This surely belongs in the Arts section. This is another stuff that does not seem to be quite as good as it used to.... mark you, I am making that judgment and I ain't either. Is it probable that more chemicals - or whatever - are use in the making thereof? The stuff my father used to churn in an old Victorian ice bucket job tasted pretty good as far as I can recall. ... and soft scoop at that. Not sure about commercial soft scoop... never buy it as I put the hard stuff in the micro to give it something to think about. My fridge is filled with half cartoons of grandsons' stuff.....icecream with dough balls and similar horrors - oh to introduce them to something really good.... but where in the world?

You are right to be wary of the modern travesty that calls itself 'ice cream'. I buy it to serve to guests but I wouldn't usually eat it myself as the commercial stuff is an industrial concoction of water and chemically-stabilised emulsified vegetable fat, corn starch, dried milk powder and fructose syrup ... with not a single drop of fresh dairy cream at all. A far cry indeed from the delicious frozen-yet-soft, creamy egg-custards, that were served by the Florentine cooks at the marriage of Catherine de' Medici to the Duke of Orléans (later Henry II of France) in 1533 and which immediately became a fashionable hit in the 16th century French court; a popularity that has only increased and become more egalitarian over the subsequent centuries.

The first reference to an ice cream being served in England is of that presented with great ceremony to Charles II during the Garter Feast held at Windsor in 1671. Unfortunately while this solitary ice cream (no one else got one) is recorded in the official diary, there is no mention of the royal reaction to this culinary novelty.

On July 1st, 1808, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra from Godmersham Park, the estate of her rich brother, Edward:

"But in the meantime for Elegance and Ease and Luxury I shall eat Ice and drink French wine, and be above vulgar economy..."

Sorbet and other frozen puds were only for the very rich - you had to have your own "ice house" to store the great blocks of ice needed for the kitchens to be able to make such delights. I wonder where the ice came from in mild winters? Tapeley Park in North Devon has such a house:



Posh kids in the Enid Blyton books I devoured as a child always went for ginger beer and "ices", something which always confused me. They never had ice creams - to call one's ice an ice cream was very working-class and vulgar!

Hocking's ice cream sold around here is made according to a secret, very old, family recipe. It is said to be more or less pure butter and cream, churned up with copious amounts of sugar, a delicious concoction which is then frozen. None of your Mr Whippy rubbish in Devon. You can pay extra for a dollop of clotted cream on top, plus a Cadbury's 99 as garnish -  about 1000 calories, if not more, in one go. It's instant heart attack in a cone.  

PS The family still has the original Hocking's van - dates back to 1928! The van was first used to sell ice cream in 1936 - it was adapted for this purpose by a local garage firm in South Molton:

Temperance wrote:

Sorbet and other frozen puds were only for the very rich - you had to have your own "ice house" to store the great blocks of ice needed for the kitchens to be able to make such delights. I wonder where the ice came from in mild winters?

In the nineteenth century ice was regularly imported from Norway, the Eastern US and Canada. A major player in the ice trade was the Wenham Lake Ice Company who harvested ice from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts and shipped it to the Southern States and to Europe. According to this 1874 advert for their "New Duplex Refrigerator" ice safe, the company could supply ice throughout London for "less than 1d. per lb" or deliver to the rest of the country by regular goods train "without perceptible waste".



The Wenham Lake Ice Company's British supply base and shop opened in 1844 in the Strand, London. As a gimmick every day the store put a newspaper in their front window with a block of ice on top of it so that passers-by could read the print through the ice, thereby demonstrating how clear and pure their ice was.

I want one - the ultimate retro fridge!

