyhood connotations of milky ice cream.
The persona of ice cream will vary, depending on where and how it is served. Moulded, ice cream is prestigious and formal. Made at home and eaten as soon as it freezes, after the messy salt-and-ice business, the work, and the waiting, it is a family occasion and a treat. Served scooped onto simple dishes, and especially in dollops balanced on cones or in cardboard tubs, it is the food of relaxation, of crowds on holiday. In all these cases, ice cream is festive food. It may be flavoured outlandishly, covered in chocolate, sold on a stick like a lollipop; ice cream is “fun food” and easily lends itself to novelty. It can glory, too, in being perversely served with hot food—with steaming apple pie for instance, or enclosed in hot pastry or meringue. The idea of buying it in large bricks at a supermarket and keeping it in the refrigerator for constant servings at family meals must always represent an uneasy rejection of this aspect of the mythology of ice cream. It is a custom which could only have come about because of the milk myth: when ice cream is looked upon as above all nutritious, it begins to look a little solemn rather then festive or fun.
The sober and dutiful view of ice cream is also a consequence of everyone’s owning a refrigerator: ice cream ceases to be evanescent. Transience, however, is the essence of festivity. The fun of being served an ice-cream obelisk lies largely in the fact that the structure will not last beyond this dinner-time: the shape chosen denotes permanence, and is given precisely to what cannot last. Crowds licking their cones in the hot summer sun enjoy themselves more intensely because they know they must go back to normal life soon. Ice cream melts; therefore it is perfect food for “time out.”
This important aspect of what the trade magazines call “America’s number-one fun food” is used to enormous effect by the American poet Wallace Stevens in his poem on the force which man exerts over the transient world—a force which is ultimately absurd because man is himself a part of the transitory world he rules. For Stevens there is cold, naked death at the centre of all life, and man can do nothing about this fact but see it and face it. He may divert himself while he lives, provided he is not taken in. Let him then enjoy the tasty, the transient, and the trivial in and for itself, for this is the only reality: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”
Thanks to the technology of cold, however, ice cream need no longer be truly evanescent, even though it is still best eaten soon after it has been made. A brick of supermarket ice cream can be kept on hand for weeks or even months, to be served at a moment’s notice. It ministers to convenience: a need which modern man seems to find more to his taste than festivity. Ice-cream manufacturers have a puzzle on their hands nevertheless, deciding how to appeal both to fun and to daily habit, for ice cream continues to accommodate both terms of the contradiction.
It has also become an expression of nostalgia, in spite of the modernity and the technological prowess which it presupposes. There are today two main kinds of nostalgia, and ice cream appeals to both of them. The first looks back to past time. Ice cream is the delight of children and therefore evocative of childhood memories; eating it makes people feel young and at least temporarily secure and innocent. Ice-cream stalls are decked with striped awnings and gingham, merchants use clowns, stuffed toys, cartoon characters, and balloons, not only to please children but also to draw adults to indulge in childhood for a while.
Ice-cream sellers also like to pretend that they are very old-fashioned folks, and they give their premises not only a nursery air but a nineteenth-century look as well. Ice-cream parlours are making a comeback at present, almost all of them finding it profitable to provide “retro”-styled furnishings: black-and-white tiled floors (the tiles preferably hexagonal), bentwood chairs, “Tiffany” lamps, mirrors, cushioned booths, marble counters and so on. The very word parlour is evocative: one brand of ice cream advertises itself as offering “The Ice Cream Parlor Taste.” Another finds it worth stressing that “We’ve been around since 1876.”
The other nostalgia is for Elsewhere. For city dwellers, the ultimately Other place is the country. Ice cream accordingly insists on its rusticity—despite the continuous freezers and the polysyllabic chemicals. Rusticity in modern life is of course closely associated with the old-fashioned, so that the two kinds of nostalgia are interrelated. Both the past and the country are perceived as being somehow more trusrworthy and certainly more natural than a modern ice-cream factory.
So ice-cream publicity gives us cows, emerald green grass, and churns, men in long white aprons, and drawings (rather than photographs) of mansions in the Old South. Gastronomic sections of magazines often carry articles describing authors’ memories, typically of childhood on the farm. There is a sudden decision to crank out a barrel of ice cream, followed by the calling-in of uncles, cousins, and friends, the bustle of preparations, the sack of salt and the crushing of ice, packing the cream, turning the handle, and the ecstatic moment when the child is finally allowed to lick the dasher. These descriptions often convey basic information to their readers, who seldom know the details of all this folklore, let alone remember such a life. They also address a vague but nonetheless genuine nostalgia for a long-ago country past, with its family companionship and its simple pleasures.
