What a pity it isn't illegal . . . Regency Ice Cream.

Ice cream is exquisite. 
What a pity it isn't illegal. 
~Voltaire

Joanna here, ruminating on Regency ice cream.
 
There's a certain perversity to Mother Nature. 

Take  strawberry ice cream. 
Here we have an obvious Good Thing.  Combine fresh strawberries, something sweet, and milk.  Cradle the mixture in ice and harden it. 
Voilà -- you're going to end up with something tasty.

But it's not so straightforward. 

 

When you've got the ice handy --  when the wind is howling through the shutters and there's icicles on the eaves, you are shivering in your fur-lined mukluks, without strawberries, and without milk   because the cow is dry, it being -- well -- the dead of winter, and she's huddled in the hut with you trying to eat the mattresses.  Nobody's in the mood for a frozen desert. 

On the other hand, when strawberries are springing up red and juicy about the lilting fields, just begging for poets to compare them to some young girl's lips, the nearest actual ice is at a five-thousand-foot elevation. 

In the ancient world, if you happened to have teams of runners fetching snow from distant mountain peaks -- who doesn't? -- you could bring together the disparate elements of summer and winter.  The Chinese, millennia ago, made a dish of sweetened, flavored milk and rice hardened by packing it in snow. 

Nero, who is famous for  a number of indulgences, indulged in ice cream.

The Persians enjoyed their complicated fruit drinks cooled with snow from Mount Damavand.  Sort of a Twelfth Century smoothie.  
 
I'll just interject an author personal note here. 
I lived for a while at the foot of picturesque, snow-capped Mount Damavand and used to come out my front door in the morning and watch the goat boys driving their particolored herds down the dusty trails of the mountain side. 
The Persian word for snow is 'barf'. 

The story of Regency ice cream is not so much 'when ice cream came to Europe' or 'who invented it up' -- I'd argue the Cro-Magnons had the concept -- it's about how ice cream stopped being the Neiman Marcus conspicuous consumption of the fabulously powerful and slid down the social scale till ordinary folk could have a bite.

It's all about the ice.
The technology that brought ice cream to the Georgian and Regency table was  the ice house. 

An icehouse is a glorified root cellar.  A Schwarzenegger of a root cellar.  It was an underground excavation lined with brick or stone and insulated with boards and straw. 

 

 

 

 

The bottom curved to hold ice melt.  The roof was domed.  The door typically faced north.  Strategically planted trees provided shade. 

In the dead of winter, men cut blocks of ice from nearby lakes and  ponds,  brought it back in horse-drawn carts and stacked the great blocks  inside.  Ice  stayed snug, frozen through the height of the summer. 

These ice houses could be huge.  The interior of one Georgian ice house,  Parlington Hall in Yorkshire, measured sixteen feet in diameter by twenty feet deep.  And they could be efficient.  In the warm climate of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson noted that his ice supply at Monticello could last till October. 

It was a miracle of rare device,
a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The idea of the ice house probably piggybacked home with English travelers to Italy.  It went viral in England in the mid Seventeenth Century.  In 1682, Charles II had his own ice house built in St. James park.  Owners of the great estates all climbed onto the ice house bandwagon.  Ice cream became almost democratic. 

 Well . . . maybe not quite for the masses just yet.  In the early 19th Century ice cream was still a rich man's treat.  In 1808, when Jane Austen went to stay with her rich brother Edward, who had an ice house at his home Godmersham in Kent, she could write her sister Cassandra;
 "In the meantime, for elegance and ease and luxury, the Hattons and Milles’ dine here to-day, and I shall eat ices and drink French wine, and be above vulgar economy."
 
In town, shops like Negri’s, (which became  Gunter's in 1799,) at the Sign of the Pineapple in Berkeley Square and dozens of confectioners along Bond Street served ice creams and water ices.  In Paris, fashionable Parisians ate ices in cafés at the Rodeo Drive of the day, the Palais Royale. 
  When it didn't snow, or just to keep up with demand, London imported ice. 

Two or three mild winters, of late, in succession, have brought a new article of foreign trade into England.  Ice, for the use of the confectioners, comes now to us all the way from Norway  . . .

This imported ice, (jealous of sunshine) is foremost in our streets now of mornings, moving along, in huge cart-loads, from the below-bridge wharfs ; and looking, as it lies in bulk, like so much conglutinated Epsom salts.
Blackwood's Magazine in 1823

I now want to call someone a conglutinated Epsom salt, but I doubt I will have the opportunity.