Sorbet is not really ice cream, as no dairy is used to make it. Our modern European sorbet was originally Eastern sherbet, I think? Sorbet, unlike ice cream, was never served as a pud either, being offered between courses to "refresh the palate". Proper sherbet was not the sugary concoction we used to suck up through a liquorice straw as children -  the highly addictive Barratt's Sherbet Fountain (the mind boggles as to what it must have done to our teeth and to our insulin levels), nor the equally addictive sugary powder they put in sherbet lemons, but was a delicious, cooling, iced preparation, served either as a well-chilled drink, or as a frozen fruity mixture partly solidified, enjoyed as a refreshing treat that one scooped out of a dish with a special spoon. I think it originated in 16th century India, but was popular everywhere in the East. Ali Pasha tried to seduce Byron (or so Byron claimed) by feeding him with almonds and sherbet or sharbat. One sharbat recorded in the 19th-century cookbook by Friedrich Unger is called "gülgülü tiryaki şerbet" which means "pink opium-eater's sherbet".  Sounds very nice, if a little decadent. Not sure if it was the opium or the sherbet that was pink - or, indeed, the opium-eater him(or her)self.

Is that really an ice cream cone the gentleman is holding? I thought cones were not used for ice cream until the 20th century. The actual ice cream looks like a lovely rich raspberry ripple.

My favourite ice cream quotation is from Voltaire, who is supposed to have remarked: "Ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal."

Did Voltaire really say that, or is it just "attributed"? Sounds more like Oscar Wilde to me.

A culinary abomination that we all loved when we were students: the infamous BirdsEye Arctic Roll. I once ate a whole Arctic Roll in one go - but I was very young and very drunk. As excess went in the 1970s, it was not too awful a thing to have done. Notice the little cluster of raspberries on the plate - an attempt to make the re-introduced frozen roll look sort of healthy.

Re Sharbet - I was once expected to  make a couple of gallons of this. Fortunately, house guests of all ages piled into the kitchen and kept adding stuff  they had brought along into the simmering pool- I recall limes, cardomon seeds, loads of sugar and a kings ransom in saffron with flaked  pistachio  and almonds and some rose water being chucked into the huge pot. All I did really was provide the pre boiled water and oodles of fridge space to chill jugs of it........ much harder than chucking stuff into a pot, I might say.  Then the casual request to suddenly produced 50 sharbet glasses to serve it in  was another shock to further  highlight my hostess inadequacies. But then they could never do a Sunday roast...... back to the ice cream.
Does anyone else recall those wafer jobs where you had two wafers about a slab of Walls or Lyons stuff..... and you had to  quickly lick it round the edges to stop it going down your sleeve?  Then came tubs and little flat wooden spoons........and I sure it all used to taste better........no handwashing nonsense in all of that, of course.

The invention of light biscuity wafer cones for serving individual ice creams is usually credited to the Victorian celebrity cook Mrs. Agnes Bertha Marshall after she described making them in her 'The Book of Ices' (1885). However miniature wafer cones and flat wafer biscuits had already been described in 'The Modern Cook' (1846) by Charles Elme Francatelli: he had been Queen Victoria's cook until he once imbibed too much cooking sherry, got drunk, hit a maid and so was promptly dismissed from the royal service. Francatelli had also suggested using biscuity wafer decorations on grand centre-table ice deserts, such as in his creation of Chesterfield Pudding, which was a tall conical ice cream sculpture, garnished around the base with waffles that could be used to scoop up the ice cream - the name was supposedly inspired by the famously twisted spire of Chesterfield parish church in Derbyshire.

   

From 'A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes' by Charles Elmé Francatelli (1852):

Iced Pudding, à la Chesterfield.

Grate one pound of pine-apple into a basin, add this to eight yolks of eggs, one pint and a half of boiled cream, one pound of sugar, and a very little salt; stir the whole together in a stewpan over a stove fire until the custard begins to thicken; then pass it through a tammy, by rubbing with two wooden spoons, in the same manner as for a puree, in order to force the pineapple through the tammy. This custard must now be iced in the usual manner, and put into a mould of the shape represented in the annexed wood-cut [above]; and in the centre of the iced cream, some Macedoine ice of red fruits, consisting of cherries, currants, strawberries and raspberries in a cherry-water ice, must be introduced; cover the whole in with the lid, then immerse the pudding in rough ice in the usual way, and keep it in a cool place until wanted.

