History of ice cream in United States

It’s believed that ice cream crossed the Atlantic with European settlers in the 1700s. The best-known cookbooks in early America were published in English in Britain.

Among the earliest British cookbooks with ice cream recipes were Mrs. Eales Receipts by Mary Eales, 1718, and The Modern Cook by Vincent La Chapelle, 1733. Both of these English manuals contained ice cream recipes derived from earlier French source.

The first written record of ice cream in America dates from 1744 when Maryland Governor Thomas Bladen served the delicacy for his guests. It was written in the letter by one of his guests dated on May 17, 1744. 

Thomas Jefferson gets credit for introducing vanilla to America following his tour as Minster to France in 1784-89.

Making ice cream at home got much easier after 1846, when Nancy Johnson invented the first hand-cranked freezer.

The cost of buying ice cream went down when wholesalers went into the business. Milk dealer Jacob Fussell, Jr., led the way and he made ice cream from the extra cream he had during the summer months.

His venture was so successful that he converted his dairy plant into an ice cream plant in 1851 and became ether first commercial ice cream manufacture in the United States.

Two of the most important contributions to development of the industry were perfection of mechanical refrigeration in 1878 and the invention of the direct expansion of ice cream freezer.

In 1920, Harry Burt of Ohio invented the ‘Good Humor Ice Cream Sucker’, a chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick. He also was the first to sell ice cream from trucks, decked out with jingling bells.

Annual production of ice cream in the United States in 1905 was only four million gallons. At that time there was no national trade organization and only one college, the Pennsylvania State College of Agriculture, offered instruction in ice cream manufacture.
History of ice cream in United States

History of Ice Cream

History of Ice Cream
The ancient Romans flavored ice with fruit and honey and Marco Polo (1254-1324) brought several recipes for flavored ice from the Far East to Italy, where it caught on in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Water ice and sherbet shops sprang up in France in the 17th century. In the late 18th century cream was added to water ices at shops in Paris.

Ice cream was popular in the American colonies and the early republic.

The hand cranked ice cream maker was invented in 1846 by Nancy Johnson in New Jersey and the first known commercial ice-cream factories was established in Baltimore in 1851.

With the advent of refrigeration it became possible to manufacture, store and ship ice cream in larger amounts.

The ice cream soda was invented by Robert Green on 1874 at a celebration at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

The sundae was apparently invented in Wisconsin in the 1890s, as means of getting around laws that prohibited the sale of ice cream sodas in Sundays.

The soda fountain operators served the ice cream with the flavored syrup but no soda and called the resultant dish a ‘sundae’ to avoid any religious backlash from the improper use of the word Sunday.

The ice cream cone was invented twice - once by an Italian immigrant to the United States, Italo Machiony, who patented a cone making machine in 1903, and the second time with an impromptu use of a Syrian waffle known as a zalabia to contain ice cream at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904.
History of Ice Cream