Bilderback - No-Churn Ice Cream: Over 100 Simply Delicious No-Machine Frozen Treats

There are a dozen stories about the inception of ice cream. Few are probably true, and even fewer are actually discussing ice cream. Most are really about early snow cones. For instance, it is a common tale that Nero had snow brought into Rome from the mountains by human chain so he could sweeten it with honey and wine. Not ice cream, but at least it sounds fairly palatable. Even earlier during the Tang dynasty, around 3000 BC, Imperial treats of shaved ice dripping with fermented mares milk and camphor were created. (No, really.) This was not really ice cream either, but at least we were adding dairy to the list of ingredients (of a sort). If it is true that Marco Polo brought these treats back to Europe, I find it hard to believe that he would have been taken seriously, especially at the suggestion that Venetians start milking their horses.

While the Italians love to tout the ever-present importance of Catherine de Medici on the history of food (which is, as far as I can tell, wildly exaggerated) it was, in all likelihood, the Italians (probably Sicilians) who first gave us frozen custard, which has come to be known in that region as gelato. It probably did spread to France (though probably not with the Medicis), and followed the French aristocracy to the far reaches of the world, including the new one, with my favorite food-loving president, Thomas Jefferson.

Lots of recipes for ice cream pop up in early American cookbooks, but the majority of early recipes are simply infused cream, sweetened and flavored primarily with fruits, then placed in a larger container of ice and salt and stirred. Cooling down the sweet cream (the richest part of the milk) with ice thickened it. The earliest written recipe for vanilla bean custardbased ice cream was probably brought from France to the United States in the 1780s, but it is unlikely that it was the first recipe of its kind, as the written recipe always follows its widespread use.