When about to send the pudding to table, turn it out of the mould on to its dish, ornament the dish with a kind of drooping feather, formed with green angelica cut in strips, and arranged as represented in the wood-cut; garnish the base with small gauffres, filled with some of the iced cream reserved for the purpose, [my emphasis] place a straw berry on the top of each, and serve.

MM wrote:

From 'A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes' by Charles Elmé Francatelli (1846)...

Heavens - if that recipe is "plain" cooking for the lower orders, what would Francatelli's idea of fancy cooking for the aristocracy be like? The ingredients for his iced pudding seem terribly extravagant and surely suggest his concoction would be far too expensive for a "working class" wife to rustle up for her husband after he had endured a long, hard day in the fields or down the mine! I'm sure he would want a proper pie or pudding with hot custard!

Well as I said Charles Elmé Francatelli - an Italian by birth and French trained - had been, albeit fairly briefly, Queen Victoria's chef de cuisine at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, so he was hardly a simple jobbing cook. After being sacked from royal service he turned to writing popular cookbooks, but despite what the titles suggest these were, as you have observed, not really aimed at the impoverished, hard-working lower classes, but rather at the successful and comfortably affluent middle classes, and especially those who were aspiring to move still further up the social ladder. Francatelli ended up as chef of the Reform Club, which again despite its name, was by the latter part of the nineteenth century a solid, traditionalist pillar of the political establishment.

Temperance wrote:

Is that really an ice cream cone the gentleman is holding?

I suspect he might be enjoying a posset and that he's sucking on the drinking pipe or the spoon that came with it. A posset was a hot drink made of milk or cream curdled with wine or ale, sweetened with sugar and often spiced, which was whipped together and then allowed to separate in the glass. The liquid portion underneath (containing most of the alcohol) was sucked up with a straw while the creamy froth on the top was eaten with a spoon. Although possets (and the related, thicker, creamier syllabub) were common drinks/desserts since the mid-16th century, they became especially popular in England from about the mid 18th century until the first few decades of the 19th century - and by the clothes depicted by John-James Chalon (1778–1854) in the scene above it would appear to be set in the early 19th century. Posset was usually served in a deep cup often with a built in spout (so looking like a small teapot but with the handle on the side) or in a tall glass with a separate drinking tube to enable one to suck up the alcoholic liquid from beneath the creamy foam on the top, which here appears to have been whipped up into a cone and so resembles an ice cream cornet. Anyway that seems to me to be what is depicted in Chalon's print of 'Le Café'.

Ah - that makes complete sense. Thank you, MM. I did wonder what the gentleman was holding - I thought it was perhaps a kind of spoon for his ice, as simply licking a cone would have been the height of vulgarity! A drinking pipe for his posset sounds very genteel - so long as he didn't slurp on it! A sort of early straw, I suppose? Very interesting.

Didn't Lady Macbeth drug Duncan's guards with a poisoned posset?

Here are a posset cup and glass, both with built in drinking spouts but I expect most regular establishments just used ordinary tall glasses, not the least because I would imagine the delicate spouts tended to get broken off.

     

Meles meles wrote:

Didn't Lady Macbeth drug Duncan's guards with a poisoned posset?

Here are a posset cup and glass, both with built in drinking spouts but I expect most regular establishments just used ordinary tall glasses, not the least because I would imagine the delicate spouts tended to get broken off.

     

She did indeed, commenting gleefully to the audience: "I have drugg'd their possets/That Death and Nature do contend about them/Whether they live or die." Possets were a popular bedtime drink in the 16th/17th century - hot milk mixed with some strong alcohol to induce sleep. Really good way of doping people too - Thomas Middleton, in his play The Witch (a melodrama to rival anything on Netflix), copies Shakespeare and also has the servants drugged with a laced posset: "For the maideservants and the girles o' the house/I spic'd them lately with a drowsie posset." I wonder if "to spice" someone was Jacobean slang for "to drug"?