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here's a 1769 recipe for making ice cream.  Apricot ice cream:
 
Pare, stone and scald twelve ripe Apricots,
 beat them fine in a Marble  Mortar,
put to them six Ounces of double refined Sugar, a Pint of scalding Cream, work it through a Hair Sieve, put it into a Tin that has a close Cover, set it in a Tub of Ice broken small, and a large Quantity of Salt put amongst it,
when you see your Cream grow thick round the Edges of your Tin, stir it and set it in again ’till it all grows quite thick,
when your Cream is all Froze up, take it out of your Tin, and put it in the Mould you intend it to be turned out of.
The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffald

The freezing apparatus looked something like this.  The ice that  chilled the ice cream was mixed with salt to make it colder and put in an outer tub.  The salt was used because a brine of salt water can reach a colder temperature than plain water.   An inner container, called a sabotiere, held the ice cream mixture.  That sabotiere might be made of pewter or -- oh dear -- lead.  A sort of scraper moved the newly formed ice crystals from the inner wall of the sabotiere.  

 

Ice cream was originally called 'iced cream'.  After the 1770s, the words, 'ice cream', began to appear.  That's the term that gradually took over.  A 'water ice' was what we'd now call a sherbet or Italian ice.
Just to be confusing, 'sherbet', in this period, meant a sweetened, dilute fruit drink. 

How was ice cream served?

Soft ice cream might be placed in a mold, as the recipe above suggests, hardened, and turned out onto a plate.  Or the ice cream at a formal dinner might be put into a special ice cream server, a seau à glace. 

This was a three-piece rig, some of them just beautifully decorated.  The outer bowl held the ice, probably salted.  An inner bowl containing the actual ice cream sits within that.  Then the lid comes down over the ice cream.  You then pile a tasteful collection of ice cubes on the lid to chill the last side of the ice cream.   
 
 
At Gunter's Tea Shop or in a Paris Café, our Georgian or Regency heroine licked her ice cream mounded up in a cone-shaped glass, or ate it more delicately with a little spoon, from glass or from  a tasse à glace -- an ice cream cup -- like those Sèvres cups pictured above.  

.
 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this last picture, we see the waiter with a menu card . . . doubtless listing all the sorts of ice cream on offer.

Sometimes, one over-indulges.  For instance, from Adelaide and Theodore, a novel  by Genlis, in 1796:

Adelaide was silent and melancholy; I asked her the reason of it; she told me she had a pain in her head. It is, says I, because you have surfeited yourself.
 

—Me, mamma ?

—Yes; you have eat ten tartlets, six biscuits, and taken two glasses of ice cream, therefore it is not at all surprising that you should be sick.

 

The temperature of ice cream would have been a novelty and a shock in an era without refrigerators and freezers.  Here's a caricature of a vulgar cockney's first encounter with ice cream.  It's an exaggeration, of course . . .

"Lauk ! its all in a freezed lump, I declare,'' cried she, directing a most immoderate spoonful into her gaping mouth, with the intention of setting both jaws to work, when giving a violent shriek, she dropped the glass, which broke in a thousand shivers; and, with a sudden effort, spit out the offending mouthful plump on the counter.
. . .
"'Drot all ice-creams, say I. How could you be such an ignorant creature to persuade me to eat such stuff . . . I'll tell ye what, my girl, (turning to the shop-woman) that there sort of stuff ought to be cried down. It may be a fashionable way of freezing your quality folks to death, but I'd sooner be burnt up alive in a brandy cag."

That great idea, the ice cream cone, is probably a late Victorian invention.  There's no written reference to waffle cookies being used to serve ice cream before the 1880s.  The ice cream fork, not such a great idea, is a strange spork-like thingum that marches in the array of Victorian silverware.  It also seems Victorian.  At least, I can't find a Regency reference.  


Here's the first American recipe for ice cream, in Thomas Jefferson's handwriting.  He brought it back from France.  It calls for vanilla bean, not available in America at that time.  He used to cajole them from friends traveling to Europe.

Ice Cream.
2. bottles of good cream.
6. yolks of eggs.
1/2 lb. sugar

Just a lovely start to a recipe, IMHO.

 

Photocredits: The icehouse at Tapeley Gardens is cc attrib Rog Frost.  The top left and top right seaux à glace and the six ice cream cups are copyright Ivan Day, historic foods. com .  Sorbetiere from Joseph Giller.

 

For me, the ultimate ice cream is pistachio.  From a sugar cone.  Outside under a blue sky full of sun.  I feel quite certain Jane Austen would agree with me.

