The Scoop on Ice Cream

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Black licorice ice cream is just to die for.

I love it so much, but it's hard to find.

I think the best one that I ever had was at a little shop in Denmark a few years ago.

But once once in a while you can find it at a specialty ice cream shop here in Minnesota.

And when I do, I call my sister and we both have to go find it because it's so good.

Mine is

lemon ice cream from Crebesome Waffles in Bogota, Colombia, and especially when I'm a little sad.

If frozen custard counts, chocolate almond from upstate New York.

If it doesn't, the olive oil gelato that you can get in Union Square.

You might think that the most complex thing about ice cream is choosing which flavor to have.

That is a tough one.

When in doubt, get them all, is what I say.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

But even if you do manage to buy all the flavors, what you don't know is that ice cream itself is incredibly complicated.

It is truly a miraculous substance.

In scientific terms, it's up there with the jet engine.

And its history is kind of complex, too.

Everything you thought you knew about ice cream, all those stories are wrong.

I'm Nicola Twilley, and I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this week on Gastropod, we're exploring the history and science of our favorite summer treat.

There are all sorts of weird myths about the beginning of ice cream.

One is that Marco Polo brought the recipe back from the East around 1300.

That guy gets credit for everything, spaghetti and ice cream.

And when I was in Italy, I heard that Catherine de' Medici brought it to France in the 1500s.

I was also told that she created one of the earliest ice cream flavors, but neither of those stories are true.

Well, unfortunately, there's no one Eureka moment.

We know that Catherine D'Amedici did not because there is no evidence of ice cream in France at that particular time.

Jerry Quinzio wrote a book called Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making.

And the title comes from the way early confectioners described the consistency of ice cream they were looking for.

They said it should be of sugar and snow, in other words, not hard-packed ice.

And in her book, Jerry explains that the origin story for ice cream goes back much further.

We've been using natural ice and snow to cool things down for thousands of years.

And one of those cool things were the sugary, syrupy, slushy drinks that turn out to be ice cream's long-lost ancestors.

And what I've learned pretty consistently is that anything sweet and delicious that we have today has descended from something in the Middle East.

Sarah Lohman is a historical gastronomist based in New York.

So in the Middle East, they were making these things called charbate.

It's somewhere between like a snow cone and a lemonade, and they were using a lot of floral flavors, a lot of sort of what are known as animal extracts like musk and ambergris, saffron, a lot of really what we consider exotic things.

But medieval Europe had the spice trade through the Middle East, so this idea of this sort of frozen ice dessert traveled to Europe.

What they were doing is pouring sweetened syrup over ice.

To make ice cream, that took another discovery.

Everybody knows that if you put salt on ice, some of the ice melts.

I mean, this is why you put salt on the roads in winter, for example.

This is Chris Clark.

He spent years working as an ice cream scientist.

Dream job.

And his book is called The Science of Ice Cream.

And the thing is, you can't make ice cream using just ice.

Ice is cold, but it's not cold enough to freeze your mixture.

But if you add salt to the ice, it messes with the structure of the ice and forces it to melt.

And the salty melty mix is colder than the ice on its own.

It knows it has to melt because the salt's there and it disrupts the crystal structure, and it has to.

But it can't do that without taking in some heat from somewhere else.

It's an energy balance thing.

It takes energy for the ice to melt to change from a solid to a liquid, and that energy gets pulled from whatever is next to it.

So if you have it in a closed system, what happens is that it takes that heat in in the form of reducing the temperature of everything else.

So you can end up with, if you start off with ice at zero degrees centigrade and you mix it with salt, if you get the proportions right, you can get down to about minus 20 degrees centigrade.

This was a revelation for the first scientists to figure it out over in Italy in the 1500s.

Finally, they didn't have to just settle for cooling things down.

They could actually freeze them.

They had a great time with this new party trick.

In their experiments, I thought it was great fun.

One of the first things they did was they tried to freeze wine.

Well, wine won't freeze solid because of the alcohol, but it gets very slushy.

So for a little while in the 16th century, slushy wine was a big hit on banquet tables, which must have been a lot of fun.

That sounds pretty dumb.

That's great.

Doesn't that sound good?

But for the first 300 years, you really had to be a VIP to enjoy ice cream.

Well, I think that's the whole key.

It was hard to get a hold of, especially if you lived in places that were relatively warm.

So ice and snow were valued.

They were status symbols.

So you would send,

for instance, one way to do it was to send your servants up to a snow-capped mountain and have them

truck it back to your estate and hope that it didn't all melt on the way.

So if you got it home and then you were lucky enough to have it, you wanted to show it off to your friends and neighbors, the way people might show off caviar or truffles or something like that.