Syllabubs were always served chilled though - surely the creamy forerunners of ice cream itself? Very rich and alcoholic and usually offered in lovely glass dishes. Possets, being hot drinks, were surely never served in anything like glass that could crack easily? It surprised me that your picture shows a glass posset cup. But then mulled wine in often served in glass. Just not too hot, I suppose. The spouted vessels at least could stand the heat - a pot, like a teapot, surely a better option - even if the spouts did occasionally get broken?

Here are two recipes for chilled syllabub.


To make a very fine Sillibub
Take one Quart of Cream, one Pint and an half of Wine or Sack, the Juice of two Limons with some of the Pill, and a Branch of Rosemary, sweeten it very well, then put a little of this Liquor, and a little of the Cream into a Basin, beat them till it froth, put that Froth into the Sillibub pot, and so do till the Cream and Wine be done, then cover it close, and set it in a cool Cellar for twelve hours, then eat it.

From Hannah Wooley The Queen-like Closet (London:1674)

To make whipt syllabubs
Take a quart of thick cream, and half a pint of sack, the juice of two Seville oranges, or lemons; grate in the peel of two lemons; half a pound of double-refined sugar, pour it into a broad earthen pan, and whisk it well; but first sweeten some red wine, or sack, and fill your glasses as full as you chuse; then as the froth rises take it off with a spoon, and lay it carefully into your glasses, till they are as full as it will hold.

From Charles Carter The London and Country Cook (London: 1749)

I listened to a radio interview some years ago where someone* who was originally from a family that made ice cream said that they used to crush egg shells into the mix so they could say 'made with egg'.

There are a couple of places in my town where you can get nice (purchased) ice cream - a branch of the Thornton chain and a traditional type sweet shop that sells some locally made ice cream.

* It's too long ago for me to be able to quote chapter and verse, sorry.  I also apologise that this is a comedown after the descriptions of the possets.

In my previous life before the pandemic, I used to go shopping in Exeter quite regularly, and I always treated myself to a Thornton's ice cream from their Chocolate Cabin on the High Street. They have stopped trading now, I believe, except for actual chocolate selections online, so that's another little indulgence gone for good. I suppose their ice cream was a ghastly chemical mix, but it was a guilty pleasure. I favoured a double scoop of what was hopefully labelled "blackcurrant". I must admit it was rather an alarming shade of lurid purple.

These were a staple of a visit to the cinema:

The Ice Cream Sundae came about when a number of US States passed laws forbidding the sale of soda on Sundays. Enterprising soda shop owners replaced the soda in their ice cream sodas with syrup to produce the sundae. There are a number of rival claimants as to who was first, with towns in Wisconsin, Illinois and New York state claiming the honour.


Ithaca Daily Journal 28 May 1892:

Temperance wrote:

I want one - the ultimate retro fridge!

How about an antique ice cream maker:



The cream, milk, sugar and eggs etc go into the metal churn which in turn is placed into the wooden bucket packed with ice and salt. The salt is crucial for keeping the ice at its lowest possible temperature. The crank is then fixed on top to churn the mixture:



Incidentally, 'modern' hand-cranked, ice-cream makers will still have an antique or old-world look because wood is still considered the best material for the bucket in order the insulate the salty ice and concentrate its coldness onto the metal churn.

In eighteenth century France, ice cream, particularly when formed into a ball, disk or other more-or-less solid shape, was often called fromage glacé (literally iced cheese) perhaps because, like cheese, it was basically solidified milk although made solid by freezing rather than being pressed, set and cured (and at a time before mechanical refrigeration when the only culinary thing ever being frozen was ice cream). Ice creams were also sometimes moulded to shape using fancy cheese moulds, although later special hinged ice cream moulds were manufactured featuring animals, plants, heraldic devices or the faces of famous people. Note also that the term 'fromage' can still refer to anything with a soft creamy/cheesey consistency (eg fromage de tête which is basically brawn, a type of meat pâté).

