Interesting facts about Ice Cream
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| cake with ice cream |
- Ancient civilizations have served ice for cold foods for thousands of years.
- Before the development of modern refrigeration, ice cream was a luxury reserved for special occasions.
- Vanilla is the most popular flavor in the United States, snagging anywhere from 20 to 29 percent of sales. Chocolate comes in a distant second, with about 9 to 10 percent of the market.Americans consume the most ice cream in the world per capita, with Australians coming in second. In 1924, the average America ate eight pints a year. By 1997, the International Dairy Foods Association reported that the figure had jumped to 48 pints a year.
- Many farmers and plantation owners, including U.S. Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, cut and stored ice in the winter for use in the summer.
- Immigrants at Ellis Island were served vanilla ice cream as part of their Welcome to America meal.
- In Europe and early America, ice cream was made and sold by small businesses, mostly confectioners and caterers.
- The most avid ice cream eaters in the U.S. don't live in Hawaii, the South, California, or any other hot clime. Instead, in 1999, it was reported that the good citizens of Omaha, Nebraska, ate more ice cream per person than any other Americans.
- Among the most unusual flavors of ice cream ever manufactured are avocado, garlic, azuki bean, jalapeno, and pumpkin. Perhaps the weirdest of all: dill pickle ice cream , which was marketed to expectant mothers. Sales were disappointing.
- One of the major ingredients in ice cream is air. Without it, the stuff would be as hard as a rock.
- Jacob Fussell of Baltimore, Maryland was the first to manufacture ice cream on a large scale.
- According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the biggest ice cream sundae in the world was made in Alberta, Canada, in 1988. It weighed nearly 55,000 pounds.
- One out of every five ice cream eaters share their treat with their dog or cat. (Can the day of liver- or tuna-flavored ice cream be far behind?)
- Ice cream novelties such as ice cream on sticks and ice cream bars were introduced in the 1920s. Seems like kid stuff, but today, adults consume nearly one-half of all such treats.
- The Persians drank syrups cooled with snow called (“fruit ice” in Arabic, thus the derivation of sherbet, sorbet and sorbetto).
- In 1988, a baking company and a sheet-metal firm in Dubuque, Iowa, teamed up to produce the world's largest ice cream sandwich, which tipped the scales at nearly 2,500 pounds.
- While popular lore claims that the ice cream cone was invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, a New York City ice cream vendor actually seems to have created the cone in 1896 to stop customers from stealing his serving glasses. He patented the idea in 1903 and it took off in popularity at the World's Fair the next year.
- In 1999, Baskin-Robbins created an ice cream cake at a beach hotel in the United Arab Emirates that weighed just under 9,000 pounds.