So you would heap up a bowl of snow or ice and put fruit on it and put it on your banquet table and your friends would all come over and ooh and ah and it was it was a very it was a very big deal.

And ice was not the only barrier to entry.

Salt was precious and heavily taxed and sugar, this is before slavery and slavery makes sugar cheap so sugar was expensive then too.

So ice cream was for really special occasions and people would go all out.

The aristocracy in Naples in the 1500s through the 1700s created these amazing, lavish trompe l'oeil displays of ice cream.

They'd make molds in all sorts of shapes and then even paint the ice cream once they plated it.

The story that I like is Dr.

John Moore.

He's an Englishman.

He's traveling in Naples in the

late 18th century.

He's with the king and queen of Naples, and he describes a visit to a convent.

And he was was rather annoyed because when they went in,

the Mother Superior led them into a dining room and the table was covered with turkey and ham and fish and all these dishes.

And the reason he was annoyed was this was shortly after dinner time.

And he thought, well, she should have known that we would have had dinner by now.

And this was not very thoughtful of her.

But they sat down politely

and the queen took a slice of what seemed to be turkey and it turned out to be a lemon ice.

And he says, all of the dishes were made of ices and ice creams molded to look like turkey or fish or asparagus or whatnot.

And they all laughed heartily at the little joke that the nuns had played on the royals.

Which brings us to what is likely the very first description of brain freeze.

It was a British sea captain at a formal dinner in Sicily in the 1800s.

And he was very, very angry.

And

it was funny because he was so deceived.

He thought he was eating a peach.

He was hit with this freezing substance in his mouth.

He became angry and yelled at the poor server, who had no idea,

one, because the man was speaking English.

He had no idea what he was saying.

He had no idea why the man was angry because he had just served him this wonderful ice.

And the man had to almost be restrained by his friends before he assaulted the poor man.

So he did not think it was a cute joke.

He thought it was very irritating.

Ouch, that must have been quite a headache.

So quick note on the science of brain freeze.

We've all had it, but it was only three years ago that scientists figured out why it happens.

There were a couple of theories.

One popular one was that the cold made the nerves in your mouth hyperactive, and your head interpreted that as a headache.

But then a group of scientists who were trying to discover a better treatment for headaches decided to look into brain freeze.

And what they discovered is that when the cold hits this major artery at the back of your throat, your body responds by sending a ton more blood up to your brain.

And then as your brain arteries swell with all that extra blood, it exerts pressure on your brain.

Hey, Presta, an ice cream headache.

There seems to be a cure for that ice cream pain.

Take note, if you jam your tongue up against the roof of your mouth, it warms up that artery and makes it constrict, and the headache should go away.

Brain freeze is one of the reasons I think those tromploy ice creams sound like a terrible idea.

Why turn something so lovely into a mean trick?

That's perverse.

But it wasn't the tromploy trickery or the fancy molds that got Sarah interested in recreating historic ice creams.

I started working with ice cream because I noticed that recipes from the past often had ice cream flavors that were more wild than anything you can find.

And like your hip is trendy as gelato shop today.

So I wanted to try recreating these recipes and tasting them.

Jerry was amazed by those crazy early flavors too.

One of my favorite writers about ice cream was Monsieur Amy.

He's French, 18th century.

And he was the first person to write a book solely devoted to ices and ice creams.

And he has just an amazing number of different flavors.

One of the strangest, which I have not tried and do not intend to try, is truffle.

And we're not talking about chocolate truffles, we're talking about the fungus.

So I don't know why you would make truffle ice cream, but I think at that point the idea was really

ice cream is kind of a blank canvas.

Once you've made a basic ice cream, you're really tempted to say, oh, I wonder if I tried basil.

How about rosemary?

What about

avocado?

What about, and keep going.

Artichoke.

Artichoke, quimate, artichoke, parmesan cheese.

Well, even clam, right?

Clam ice cream or oyster ice cream.

That was stuck to me.

They did make a clam ice cream.

And again, I just kind of read that, that, shook my head, and turned the page.

Those early recipes wouldn't make much sense to us today.

They're vague on the details.

And that's because a lot of people in Europe already knew how to make custard.

After they figured out freezing, first they played around with wine because it's fun and then they turned to their existing desserts.

In medieval Europe, people made a lot of burnt creams and baked custards.

So we're talking eggs, cream, milk, and then, again, flavorings that today we would consider exotic.

Vanilla wasn't an option.

There was no modern creme brulee.

That's a New World flavor.

So they were using things like bay leaves, spices, lemon peel.

And it's those two things, sort of the ice and floral or fruit flavors or the like custard spicy things, that once we discovered the science of ice cream, those are the first things we started to freeze.

That Frenchman, Monsieur Emy, may have written the first book all about ice cream.

But the first recorded recipe for ice cream comes from my homeland.