What's your significant ice cream, and what literary character do you share it with?   
 

One person in the comment trail will win a copy of Forbidden Rose or the trade edition of Spymaster's Lady, your choice. 

Comments

[Kim Colby]

What a facinating article.

How hard, to choose a favourite ice cream..... back home in NZ we have Boysenberry Ripple, (vanilla with BIG swirls of boysenberry through it), it's to die for but I haven't seen anything close here in the U.S. Caramel would be my very close second.....yum!! I can't be doing with hard things in my ice cream, like choc chips, nuts etc. For me it's all about letting it melt in your mouth and savouring it as it slides down your throat....not having to chew....lol.

[Janga]

What a great blog! I'm amazed at how similar the "freezing apparatus" is to the hand-turned freezers of my childhood.

Does Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream" count as a charater? As is so often true for me with Stevens, I disagree with the idea but love the language. And as any kid with an ice cream cone knows, eating ice cream is a sensuous experience. I'm glad I live in a age when that sensuous experience is available to us peasants. I'll take Blue Belle Pecan Pralines 'n Cream.

[Linda Banche]

Oh, wow, can I have some? I love that first picture, but if I ate it, I probably wouldn't be able to move for a week. But I'd be happy. *g*

[CrystalGB]

Great post. My choice is butter pecan. Love it.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Kim --

And yet I am quite sure we have boysenberries in the US.

I like crunchy in the ice cream myself. Thus the pistachio.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Crystal GB --

My husband loves butter pecan.

I think Dickens would have liked butter pecan. I'm not sure why I am convinced of this . . .

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Janga --

Pralines appeal to me in any form. Yum.

I love Stevens. "I think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great" is one of my favorite poems.

I don't know why, but I feel as if Stevens would have been a fan of French Vanilla.

[Kat]

I must comment that Europeans are still stingy with their ice. If you ask for ice with your drink they give you one or two cubes. Why do they drink everything warm?
To make a rather difficult choice as I have rarely meant an Ice Cream that disagreed with me I will go with the always-delicious butter pecan.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Linda --

That's a pretty decadent picture, isn't it? -- that strawberry and ice cream melange up top.

From period recipes, it looks as if Regency ice cream -- we see it further down the page -- was sweeter and more intensely flavored than modern ice cream. Probably with higher cream content as well.

See how small the portions are in the period prints? That's maybe a third of a cup of ice cream.

And look how these elegant ladies picked up the glass and licked the ice cream off. So unrestrained and sensual.

[Hope Tarr]

Delicious post. Mine is rum raisin--and I never share. ;)

[Cecilia Grant]

What an enjoyable little lesson this was :)

In New England, where I used to live, coffee is the fourth staple flavor, right up there with chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. And coffee ice cream with chunks of things in it is to die for. I still pine for coffee with Oreo cookie chunks.

Not sure what literary figure I could assign it to, though. Jo March, maybe?

Okay, off to remove a passing mention of sherbet from the current MS...

[deniz]

What a gorgeous post Jo. I'm all hungry for ice cream now. My favourite is mint chocolate chunk on a sugar cone. I have no idea which literary character might enjoy mint, however. Hmmm...
Adeleide sounds like she has an ice cream headache :-)

[Susan Wilbanks]

In Philadelphia they still call Italian ices water ice--and reading your post the name finally made sense to me.

I had a delicious watermelon water ice last time I was back in Philly, and I'm with Hope. I wouldn't share. :-)

[theo]

You made me laugh! What a great post. Barf? And the cow trying to eat the mattresses... LOL!

Homemade brand Cookies and Cream ice cream is to die for! It's the creamiest, richest I've ever had.

I'd have liked to be there though when Giles handed Lady Elinore her brown bread ice and she ate that first spoonful...

[Vivian]

Mmmmm, makes me recall making ice cream as a kid in Wisconsin, scooping snow up from the terrace and mixing it with rock salt. We made chocolate ice cream and pineapple ice cream. My favorite, though? I have to go with real Italian raspberry gelato eaten in front of the Pantheon.

[Vivian]

PS--I missed the literary connection...I'd share with Keats in exchange for an ode to ice cream.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Kat --

I've noticed ice is at a premium in Europe.

I wonder if this is a holdover from the days when ice was delivered by wagon and was not guaranteed to be 'clean'. You'd use this ice to cool the refigerator and your bottled water or your bottled drinks -- but you wouldn't put that ice in the drinks themselves.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Hope --

I've never had rum raisin ice cream. So many ice creams, so little time.

