Cool tales of icy sweets

On a hot day, even a short trip to the fridge can seem too long. But at least you don't have to scale snowy peaks or crawl into underground vaults for a cool treat. That's what people used to have to do.

The history of frosty desserts includes tales of happy substitutions, unintended inventions, and super-successful recipes that are still secret. It's also a history that begins in ancient China where, in many cases, they had it first.

Here are some of those stories – and a few easy recipes, too – to help keep you cool this summer.

About 4,000 years ago, the Chinese are said to have developed the first resemblance of what we now know as ice cream. They had just figured out how to milk farm animals. They were also discovering ways to transport snow from the mountains to make frozen dishes.

The result? A pasty ice milk made from overcooked rice, spices, milk, and snow – packed hard so that it would solidify. Because milk was still so rare, only the nobility could afford it.

Many centuries later, in AD 62, Roman Emperor Nero reportedly sent teams of slaves to the Apennines mountains to collect snow so that he could flavor it with nectar, fruit pulp, and honey.

By the 1200s, what we would recognize as ice cream began to spread throughout Italy and other parts of Europe. But the frozen phenomenon was still out of reach of commoners. Ice-cream recipes were kept secret by chefs to the wealthy. Refrigeration was nearly nonexistent. Ice had to be harvested in the winter and then stored in underground caves or vaults to use in the summer.

But by the late 1500s there had been a breakthrough. A Spanish physician living in Rome found that adding salt to ice caused a chemical reaction that made the ice-salt mix very, very cold. Now ice-cream recipes could be frozen much more quickly.

Soon, ice-cream vendors all over Europe were pushing salt-and-ice-cooled carts to the masses.

The first ice-cream parlor opened in New York in 1776. Today, Americans eat an average of 15 quarts of ice cream per person every year. That gives ice cream the title of "America's favorite dessert."

Waffle cones and ice cream may seem as logical as peanut butter with jelly (another combination from the early 20th century). But someone had to invent it first, and the invention may have been the result of desperation.

It happened at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The fair featured, among other things, the first demonstration of electric cooking – including that of waffles.

According to one version of the story (there are several, though they all take place at the 1904 fair), a teenager named Arnold Fornachou was working at an ice-cream stand. It was a hot day, and he ran out of dishes. What to do? His ice-cream stand was right next to a waffle stand. Ice cream had been served on waffles for centuries. So he bought some waffles, rolled them into cone shapes, and filled them with ice cream. A sensation was born.

Waffle cones were rolled by hand until 1912, when a machine was invented to do the job. Some 10 years later, one-third of all the ice-cream consumed in the United States was eaten atop cones.

One year after the waffle cone's invention, an 11-year-old happened upon the Popsicle.

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