The first recipe that we have written in English is from 1665.

And I didn't personally track it down.

There's an amazing culinary historian, Ivan Day, who really focuses sort of on Georgian-era recipes in England.

It's from a woman named Lady Anne Fanshaw.

Her husband was an ambassador to Spain in the 17th century, and it was in the Spanish court that she first saw ice cream being made.

And it's what we would consider a custard-style ice cream, and she recommends flavoring it with mace.

We're familiar with nutmegs.

Nutmeg is the seed of a fruit.

There's a nutmeg fruit.

Between the fruit and the sea, the pith, there's this sort of red, webby stuff.

We dry it, and it's called mace.

Kind of like nutmeg, but a little spicy.

Or she recommends using a little bit of ambergris or ambergris sometimes, people call it.

So I went round to Sarah's and we made a batch of Lady Ann Fanshaw's ambergris ice cream.

I love that you ate ice cream made from ambergris.

I actually wrote about it a few years ago.

It's this grayish, blackish lump of stuff that sailors and beachcomers find randomly.

It comes from sperm whales.

Sperm whales eat squids, their beaks are indigestible, and at a very, very small percentage of sperm whales, something happens where the squid beaks, as opposed to being sort of coughed up like a cat's hairball, get impacted in their bowels.

The squid beaks irritate their intestines and they create this mucus to protect themselves.

And what you get is this sort of buildup of squid beaks and fecal matter and mucus because their intestines are irritated.

And then no one is quite sure if then the sperm whale eventually passes this mass or if it kills them.

People used to think it was whale vomit, but nowadays the general consensus is that it comes out the other end.

It sounds gross, but it floats around in the water for months and it changes color from black to gray as the sun and salt water cure it.

So when it first comes out of a whale, it smells very, very fecal, but the longer it sits in the ocean, the more flavor it develops.

And from what I've understand, really no two pieces of it smell the same.

It washes up on beaches and there are people who hunt for it professionally.

It's ridiculously expensive.

It's been used for thousands of years for perfume and spice and even medicine.

Today it's hard to find.

People can make thousands of dollars by randomly coming across a chunk on the beach.

It's a difficult ingredient to find because it is technically illegal in the United States.

It's protected under the Endangered Species Act because sperm whales are endangered.

The thing is, you don't kill whales to get it.

In fact, you can't.

The ambergris that's in their gut isn't cured yet, so it's not usable.

That's the reason it's legal in a lot of the rest of the world, because it has nothing to do with hunting or herding whales in any way.

It's still used very heavily in the perfume industry, particularly in Europe where it is not illegal.

And historically, it was used as a food flavoring.

In the medieval era and really up through the 19th century, there was a very like wavy line between the smells that you wanted to wear on your body and the smells you wanted to flavor your food.

And ambergris kind of falls in that category.

Sarah told me that ambergris would have been even more expensive in Lady Anne Fanshaw's day, which kind of made sense to me.

Ice cream was such a luxury already.

Why not flavor it with the most exotic ingredients you could get hold of?

Fortunately, Sarah tracks them down on eBay that was more affordable.

But the reason it was more affordable is that it hadn't cured for very long.

It smells so

odorous, I have not had the heart to take it out of all the way out of the envelope yet.

So

go ahead, just give it a little smell.

Whoa.

Well, that just smells like someone sent you a fossilized turd.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it smells very fecal.

Jokes on us if this is actually just dog poo in a bag.

The things I will do for gastropod.

That sounds lovely.

So we held our noses and chopped up the ambergris.

We put it in a pan with the heavy cream and milk and brought it to the boil.

At which point it smelled like milky poo.

Oh, now I really wish I'd been there with you.

Then we mixed the egg yolks and sugar together and slowly added the hot ambergris cream to the egg and sugar mix.

Okay.

We've got this pretty consistently frothy, yellowish, butter-colored liquid.

That's going to go back on the burner.

I'm going to cook it really slow until it thickens into a custard.

And then we popped it in the ice cream machine, Which was not authentic to Lady Anne's day, obviously, but it meant we could taste our creation a lot quicker.

So let's let the ice cream maker do its thing and come back when it's ready to eat.

I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on this odorous concoction.

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I like a lot of ice creams, but my very best flavor is mint chocolate chip.

I don't know, maybe pistachio gelato, but if that doesn't count, maybe chocolate chip cookie dough.

Anything with chocolate, but just chocolate.

I don't want anything else in there.

We asked dozens of people, and everyone has a favorite flavor: strachatelli, soft serve, twist, Strawberry.

Mango.

Mango.

My favorite

ice cream flavor without a doubt is mame

in Mexico City.

So this is actually a fruit that I have not had the pleasure of meeting elsewhere.

So it's brown and very

nondescript, rough, almost like a bark on the outside, shaped like a big avocado.