Just when almost all the ice-cream parlours in America had closed, capitulating in part to the take-home ice-cream brick, Walt Disney opened one, in 1955, at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. This parlour was almost certainly the first of its kind: it was built specifically to be “old-fashioned” and advertised itself as such. True, the establishment was a museumizing recreation of an almost dead past, but Walt Disney, in this as in so much else, had his fingers on the mythic pulse of America. Five years later Reuben Mattus, whose story has been repeatedly described as “a capitalist folktale,” began to market Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream.
He packed it in pint-sized round containers, not large bricks, and designed it carefully to satisfy nostalgia and fastidious taste (“an old world delight,” the tub calls it, “especially for the most discerning”). There are no additives, emulsifiers, or stabilizers. It melts; it deteriorates if it is not kept frozen solid. Consumers are advised to let it soften a little (“tempering” it) before eating. It is also much heavier than it needs to be to satisfy the ice-cream standard, largely because it contains 16 per cent butterfat and only 20 per cent air.
On the lid appeared a map of Scandinavia; clean, sober, efficient, and technologically advanced Scandinavia, with a star marking Copenhagen and an arrow pointing impressively towards the star. The name Häagen-Dazs is a complete fiction, designed of course to attract the eye, to be seen rather than said: so much shopping is now self-service that buyers would rarely have to ask for it by name; when it became famous enough to be a household word, the pronunciation of it would look after itself. In any case, Mattus said, “the type of people we were looking for, if they mispronounced it, they’d think they were right and any other way was wrong.” The name is meant to look vaguely but arrogantly Danish, with its double a, its hyphenation, and its impossible zs. The umlaut is especially effective, even though Danish has no umlaut. Mattus had absolutely nothing to do with Scandinavia; his factory was in the Bronx and later in New Jersey.
Mattus started small, and jealously guarded the “family business” image, even as his brilliant idea turned out to be exactly what the public had wanted without being able to formulate its desire. The firm prospered and spawned imitators. Frusen Glädjé, a concept created in direct competition with Mattus by his cousin Edward Lipitz, has a genuinely Swedish name which means “Frozen Delight.” (The umlaut this time is correct, while the final French accent is a purely artistic touch.) Lipitz took the trouble to incorporate his company in Sweden (his tub has a map of part of Scandinavia with Stockholm marked in black), although his factory was in Utica, New York. The new company’s innovation was an improvement in the container’s design: not only small and round like the Häagen-Dazs tub, but in more emphatically smooth white plastic, with a raised rounded lid as well. Frusen Glädjé street-vending booths continue the smooth round white theme. The product aims at an extremely restricted market, describing itself as “A gourmet experience for those who prefer the best.”
The Swiss and the Germans have also found their North American image pressed into the service of ice-cream sales. The allure of imported culinary savoir-faire does not operate everywhere in the United States, however. In the south, Rich ‘n’ Creamy was found to sell far better than a foreign name; as one Texas businessman put it, “We don’t regard it as gourmet, but just a damn good product.”
A totally different approach, “all-American” but laying much greater emphasis even than that of Häagen-Dazs on the nostalgic, the natural, and the rustic, was launched by “two Vermont hippies” in 1978. They called it Ben and Jerry’s Homemade, “the only superpremium [ice cream] you can pronounce.” Marketing strategy at me original store included an old ice-cream churn with salt and ice cranking before the customers, a honky-tonk piano, free movies, and apple-peeling, look-alike, and lip-sync contests. Customers were made to stand in line and wait for the ice cream to be ready. People would become frantic if a batch was sold before they got any: the impression that “everybody wants it so you might not get some” is one of the oldest merchandising devices on earth. When the machine ground to a stop, the first in line got to lick the dasher.
The company started mass-producing. The list of contents on the container was in hand printing, and there was a photograph on it of Ben and Jerry: the personal element enormously enhanced the natural, rural image. A great deal of publicity was generated through an advertising campaign by Ben and Jerry’s Homemade which attacked the bullying methods of “the giant Pillsbury Corporation” when it bought the Häagen-Dazs company; Americans (indeed, people of all cultures) love to see the little guy take on the faceless great. Ben and Jerry’s made millions, but continue to cherish their rustic image: a large new plant in Vermont keeps live dairy cows grazing on the front lawn.
