Ice cream

Spelling variants - ice-cream or icecream.

In its simplest form, ice cream is a frozen dairy dessert made from milk, cream or custard combined with flavourings and sweeteners, and whipped to a light and airy consistency. Ice creams come in a wide variety of flavours, often with additives such as chocolate flakes or chips, nuts, fruit, and candy/sweets. One of the most popular ice cream flavours in supermarkets is neapolitan.

Before the advent of modern refrigeration, ice cream was a luxury item reserved for very special occasions. Today, icecream is sold in every supermarket, grocery store and service station in the Western world, and enjoyed worldwide.

Modern commercial ice cream is made from a mixture of:

10-16% milkfat
9 to 12% milk solids-not-fat: this component, also known as the serum solids, contains the proteins (caseins and whey proteins) and carbohydrates (lactose) found in milk
12 to * 16% sweeteners: usually a combination of sucrose and glucose-based corn syrup sweeteners
0.2 to 0.5% stabilizers and emulsifiers
55% to 64% water which comes from the milk or other ingredients

These ingredients make up the solid part of the ice cream, but only 50% of the final volume, the remainder being air incorporated during the whipping process.

There are several popular legends surrounding the discovery of ice cream. Marco Polo supposedly saw ice cream being made on his trip to China, bringing the recipe home to Italy with him on his return. From there, Catherine de'Medici's Italian chefs are said to have carried the recipe to France when she went there in 1533 to marry the Duc d'Orleans. Charles I was supposedly so impressed by the 'frozen snow' that he offered his own ice-cream maker a lifetime pension in return for keeping the formula secret, so that ice cream could be a royal perogative. There is however, no historical evidence to support this fable, which first appeared during the 19th Century and was probably created by imaginative icecream vendors. Icecream most likely DID originate in China, but it is unknown how and when the idea made its way into the Western world.

The making of icecream was originally an extremely laborious process. It was made by hand in a large bowl surrounded by packed ice. The hand-cranked churn was invented in 1846, making production simpler, and the world's first commercial icecream factory opened in Baltimore, Maryland in 1851. The continuous process freezer was perfected in 1926, allowing commercial mass-production of icecream and the birth of the modern icecream industry.