And on the inside, it's like this orange, pink, amazing, buttery, delicious, sweet fruit.

There's an ice cream place in Condesa that's about 50, 60 years old.

It's called Roxy's.

And they make the most amazing mamma ice cream.

But ice cream had to go through another transformation before it could reach the masses.

Until the 1800s, it was still a luxury.

And you know what changed everything?

It's back to my favorite topic, refrigeration.

Of course.

You can't stop me, Cynthia.

What happened was that in the 1850s, a young chap from Boston, Frederick Tudor, had the brilliant idea of turning ice into a business.

He harvested big blocks of ice from New England lakes and shipped them off around the world.

He didn't have what I would think of as a very practical business plan.

The first thing he did was sail to the West Indies with a ship full of ice, much of which melted and then there was no place to store it when he arrived.

So when he got there, he used that melting ice to make ice cream.

Brilliant.

There were some hiccups, but Frederick eventually figured out how to harvest and store and ship ice really efficiently.

And that efficiency brought the price of coal down.

By the end of the 1800s, most Americans could afford ice.

There were a few other things that made mass ice cream possible.

Slavery made sugar cheap.

Salt was cheaper at this point, too, because it wasn't as heavily taxed.

The French Revolution even helped with making ice cream more popular.

As their masters were guillotined, all of those fancy confectioners left France and spread out across the world.

They brought their specialized ice cream knowledge with them, and many of them ended up opening cafes and restaurants to serve it.

It's like let them eat ice cream.

Democracy in action.

And then came the home ice cream maker.

Originally, you'd have a tub filled with ice and salt, and you'd put your covered ice cream bucket into that, and then you'd have to pull it out of the freezing slush and stir it, and then put it back, and on and on.

But that changed thanks to an American named Nancy Johnson.

What she came up with was the inner tub would have a kind of a churn or dasher and a handle on the outside.

So you could move the outside handle and mix the inner mixture.

So you wouldn't have to be opening and closing and scraping and so on.

It made it much easier to make ice cream and her patent freezer, as it was called, was more affordable.

So the combination of affordable ice distributed by the ice man

and this much easier to use ice cream maker made it accessible to even an ordinary household.

And what's amazing is that the basic technology for making ice cream hasn't changed that much since Nancy Johnson got her patent in 1843.

It's been tweaked a bit to scale it up, but the process is still the same.

They figured out the basic mechanism of how to make ice cream.

But what those early ice cream makers didn't realize is that what's happening in the ice cream itself is incredibly complex.

It's got all three phases of matter in it.

So it's got solid in terms of the ice crystals and the fat droplets.

And then it's got liquid, which is the sort of the aqueous solution which has all the sugars and the flavours and the proteins.

And then it's also got gas bubbles.

So it's got solid, liquid, and gas all together in one substance.

And you need all three of those things to work together to give you the texture of ice cream.

You can't get it without any one of them.

Chris Clark, you might remember the ice cream scientist from the beginning of the show.

He thinks ice cream is as complicated as a jet engine.

An ice cream actually, although you think of it as being cold, in a sense it's a sort of a high temperature solid because it operates just below its melting point in the same way that these high-temperature ceramics do it in jet engines.

So it's quite a tough thing to do to get a solid material that retains really good properties as you get close to the melting point where it starts to fall apart.

Each of the ingredients in ice cream plays a different and vital role in creating this thermodynamic miracle.

So you need the ice.

Well, firstly, it gives you the cooling, the cold sensation, but it gives you the solid particles that contribute to the texture.

And then you need air, a lot of it.

Ice cream is about 50% by volume of ice cream, is air.

That varies a bit.

Some ice creams, like Ben and Jerry's, for example, is quite dense.

And that's why it's really hard when you take it out from the freezer, and that's got less air in it.

So you need the air.

If you didn't have the air, you just end up with something that was rock solid, like a popsicle kind of thing.

And then the stuff we think of as being the ingredients of ice cream, the cream, the eggs, the sugar, the flavourings.

That's really in the liquid phase, which ice cream scientists call the matrix.

It kind of sounds a bit sinister, but that basically just means the sort of the liquids, which is a really sticky, viscous sugar solution that glues the ice crystals and the air bubbles together and holds it all in place.

But it's not just about getting the right ingredients.

It's also about getting the right microstructure.

So, you know, having a big lump of ice and a big lump of air just doesn't give you the right texture.

This is where sort of the techniques in making ice cream become really important.

And the steps in the process have been honed over hundreds of years.

The ice cream is kind of fighting against us the whole way as we try to trap bubbles in a liquid that is also a solid.

I have a newfound appreciation for ice cream.

So remember, Sarah and I put our ambergris ice cream into the ice cream maker right away.