I think Dylan Thomas would have liked rum raisin.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Cecilia Grant --

I looked up sorbet in googlebooks and that doesn't seem to work either. It's still a drink at this time.

I love coffee ice cream.

London used to buy ice from New England. They'd bring it in by ship from Maine and Massachusettes. This started within the Regency period, I'm pretty sure, and the trade just got stronger and stronger into Victorian times.

New England also shipped ice to India.

I find this funny -- shipping ice and snow halfway round the world. Me sitting here drinking water shipped in from France or Italy.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Deniz --

I'd imagine a big deterrent to eating ice cream would be poor condition of the Regency teeth.

I honestly don't know what the 'state of the mouth' was. This was prior to sugar and modern tooth decay.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Susan W --

There is a lively dispute as to who came up with what ice cream innovation -- the US or England.

The Italians lay claim to the 'water ice' though.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Theo --

Y'know, there are surprisingly few references to ice cream in the great works of literature.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness and ice cream, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . . "

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of ice cream.”

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Vivian --

Yes. I want to go to Italy and eat Gelato. Any flavour, though raspberry is good.

And maybe Florence.

[Louis]

I remember cranking the ice cream maker as a kid...now all I do is plug in the motor to an outlet.

Strawberry is my favorite.

[Christine]

Mmmmm delicious article! It makes me rethink the old saying "he could sell ice to Eskimos."

My choice would be peppermint stick ice cream (why oh why does Ghiradelli and other companies think people only want to eat this flavor at Holiday Time?) I would share mine with Charles Dickens and Laura Ingalls(Wilder) and we would discuss the different holiday traditions on the US frontier vs. London in the 19th century as this seems an era appropriate treat. Perhaps we would go wild and put chocolate sauce on top!

[Patricia Rice]

You always have such intriguing blogs, Joanna! Although I do have to worry about all those poor servants chipping away at huge blocks of ice to fill those little ice cream saucers.

Haagen-daz raspberry white chocolate, hands down!

[Maureen]

What an interesting post. It really must have been a treat for people in the Regency time. For me, vanilla fudge is my favorite.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Louis --

We had handcranked ice cream too, when I was a kid. We made peppermint ice cream a lot.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Christine --

I do seem to remember there is ice cream in Laura Ingalls Wilder. Was it at a county fair? I should have looked in there for a quote.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Pat --

I like to think the servants got their own taste of all these treats before they were sent upstairs.

I'm probably fooling myself . . .

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Maureen --

It would have been a very sweet treat indeed, I should think. The apricot ice cream is 6 oz sugar to 1 pint cream. Doesn't that seem a lot to you?

We do hear about the rich folks of the Regency period just loving sweets.

[LouisaCornell]

Fascinating post, Joanna, and delicious too!

I love Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip. I think Pip from Great Expectations might enjoy it so long as he didn't have to eat it with decaying wedding cake!

Another favorite is Haagen Daas Dark Double Dutch Chocolate. I think Roderick Usher from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher might like it. Dark, decadent and apt to drive one mad!

I think my favorite ice cream of all would have to be the homemade peach ice cream we made every summer when I was a girl. It was a tradition in my mother's family and we made it any time any of her family came to visit. We cousins all clamored to have our turn at the crank.

I think Benjy Compson from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury would love it.

[Chelsea B.]

This post made me crave icecream....and of course we have everything but ;-)As to my favorite, I would have to stick with the classic chocolate :-)

[Julee Johnson-Tate]

Really interesting article, thanks! My favorite is Baskin Robbins World Class Chocolate or anything with dark chocolate in it (local brands of Denali Moose Tracks). I can imagine what a complete and total decandance an ice would be and I always enjoyed the trips to get one in the Regencies I read. I can see where dentistry would be an issue, though.

[alison]

What a fabulous post! My absolute top ice-cream memory isn't actually ice-cream as such, it was an ice pop, but I've remembered it with absolute clarity for thirty years. I was on a school exchange trip in Germany and the girls' mother bought us ice pops. It was the most delicious thing I had tasted, ever, and I asked what it was. They said the fruit was cujamara (I don't know if I'm spelling it right) but no-one knew what the English name for it was. It took years for me to find out it was passion fruit, with the wrinkly purple skin and pulp inside.I can still taste it, she said, licking her lips dreamily...

[Darlene Marshall]

What a wonderful article! Thanks for sharing this. Hmmm...my favorite ice cream? Well, it has to be super fresh with pure ingredients to tempt me. I like the local company Sweet Dreams, and some of their more exotic flavors--Cardamon, Chile Chocolate, Ginger Spice, pretty much whatever's on tap that day.