Häagen-Dazs ice cream and its “gourmet” competition contain real cream, skim milk, egg yolks, sugar, and natural flavourings. It really does taste better than milk derivatives with chemicals. It costs more, however, than the difference in price between chemicals and natural whole ingredients should warrant. One business magazine estimated in 1984 that “the manufacturer pays 22 per cent extra, and charges up to 400 per cent more.” Stores which stock it regularly add more or less outrageous mark-ups to the already high price, and people buy it anyway:the “gourmet” ice creams are created for those who wish to pay a little more. People want to buy reality. Into the bargain they also want a certain ambience and connotation, a je-ne-sais-quoi, which is one of the meanings of the word “myth.”
The new ice cream is designed for people who want status; and one of the most effective methods of gaining status is to surround yourself with suggestions that you already have it. An ability to recognize the finest quality just might show that you have been brought up with it. Being prepared to pay for it is an expression of certainty that it is the best; and certainties in matters of taste, provided that other people can be persuaded to defer to them, are part of the insignia of status. Even now, “gourmet” ice cream is marketed as though it is a prestige product for the exclusive and demanding few.
The figures give a very different picture. Since 1980, each of the citizens of the United States has consumed more than fifteen litres (4 gallons) of ice cream per year; the business is worth $6 billion annually. The world’s largest consumers of ice cream are, after the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Britain. The market in all these countries is considered to be saturated, only to be influenced by the growth or diminution of the population. Within that market, “gourmet” ice cream sales are increasing by at least 38 per cent per year. The small heretical group of those who, unlike the great unwashed, “prefer the best,” is fast becoming a very substantial minority. People in the First World feel prosperous and want to experience luxury. ‘They may not be able to afford a Rolls-Royce,” says one market analyst, “but everyone can afford gourmet ice cream.” Others have a different perspective: “Like beer and movies, ice cream booms when people are most troubled. It beats going to your psychiatrist.”
People prepared to pay a high price for ice cream embark on quests for the ideal brand. Food columnists frequently describe long car journeys which they say they undertake in order to buy a particular flavour from the honest little dealer whom they have discovered to possess that ineffable flair. Approached from this angle, finding and eating the very best ice cream can take on some of the mystique of antique collecting or adventure touring, where victory is only to the competent, the passionate, and, above all, the first.
Manufacturers understand this corner of their market. Many are the stories they tell of long and arduous battles to achieve the indisputably “best” ice cream. The founder of a company refused for years to market a strawberry ice cream that does not meet his exacting standards; intense searches and negotiations finally succeeded in running to earth “the world’s finest vanilla” for flavouring ice cream; another expert “spent six months just perfecting his mocha,” or “laboured two years to achieve his real chocolate coating.” Another demonstration of efficiency, commitment, and extravagance in pursuit of the best is the custom of actually mailing by air to one’s friends a package of the “ultimate” ice cream, once it has been found: happy the few who have the means to harness technology in the service of their own taste.
One of the bemusing paradoxes of western society today is the ideal of remaining slim, raised as it has been to dizzying heights just as we increasingly reach for the most expensive ice cream, the heavy one with the most butterfat. “Diet” ice creams are a new area of expansion for the industry, to meet the demands of those who want ice cream, but not to “pay” for it by becoming fat. The new soy-based ice “creams” use vegetable rather than animal fat in order to encourage those worried about cholesterol. Tofutti, for example, is marketed as “the nondairy ice cream substitute.” It was originally designed for Jews keeping kosher dietary laws so that they could eat ice cream at a meal which featured meat. The discovery that a large percentage of people are congenitally lactose intolerant is also encouraging to producers of tofu or bean-curd ice “creams.” The product costs as much as the richest “gourmet” confections: it continues the marvellous marketing bonanza in “lite” foods which we have already looked at, where people happily pay more for less. As one food technologist put it recently, “All the big companies want to buy premium-priced ice cream. But there are far stronger fads for slender waists and longevity,” and he went on to point out that over 57 per cent of North American households now have “calorie conscious” members.