But in an ideal world, we would have put that custard mix in the fridge overnight before churning it.

The cold makes the liquid dairy fat just a bit solid, but not too much.

And the egg helps with this too.

It works as an emulsifier, so it makes the fat particles more likely to stick together.

That way, they form a sort of protective layer around the air bubbles and that keeps your ice cream fluffy.

So it's a really subtle and complex process getting these fat droplets to do the right have the right amount of solid content and the right emulsion stabilization from their coating such that they can stick together just enough.

It's kind of the Goldilocks thing.

You know it's got to be just right to get the balance to make ice cream that's got a really good air bubble size and that's stable for a long time.

That's why it's so hard to make ice cream out of anything but cream.

Most non-dairy oils just don't work as well because they don't get solid and liquid at the right temperatures.

And without that, you can't trap the air bubbles.

Sarah and I just didn't have time to put our mix in the fridge overnight.

It does still work, it's just not quite as perfect a texture.

So we jumped straight ahead to the churning stage.

And that's a super delicate process, too.

It's the only chance you get to make ice crystals in your mix, and you need to make as many as you can.

The ice crystals give the ice cream that solid feel, but they have to be ridiculously tiny, or it will feel all icy and grainy on your tongue.

So you want to make as many, many small ice crystals as possible.

And the way you do that is by having a barrel and you cool the outside of the barrel.

In Victorian days, that was done with a mixture of ice and salt.

Nowadays, it's typically done with liquid ammonia.

So you make that surface of the outside of the barrel really cold so that when the ice cream mix comes into contact with that, it instantly freezes.

But what you don't do is let it sit there and let the ice crystals grow.

So the moment it's frozen, you have a scraper blade that comes along and scrapes the little ice crystals off the surface and into the the center of the mix so by doing that you're continually forming lots and lots of new ice crystals all the time and they don't get too big and and that way you've you know as the mix gradually cools down all each of those crystals will grow but the more you have to start with the smaller they the average size will be overall at the end it's the same basic process that Nancy's machine used back in Philly in the 1840s but now we understand the science behind it a lot better.

Speaking of mixing, last we left that ambergree ambergree ice cream.

You just put it into a mixer with Sarah and we could hear all that churning going on as those ice crystals were forming and being scraped and breaking up.

And then 20 minutes later, we got it out and we tried it.

And after that smell description, I am waiting with baited breath or maybe plugged nostrils.

Well, here's the thing.

It was really, really, really good.

Really?

What did it taste like?

Did it stink?

No, and we had made really good ice cream, so it was creamy and delicious and all of that.

But the flavor,

really hard to describe.

It wasn't a flavor like strawberry, like full-on, 100% a thing.

It was much more subtle.

To me, it felt kind of like vanilla in that it was sort of a background thing.

But then it was so much more complex tasting than vanilla.

It's like vanilla on drugs or something.

The word that kept popping into my head, for whatever reason, was sophisticated.

That does sound surprisingly delicious.

What'd Sarah think?

Well, that was what was so funny.

She hated it.

Hated it.

She just kept saying, this is appalling.

That's hysterical.

I know, and I kept saying, this is my new favorite flavor.

I felt like the grown-up version of vanilla.

Mysterious and musky, and yeah, a little barnyard-y, sure, but like a good cheese.

I'm not sure you'll ever get to taste it again, though.

It is way too expensive.

Unless you happen on some polished chunk of that on a seashore somewhere, are you going to turn into an ambergris hunter?

Maybe if podcasting doesn't work out.

Seriously, though, I would save up to get some more again.

It was that good.

But, you know, as it warmed, it crossed that line from barnyard to fecal again.

And then it was not good.

Again, all I can say is lovely.

But the cone we made was a universal success.

So, what recipe do you use for that early cone?

Because cones have been around since time immemorial.

They're not a new invention.

No, they're not.

But the moment when the cone met ice cream and they got together, that's much more recent.

And like the origins of ice cream itself, it's a story that is filled with myths.

Well, there's the popular story of the first ice cream cone, and then there's the actual story of the first ice cream cone, which I've realized in food history there's a lot of that.

Usually, the popular story that's repeated again and again and again, as soon as you start questioning it, it just doesn't make sense.

The real story of the cone goes back a long way.

The Romans made wafers.

They're popular in a lot of European and Middle Eastern cultures, they've been around for a while.

And they've even been rolled into cones for a while, but people would put whipped cream or candies or fruit or other things inside them, not necessarily ice cream.

So it's really that moment where we put the ice cream in the cone that's more important when it becomes an ice cream cone.

There are a couple of early pieces of evidence that maybe show ice cream in cones.

There's a print from 1807 that shows the interior of a popular ice cream shop in Paris.

And in one corner of the picture, it looks like there's a woman eating an ice cream cone.

