Aren’t the fires in Spain and France terrible? Thousands evacuated, houses burned, forests destroyed. Experts say it’s a result of global warming that caused abnormal heat waves in Europe, which in turn dried the veld to tinder.
A great shame, particularly as Europe has done more to reduce climate-changing fossil fuel emissions than most. There is often someone who scores in a crisis, isn’t there, and in Europe right now I hear it’s the ice cream sellers. This got me reading about ice cream – and I fell down a rum-and-raisin rabbit hole. Did you know that people were making frozen desserts in several countries, including Persia, India, China and Japan, more than a thousand years ago? I had no idea. To make ice cream or other frozen desserts you had to be living in an area where lakes froze in winter. Ice was then cut from the frozen lakes and stored underground in specially built icehouses. Frozen desserts were available only to those who had the money to pay people to cut, transport and store ice, so they were a luxury reserved mainly for the nobility. One of the oldest known iced desserts was invented in Persia around 400 BC made from rose water, lime juice and “delicate noodles”. Frozen desserts using milk were developed in China between 618 and 907 BC. The sweetened milk was mixed with rice and frozen into a “rice ice cream”. These ancient cultures discovered that mixing salt into crushed ice lowered its temperature, making it easier to freeze ingredients. Ice cream spread to Europe during the 16th century and was soon a favourite with the aristocracy. In 1686 ice cream became available to ordinary people in Paris when an Italian called Francesco dei Coltelli opened an ice cream café. It was so popular that soon about 250 such cafés opened all over Paris. Ice cream arrived in the American colonies in 1744. In 1843 a woman called Nancy Johnson developed – and patented – the first hand-cranked ice cream maker. Usually the sweetened cream was put in a metal cylinder with a lid and placed in a bucket of ice and salt. As the cream began to freeze, you had to open the cylinder and scrape the frozen cream off the sides and mix it with the unfrozen lot, over and over until eventually it was all frozen. Clever Nancy Johnson developed a handle that was attached to two perforated paddles inside the cylinder that scraped the frozen ice cream off the sides every time you cranked it. Made it so easy. Which country eats the most ice cream? Surprisingly it’s New Zealand, where each person consumes an average of 28 litres a year. The United States is second with 20 litres a person a year, then Australia (18 litres) and Finland (14 litres). South Africans are way down with 1.5 litres a person. It seems ice cream is a great leveller. Everyone loves it from kings to kids. It’s a big favourite of US rapper Snoop Dogg who once said: “When I’m no longer rapping, I want to open an ice cream parlour and call myself Scoop Dogg.”