There again 18th century ice creams were not limited to simple fruit flavours and there are indeed recipes for cheese-flavoured ice creams, such as this one from Frederick Nutt's 'The Complete Confectioner: or, The whole art of confectionary made easy' London, 1789. (Frederick Nutt had been apprenticed to the Italian, Domenico Negri, whose 'Pot and Pineapple' confectioner's shop in London's Berkeley Square, was, during the 1750s and 60s, one of the first to popularise ice cream in England).

No. 150. Parmasan Cheese Ice Cream.
TAKE six eggs, half a pint of syrup, and a pint of cream; put them into a stewpan and boil them until it begins to thicken; then rasp three ounces of Parma-san cheese, mix and pass them through a sieve, and freeze it.

Not having a sweet tooth that sounds quite tasty to me, as do his biscuit ice cream (no.131) his brown bread ice cream (no.133), his ginger ice cream (no.135) and his burnt filbert ice cream (no.144) ... all indeed sounding just like the sort of innovative 'nouveau cuisine' flavours one might get in a modern, very fancy restaurant.

I am pretty sure we had an earlier thread mentioning ice-cream, because I remember being surprised that ice-cream in England came via Italian salespeople. 
I have never been fond of ice-cream, not liking sweet food much (especially when I was a child), or extremes of temperature in food. And ice-creams nowadays, at least in NZ, are huge, so I just have a lick or two of a child's one (if they can be persuaded to give that to me). I don't remember the first time I had an ice-cream - it was probably just as a 'treat' since we didn't have a freezer at home and we got our groceries delivered and I doubt if the delivery van had a freezing compartment either.

I do remember the first time I had yogurt though: I was at university and we used to go from our flat for a walk on Sundays and on one of these outings we stopped and got a pottle of yogurt. Can't remember whether I liked it or not; I do now (especially with some caramel sauce on it).

We did somewhere here discuss ice cream because I remember the mention of hokey-pokey men. Interesting, Caro, that you say "a pottle of yogurt" ... it's good to see old Imperial units of measure still in use, but that's a serious fondness for yogurt you had if just on a whim you bought half a gallon of the stuff.  

I was going to ask what a "pottle" was -  it's a lovely word!

I regularly buy a kilogram of the delicious Yeo Valley natural live yogurt. I am trying to work out what that is in pottles:

1 pottle = 4 pints                  
1kg= 2.2lbs=4.4 pints       x     WRONG! A pint is a pound the whole world round.

Try again:

1 pottle = 4 pints

1kg = 2.2lbs = 2 and a bit pints

1kg = roughly a demi-pottle

So my big tub is half a pottle. Imperial v. metric  is very odd - is yogurt classified as sugar or water (liquid)? I shall give up and use the pottle to kilo converter online thingy. It has just asked me if I mean a "bottle". No, I mean a "pottle".

Google has answered:

How many kilo g in 1 pottle? The answer is 1.8927059. We assume you are converting between kilogram [water] and pottle [liquid].

I am totally confused. It's a lot of yogurt anyway. I hate maths.

I couldn't eat a whole kilo tub in one go, but could easily manage half a tub , or a hemi-demi-semi-pottle or thereabouts. The  Yeo Valley yogurt, being sugar-free and full of the excellent bifidobacterium and streptococcus thermophilus, is very good for you. The latter yogurt bug sounds a bit dodgy - as if you would develop a sore throat if you ate a whole pottle of the stuff.





EDIT: You can now buy "kerned" yogurt also by the half-pottle. Kerning is another a total mystery. I looked it up:

Yeo Valley has launched its thickest yogurt ever, kerned in Somerset and in 100% recycled and recyclable pots. Kerned is an old Somerset word – it means thickened. The Super Thick Kerned Yogurt is naturally high in protein and low in sugar and fat due to the repeated straining process.