And then there's Agnes Marshall in the 1880s.

Who was like an ice cream genius.

She wrote two cookbooks with all sorts of ice cream flavors.

She was super ahead of her time, too.

She even wrote about using liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream, and that is still a fancy technique today.

And in one of her cookbooks, she says that you should put the ice cream in wafer cones.

And then in 1903, an Italian patented an ice cream cone machine.

So all these things happened before the popular story of how the ice cream cone came about.

At the 1904 St.

Louis World's Fair, there was an ice cream vendor serving ice cream in glass dishes, and he ran out of dishes, and there was someone next to him by the name of Hamwe, who was a Lebanese immigrant, who was making wafers.

And they put their heads together and had the idea to roll the wafers and the sell it with the ice cream.

The problem with the story is that there's no documentation of that vendor existing at the World's Fair of Hamwe.

It's a story that was kind of self-perpetuated by him because he, right after the fair, went and did found a ice cream cone company, and I do believe it was the first ice cream cone company.

So he sort of self-created this legend.

There were several wafer vendors next to ice cream makers.

It seems to be

kind of before the modern era, before the internet, before food blogs, the world's fairs were the places where a food that probably already existed became popular nationally.

So I think what's more important about 1904 is that somebody or someones were serving ice cream cones and people from all over the country got to see them and experience them.

Basically, we don't really know what the very first ice cream cone was.

So what did you and Sarah decide to make?

Well, on the one hand, we knew we needed a basic wafer recipe.

And those early wafers, they were all flavored.

The Italian ones, Pizel cookies, they used anise a lot.

But at the World's Fair, the cone was referred to as a Persian treat.

Knowing all of that, when we're trying to make an original ice cream cone, I came across a recipe in a contemporary Middle Eastern cookbook for a cardamom, orange, and orange flower water wafer, which I think is really both in terms of the recipe, the quality and consistency of the wafer.

It's similar to a lot of things coming out of the Middle East.

And cardamom and orange flower water are so typical, particularly of Persian cuisine too, where this particular wafer originates, that I think if we're trying to like find

what those ice cream cones might have tasted like in 1904, it's a good guess.

So we mixed together orange zest and cardamom with the flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.

And then we added a drop of orange flower water.

I love that.

We read in Jerry's book that orange blossom water ice cream was kind of the vanilla of its day before vanilla was widely accessible.

It was the basic flavor.

So it's cool that you're using it in a waffle.

And the mix smelled amazing.

And then we put it in a Pazelle maker and then we burned the tips of our fingers off trying to roll them into a cone shape.

It's so hot.

How do they do this?

I bet if you have been doing it for years.

You have asbestos for fingertips?

You have asbestos fingertips.

Alright, so I'm just using a paper towel and that's helping a a lot.

And our baby cones were so delicious.

Not tasty.

This is really good.

Mm-hmm.

It's not too strong for like an ordinary waffle cone, but it's just got a little something extra.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Truly lovely.

That does sound delicious.

Those are some of my favorite flavors there.

And the flavors went so well with the ambergris, it was insane.

That floral orange flower flavor was perfect on top of the musky barnyardy ice cream.

There's a combination of two different things things here, though.

You have ambergree ice cream, it's a callback to the time when ice cream was an expensive luxury, and the cone recipe, that comes from when it's starting to kind of democratize.

Ice cream is much easier to get a hold of in the early 1900s.

Yeah, we sort of combined two eras.

In fact, by the start of the 20th century, when cones were really getting to be popular, ice cream was pretty affordable too.

And things only took off from there.

Prohibition really did great things for the ice cream business.

You heard that right.

Prohibition helped the ice cream business.

That was from 1920 to 1933.

People couldn't go to a bar of an evening, so they went to an ice cream saloon instead.

There were entertainments, there was ice cream, it's a pretty fun night out.

And when Prohibition started in 1920, that is also when a guy named Harry Burt in Ohio got the idea to put ice cream on a stick and sell it from trucks.

And he stuck some bells on from the family bobsled to let people know they were coming.

And the soundtrack of the summer was born.

But this actually gets at the ice cream maker's big problem.

Ice cream was definitely a summertime treat, and ice cream makers bemoaned the fact that they went out of business basically in the winter.

So they tried all sorts of things.

They had ice cream parades, they had ice cream specials.

One advertised ice cream for breakfast because, you know, it's milk, it's calcium, it's good for you, have it for breakfast.

They did special Christmas ice creams.

They really tried all sorts of ways, but I think basically it was having a home freezer that made ice cream more of a year-round treat.

These are the golden days of ice cream.

It's affordable, it's accessible, it's delicious.

People are inventing popsicles, and they're figuring out how to dip ice cream in chocolate to make Eskimo pies.

