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Some people eat pie with a little scoop of ice cream. Some people eat ice cream with a little slice of pie. Whichever category you fall into, you'll find lots of baked goods in the freezer aisle to go with your ice cream purchases.
A few selections:
Ben & Jerry's buys all of its milk and cream from farmers who do not use rBGH (bovine growth hormone) in their cows.
We Americans eat more than 1.74 billion gallons of ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sherbet every year-or about 14 quarts per person. That's a lot of frozen fat and sugar. Not that I'm maligning ice cream-who doesn't love it? But how did it come to be one of the most beloved confections of the 21st century, surpassing even chocolate-chip cookies?
The story of the first ice cream cone is fairly well known. The popular version has it originating at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, when a Syrian immigrant rolled a zalabia-a waffle-like pastry-into a cone for a neighboring ice cream vendor who had run out of serving bowls. A probably more factual account suggests that Italo Marciony, an Italian ice maker, first sold ice cream cones in 1896 from a pushcart in New York, making them on a cone-shaped waffle iron for which he held a patent.
What About Ice Cream Itself?
Some accounts claim that Marco Polo saw ice cream being manufactured on his travels to China in the late 11th century. Others say iced dairy products from a variety of critters-including horse, yak, camel, and buffalo-showed up as early as the seventh century, during the Tang Dynasty in China. One story says Catherine de Medici and her chefs carried the procedure to France when she journeyed there to marry the Duc d'Orleans. Charles I of England is also said to have rewarded his personal ice cream maker with a lifetime pension, provided he kept the recipe confidential-thus ensuring that ice cream would remain a strictly royal dish.
They're romantic notions, but probably not true. More likely, the invention of ice cream paralleled discoveries-some as early as the fourth century-that adding salt to water, snow, or ice produced an extreme cooling effect. The earliest reference to ice cream in the New World was in 1744 in a journal entry describing a dinner party at the home of Thomas Bladen, then-governor of Maryland. The first ice cream machine was developed by Nancy Johnson, a Philadelphia housewife, in the 1840s, and commercial production of ice cream started in Baltimore, in 1851.
The original ice creams were simple but heady confections of cream, eggs, and sugar; this was, of course, long before we were troubled by the deleterious effects of these ingredients. In the 1980s, low-fat ice creams began to show up on grocers' shelves; this was a truly troubling chapter in our history of food, and one that ushered in all manner of ice cream imposters: sugar-free, low-carb, zero-fat, and other horrifying inventions. Most of these, of course, also include artificial flavorings and colorings, rendering a once-simple dish made up of three or four food ingredients-milk, sugar, egg yolks, and a little fruit, vanilla bean, or chocolate-into what amounts to a frozen chemical soup.
Once some of us realized that the artificial ingredients in these ice creams would probably kill us faster than the sugar and fat, we began to demand better alternatives. Which brings us to the present. Ice cream lovers can enjoy an impressive variety of frozen confections, ranging from organic goat's milk ice cream to dairy-free coconut milk to frozen açaí fruit bars to organic versions of the classic Dove bar.
Product Examples: As for the ice cream itself, most still use some derivation of cane sugar, but skip the eggs and substitute skim milk for some of the heavy cream. And most of the selections you'll find on your natural grocer's freezer shelves are either organic or made from milk that's free of added growth hormones.
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