With “diet” ices, food processing comes once again into its own, substituting, subtracting, doctoring, and reflavouring-and all, this time, in the irreproachable name of Health. One recently created brand of torn ice contains the following ingredients: water, sugar, corn oil, corn syrup solids, tofu, salt, citric acid, sorbitol, glycerine, cellulose gel, soy protein, carrageenan, guar gum, locust bean gum, natural flavours, polysorbate 80, coconut oil, microcrystalline cellulose, monoglycerides, diglycerides, and cellulose gum. A call went out recently for food technologists to come up with “a low-calorie bulking agent with pleasant mouthfeel, not needing a caution label for single servings over 15 grams.” All kinds of special intensive sweeteners and low-calorie fats are already on the production lines. “Lite” frozen desserts are expected now to parallel the enormous growth of sales in diet soft drinks. A $10-billion industry is projected for the end of the century.
“Gourmet” ice creams, on the other hand, proudly proclaim their heavy fat content and deliberately distend their prices. As competition among “premium” brands becomes fiercer, we are being offered not only pints of ice cream with silver and gold leaf mixed in at $6 a pint and up, but more and more butterfat, less and less air. Manufacturers have had to stoop to technology to achieve some of the new features, since without the help of some science, less air and more than 17 per cent fat have the effect of inhibiting the strength of flavour upon the tongue. But, as an influential article which appeared in Time magazine put it in 1981, “When people break faith with their diets, as they always do sooner or later, they want to do it with a strumpet certifiably and wickedly luxurious.”
Here we have yet another contradiction contained within the mythology of ice cream. (Contradictory messages do not undermine but rather augment the power of entrenched symbols.) Innocent, childlike ice cream is now an incarnation of voluptuous hedonism. It is rich and costs a lot; the price is a consequence and almost a symbol of its “richness.” It is heavy too—which is exactly what people should try not to be, especially if they are middle class and rich. (The small container should not confuse us here: most people bracketed as “rich” in our society live in households of one or two members; the pint-sized container is designed for them.)
Ice cream, despite its childhood image, is eaten far more now by adults than by children—three times as much more, according to one California study—and more by men than by women. The sexy, voluptuous, even “sinful” image of ice cream has therefore been greatly accentuated lately. Ice cream (cold, milky, breast-shaped) has always been mythologically “female” in northern cultures. For example, the ragged edge which often forms where a round scoop of ice cream rests on the cone is called a “skirt.” A good scooper is trained always to provide “a neat, inviting skirt.” Ice cream can be a sexual symbol of ambiguous gender: in the 1930s starlets licking cones were especially popular as pin-ups. Ice cream has in fact always had adult aspects to its appeal-one thinks of the sophisticated aura of formal, moulded desserts, for example. Stendhal declared ice cream to be worthy of an adult’s attention by remarking, on first tasting it, “What a pity this isn’t a sin.”
A new “confessional” note is struck by ice cream enthusiasts today, who regularly speak as though their favourite dessert is some kind of obsession, even a drug. Their eulogies remind us of Michel Foucault’s theory about sex: modern man is imperiously required to speak about it. “I am an unregenerate ice cream fetishist”; “this decadent delight, my drug of choice”; “when it comes to ice cream, my taste-buds know no shame”; “it is outrageously heavy and rich, sinfully delightful”; “I stood in line for my multi-calorie fix.” There is, in addition, a constantly reiterated insistence on the “satisfaction” which ice cream affords.
At least some of these words, and many more like them, which pour daily into TV copy and magazine columns, are designed of course to make people buy more ice cream: a drug addict, after all, never has enough; he keeps buying. The obsession with the enjoyment of ice cream’s “voluptuousness” sounds as though modern mores have changed, relaxed, become free at last from constraints and from the “uptight” past. But there is a sense in which the substitution of food (and especially food so easily bought) for sex constitutes a false and knowing ingenuousness, and even a flight from the challenges and responsibilities which sex entails. It could be the “puritanical” attitude to sex reasserting itself in a twentieth-century, comfort-obsessed guise: a modern version of the Victorians’ reputedly having found piano legs suggestive.
It is likely that there is as well another truth: that ice cream has become a great indulgence precisely because its “innocent” myth remains intact. It is a safe drug, an antidote to anxiety—to the stress, for example, of having to be thin. We feel that reality is now something for which we have to pay a high price; but we doggedly, even touchingly, wish that reality could be innocent.