Good times.

But there is always a but.

We went through a bad patch.

Just like in our cocktail episode, food quality took a dip in the 1970s and 80s.

People kept trying to replace the good stuff with cheaper ingredients.

And also there were those low-fat, low-sugar crazes.

But you need sugar in ice cream for science.

Because the sugar is not just there to give you the sweet flavor, but it's there to control the amount of ice by acting as a freezing point depressant.

So you can maybe take the sugar out and replace it with an artificial sweetener or something like that, as you would do in Diet Coke or something.

So you still might be able to get something that was sweet, but it just wouldn't have the right texture because you wouldn't get the freezing point depression.

You'd get far too much ice in your ice cream.

So it's a really tricky balance.

And I guess that's why ice cream sort of taken thousands of years to evolve into what it is now.

And if there were an easy solution to kind of change some of these ingredients, I guess

we would have discovered it.

These are really interesting scientific challenges.

And that's why ice cream companies employ people like I used to be to be an ice cream scientist.

So you really can't take out the sugar.

Same with dairy fat.

As Chris explained, it's hard to find a fat that has the same properties that are perfect for ice cream.

Basically, ice cream is such a complicated, delicate, unlikely substance that it's really hard to mess with the basic recipe.

But there is some room for innovation.

We had a company come in here and say we would really like to find a new way to make ice cream.

That's John Brisson.

He's a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, and he studies fluid thermodynamics and heat transfer.

Of which the ultimate expression is ice cream, of course.

Of course.

That company that came in to talk to him and his colleague, they wanted to find a new, more energy-efficient way to make ice cream.

We came out of that meeting and looked at one another and said, what if we did it this way, you know, using carbon dioxide?

And we started kicking it around, we started building things.

Using carbon dioxide to make ice cream is a bit like using liquid nitrogen.

It makes the custard mix really cold, really fast.

The carbon dioxide starts out at high pressure, so it's a liquid, not a gas.

Then it gets injected into the ice cream base, and then the researchers pump the mixture through a nozzle.

It expands.

The carbon dioxide flashes into a gas, and when it does that, it cools and it freezes the cream.

It ends up as these little cold powdery flakes.

John told us that they melt on your tongue and turn into that creamy ice cream feeling.

So it worked, but it wasn't exactly normal ice cream.

When we originally went with this, we were looking at it from an energy point of view.

We weren't looking to make fizzy ice cream.

Although, I must admit, when I wrote the proposal, I thought to myself, you know, this may fizz.

And it was a pleasant surprise when it actually did.

Again, it was serendipity, I think.

And it's quite something.

You put it on your tongue and it'll just whoosh on you.

Depending on exactly how much carbon dioxide content you've put into it, you can have it.

It's just blowing through your nose.

Fizzy ice cream.

This is like two of my favorite things in life, fizz and ice cream united.

Total genius.

Mind blown.

I am not as big a fan of fizz as you are, but I'm still insanely curious about what this stuff tastes like.

I mean, ice cream hasn't changed much in hundreds of years.

This sounds crazy.

Yeah, so that's the cool part of his research.

And then here's the devastating part.

No one's making it.

We're all pretty upset about this.

The thing I want most in the world right now is a fizzy ice cream.

I cannot believe.

She is really devastated about this.

I'm also pretty upset we can't believe it.

I love Fizz.

My Soda Stream at Home gets a lot of love.

No, we were running it.

We were making it for various people.

What happened is we got involved with a large company and the marketing people sat there and went out and did the thing that came back to me was they had done a market research and they found that there was no fizzy ice cream on the entire market and so therefore why should we do this?

And no one else is doing it.

And you know, my reply was there's a reason for that.

No one else knows how to do it.

Now mind you, we had a patent disclosure, so you know the technology is out there.

That's really sad.

And it doesn't sound like it's something very easy for folks to replicate at home.

No, we were talking, we were looking at the possibility of making machines that could do it at home, you know, like it would be on your on your

Mickey's face.

That'll go right next to her soda stream.

I really want that.

Entrepreneurs out there, please make this happen.

I want fizzy ice cream in my freezer.

But you know, talking to John, I couldn't help also wondering, so if you can use liquid nitrogen and you can use liquid carbon dioxide, what other gases can you use to make ice cream?

And what would they taste like?

But the only one John could think of that would actually work is methane.

Small problem, bad aftertaste.

You thought ambergree had a barnyard flavor?

Right, I'm sticking with the fizz.

Chris also told us about some other new ice cream developments.

Scientists figured out that some fish that live deep underwater basically have a protein that's like an antifreeze to keep them alive.

So scientists redesigned a yeast to make that antifreeze protein.

It can slow down the growth of ice crystals to help keep ice cream more pliable in the freezer.

