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Cool your world with homemade ice cream
From M&Ms and cookies to garlic and corn, discover your own favorite flavor for summer's No. 1 treat.
By John Edward Young | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the July 11, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 3
A quick poll: Everyone who dislikes ice cream, please stand....
I rest my case! No one, it seems, doesn't love ice cream.
No surprise, really. It's cool, rich, creamy, and comes in an endless variety of flavors. It's perfect mixed with everything from M&Ms and nuts to chocolate chips and peppermint. There's even a garlic-laced ice cream that's a sellout at the annual Garlic Festival in Gilmore, Calif.
Not that all flavors work. Celebrity chef Bobby Flay concocted one with golden nuggets of fresh corn kernels that he had his good friend Bryant Gumbel sample on "The Early Show" a number of years ago. Mr. Gumbel, with much levity, declared it "terrible" and the worst-tasting ice cream he'd ever had. But Gumbel hates cheese, and can you trust anyone's palate who hates cheese? Still, it's doubtful you'll ever find corn ice cream on Ben & Jerry's menu board.
Where did this otherwise universally loved dessert come from? Who discovered it? Who invented it? Who popularized it?
Popular lore has given partial credit to everyone from Marco Polo who found it (and everything else, it seems) in China, to Nero Claudius Caesar, who sent his slaves to the mountain peaks to retrieve ice to make it, to the royal chef of England's King Charles I, to the kitchens of Catherine de' Medici, to Al Gore. No, wait – that was the Internet.
George Washington owned a contraption called a "cream machine for making ice." Washington was so fond of ice cream that he spent more than $200 making it in the summer of 1790. (Depending on whom you ask, that's the equivalent of several thousand dollars today.) Thomas Jefferson's fondness for it is legendary: He is credited with putting the "French" in French vanilla – the incorporation of egg whites into the custard.
But what does its history really matter? There are more stories and legends about ice cream than Baskin-Robbins has flavors. We all have it now, along with its equally cool cousins sorbet, sherbet, ices, Italian gelato and semifreddos, and on and on. In a shake or on a slice of cake, ice cream puts the "ooh-la-la" in "a la mode."
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