[Aislinn]

When I was young, my mother used to get her milk from a real dairy, rather than the supermarket. They had a sort of ice cream I've never seen anywhere else, and it was pure heaven.

Coconut chocolate chip.

I'd love to have some of that again. I'm not sure what literary character would share it with me. I'd be inclined to keep it all for myself.

Interesing term, "sabotiere." I would have thought it was "sorbetiere," as that's the modern French term for an ice cream maker. "Sabotiere" suggests to me something that would make wooden shoes--or horses' hooves.

[Hellion]

Breyer's offers a Triple Chocolate flavor: dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate. It's decadent. Makes me think of romance heroes. You've got the bad boy heroes (dark chocolate); the boy next door heroes (milk chocolate); and the knight in shining armor guys (white chocolate)--but it's still chocolate no matter which one you choose. You can't go wrong.

Literary person I'd share it with...maybe Barbara Cartland. *LOL* I think she had every hero you could invent in her books; or maybe Georgette Heyer (I've never read her but know she had a variety of heroes.)

[Leslie]

Breyer's double whipped French Silk for me . . . .ummmmm.

[MJ]

My family's ice cream tradition happens every July 4th when we make homemade vanilla in an ice cream maker that's about 100 years old. In fact, my aunt saw a similar one in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. Everyone had to take a turn at the handle of the ice cream maker if you wanted to have some of the ice cream. My best memory is working alongside my grandmother at her 90th birthday party as she instructed me on the proper texture that the base cream had to be.

As far as modern day ice cream, nothing beats the ice cream from "That Little Creamery in Brenham, TX" - Blue Bell ice cream. Their Butter Pecan is to die for!

[Joanna Bourne]

I think Roderick Usher from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher might like it [Haagen Daas Dark Double Dutch Chocolate.] Dark, decadent and apt to drive one mad!

Yes! Now why didn't I think of decadent delights of dark chocolate.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Chelsea --

You are so right.

The whole time I was writing this I wanted to head for the kitchen and dive into the Ben&Jerry's.

Maybe I should have written about Regency salad greens.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Julee Johnson-Tate --

What a cool name for an ice cream -- Denali Moose Tracks. Like the park.

I've always wanted to visit the park, though I may have to settle for the ice cream.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Alison --

Apparently Häagen-Dazs makes passion fruit ice cream. And Martha Stewart has a recipe for passion fruit sorbet.

http://tiny.cc/n7ygd

Who knew?

I'm a big fan of cassis sorbet.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Darlene --

There is nothing like an old fashioned Ice Cream Parlor where they make their own ice cream. There's one at Chincoteague in Virginia.

Not Chile Chocolate however . . .

I honestly don't know whether I would like something that exotic or not. I'd have to try it.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Aislinn --

I would have thought it was "sorbetiere," as that's the modern French term for an ice cream maker. "Sabotiere" suggests to me something that would make wooden shoes--or horses' hooves.

In 1800 both terms were used. I went with "sabotiere" because that's the term at Historic Foods. I lifted my illustrations from there. If someone went back to see more info at that site, I didn't want them confused.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Hellion --

You've got the bad boy heroes (dark chocolate); the boy next door heroes (milk chocolate); and the knight in shining armor guys (white chocolate)--but it's still chocolate no matter which one you choose. You can't go wrong.

Oh LOL. and LOL again. This is just lovely.

Heroes as chocolate -- choose your own flavor.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Leslie --

I very much like Breyer's as a standard, good quality ice cream. Honest stuff.

I will have to try that flavor. I've never had it.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi MJ --

"That Little Creamery in Brenham, TX"

I am so envious of those folks who have home town ice cream places.

There was an ice cream parlor near where my husband grew up. Gifford's. Apparently they had a 'special' huge dish of ice cream. If you finished it all, you didn't have to pay for it.
*g*

[Filipina Dating]

Wow! This is my first reaction when the time I saw the picture. I love it and I wished I can have that one today. And it’s better if they have all purpose cream and then I have a cappuccino coffee. Hhaayyy It’s a great thing.

[Joanna Bourne]

Hi Filip --

I am a great fan of coffee ice cream. If covers two of the major food groups in my life. 'Sweet stuff' and 'coffee'.

[Jeannie Lin]

So much effort...and SO worth it. Fabulous information. Loved the blog

[joanna bourne]

Hi Jeannie --

I just love writing nonfiction. Hope it will be useful to somebody.

I've never had occasion to send my characters off to eat ice cream, but one never knows, do one?