And it seems like it can do some other cool things too.

No pun intended.

But they do change the way the ice crystals grow and that has some really interesting effects as well.

So you can make ice crystals that are a different shape and you can make an ice structure that's really hard and solid, for example.

So if you take a normal popsicle, typically you can sort of suck the colour and the flavour out of that if you suck it quite hard.

If you put these nature identical fish proteins from the yeast into the popsicle, it can make basically a continuous ice structure that you can't suck the colour and the flavor out of.

It's a bit like the sort of everlasting gobstopper from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It's sort of a kind of an everlasting popsicle.

And in New York City, a couple of scientists that I know, Arielle Johnson and Kent Kirschenbaum, they figured out how to make an ice cream that starts out stretchy and then melts in your mouth.

They based their idea on traditional Turkish ice cream that uses an endangered orchid to get that stretch effect.

But they found a sustainable replacement.

I thought that what was most exciting about ice cream these days were all of these crazy flavors people are making, but it's really about the texture.

There's fizzy and stretchy and who knows what else.

And really, when it comes to eating it, texture is what ice cream is all about.

A really important thing about getting the texture is not just what the ice cream is like at the moment it enters your mouth, but how it changes while it's in your mouth.

So it's melting all the time you'll have it on your tongue and in your mouth.

And it turns out there's a right and a wrong way to eat your ice cream.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean if you take a really big lump of ice cream and put it in your mouth all in one go, you're probably going to freeze your mouth and

you might get what's known as brain freeze.

So if you do that you may not get the best experience from it.

But if you eat kind of really tiny amounts on a spoon, you're probably not going to feel much of the cold.

You're just going to get it's almost melted by the time you get it into your mouth.

So I guess you want to take the right kind of size portion.

And you want to savour it in your mouth as you're eating it.

So don't sort it straight down.

Allow it to break down in your mouth.

And you should notice the sensation of the texture changing and the flavor becoming more apparent as things melt and the structure breaks down and releases the flavours.

So I guess,

you know, it depends on which particular ice cream it is you're melting.

But take sort of reasonable sized chunks, but not too big, not too small, and take your time overeating it so you can enjoy the sensations sort of all the way from the cold, solid structure as it enters your mouth till it's all till the ice has melted and you're left with a really nice creamy liquid coating your tongue, hopefully.

And now I want some ice cream.

So, what's your favorite flavor?

My mom's homemade rhubarb crumble ice cream.

She has an ice cream maker, but she only makes one flavor of ice cream.

But it is the best.

You?

Oh, I can't decide.

I like too many of them.

I'm more of a generalist.

It just depends on my mood.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Come on, you have to choose.

Imagine it's your last bowl of ice cream on earth.

Only one, my last bowl on earth.

This is a challenge.

Okay, I did really like this rosemary and toasted pine nut at Humphrey's Locum in San Francisco.

I also love lavender ice cream.

I made this awesome creme fresh with blueberry swirl once.

I hate choosing.

A flavor that had a particular impact on me was a chocolate chili ice cream.

I think it's from Christina's in Inman Square in Cambridge.

At the first taste, it was completely chocolate.

It was delicious.

It was wonderful.

But as it went down my throat, there was a burning sensation from the chili.

And there was sort of a very immediate reflex of having something very hot

in my mouth and my throat, such that I went for the nearest, coldest, soothing thing I could find, which was the chocolate chili ice cream right in front of me, proceeded to cool off with that, and then had the cycle repeat itself over and over and over again because of the sort of unique combination of the chocolate foretaste and the sort of burning, spicy chili aftertaste.

Probably one of my very favorite ice cream memories is

from Thailand on the island of Kosamui, and a little man who would ride up in his bicycle with coconut ice cream.

and he'd ring the little bell and I had to have it.

It was so tasty.

My favorite ice cream is chocolate and manella and chocolate chip.

So I'm putting my mic down and running out to the ice cream store.

See ya.

That's it for this week's episode.

Let us know what you thought by emailing us at contact at gastropod.com or tweeting at gastropodcast or commenting on our Facebook page.

Thanks this week to all our guests, author Jerry Quincio and historical gastronomist Sarah Lohman.

I am so visiting her next time I'm in New York.

You can find more of Sarah's adventures in historical cuisine on her blog, 4PoundsFlower.

And she also co-hosts a lecture series that they release as a podcast.

It's called OMGMSG.

Check it out.

We also need to thank Chris Clark, who literally wrote the textbook on the science of ice cream, and John Brisson at MIT, who dangled the possibility of fizzy ice cream in front of me and then took it away.

We have links and all the ice cream info you want on our our website and huge, huge thanks to all of you for your amazing ice cream stories.

We couldn't use them all, but we loved reading and hearing them.

Thanks for listening.

Till next time.

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