Triceratops wrote:

These were a staple of a visit to the cinema:

This was a question on "Brian of Britain" - it seems the Americans call / used to call that an "Eskimo pie"

In New Zealand/Aotearoa 'pottle' is used mainly for small plastic containers, like the yogurt (I can't think of another word than pottle for this) container you give a child for afternoon tea. About 150gms. You get 6 pottles in a pack.

Hence in NZ common parlance a "pottle" is just a diminutive of pot; a small pot in other words. I like it and might well adopt it myself. It's nice to see an old obsolete English measurement name being kept in use, even if inexactly and just colloquially (rather like "teaspoon", "cup", "wine glass" measures, and indeed "barrel" and "bushell" etc, which while having exact definitions are also used informally or figuratively).

Temperance wrote:

I regularly buy a kilogram of the delicious Yeo Valley natural live yogurt. I am trying to work out what that is in pottles ..... A pint is a pound the whole world round.

I don't recall that one: i remember "a litre of water's a pint and three-quarters", and, "two and a quarter pounds of jam, weigh about a kilogram".

In the Imperial system a gallon of water (that's an English gallon not a US gallon) was defined as weighing exactly 10 lbs (at standard temperature and pressure) so a pottle of water (half a gallon) weighs 5 lbs. But yoghurt is denser than water, with a specific gravity of about 1.04 (depending on the yoghurt). Hence a pottle of yoghurt would weigh 5 lbs x 1.04, that is 5.2 lbs, or in metric, 2.359 kg. Conversely 1kg of yoghurt would fill ¹/_2.359 or 0.424 pottles. I think.

MM wrote:

But yoghurt is denser than water, with a specific gravity of about 1.04 (depending on the yoghurt).

It's all so confusing - but I still think pottle is a lovely word and I shall use it frequently in future.

I wonder what my specific gravity is after bingeing on a 500 gram tub (0.212 pottles) of Yeogurt?

I had a discussion yesterday about making frozen yogurt (is is yoghurt or yogurt?) I was told simply to bung a demi-pottle into the freezer and it would turn out OK. But the storage instructions on the tub quite clearly state "not suitable for freezing! I wonder if you actually need something similar to an ice-cream-making machine. My friend makes al sorts of clever frozen offerings - gin ice lollies and such, but I have never wanted to risk expensive alcoholic disasters.

Advice, MM?

I'll join Meles and Temp in admiring the word 'pottle' and thanking Caro and our Antipodean cousins for keeping it alive. I hadn't heard of it either but I like it a lot. Whether it represents an exact volume or is just used figuratively, it's certainly in need of revival here 'Up-Over'.

Rather than plastic pottles, however, individual ice creams and yoghurts used to routinely come in waxed paper/cardboard cartons with wooden spoons/spatulas attached. It seems that over the last 40 years we've come full circle. The smarter producers and outlets are now promoting their biodegradable containers and implements as positive selling points.



(This old American container gives its quantity as 5 fluid ounces. Definitely not a pottle - but certainly a pottle.)  

I'm reminded of the story from the 1970s when the East German car manufacturer Trabant commissioned a top Parisian advertising agency to try to improve the car's image, increase sales abroad and help with the country's desperate balance of payments deficit. The democratic republic's economy was so straitened at the time that the panels on the little cars weren't made from metal or even fibreglass but rather comprised treated, hardened and coated papier-mâché. The advertising executives were taken on a tour of the factory at Zwickau in Saxony and out on test drives with new models of the car and then given a studio in which to work on the campaign. At the end of the week the Trabant bigwigs dropped in to see how they were getting on:

"Well? Have you thought of any good slogans etc?"

The reply came back:

"Oui - bien sûr. 'Carton de fromage blanc!'"



(A classy image of the Trabant 601 intended for international use.)