You're Dead to Me - The History of Ice Cream

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Greg Jenner and his guests Dr Annie Gray and Richard Osman get the inside scoop on the history of this delicious dessert while packing in as many of their 'flavourite' ice cream puns as possible (final count: 15!). They savour the dubiously 'legendairy' origins of frozen cream dishes, explore some weird early flavours (whale vomit!), and discover how ice cream went from glamorous luxury to dangerous health risk. Plus Dr Annie teaches us how to make our own ice cream in the Nuance Window!"Research: Chris Wakefield Script: Emma Nagouse, Chris Wakefield and Greg Jenner Project Management: Siefe Miyo Edit Producer: Cornelius Mendez

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. and playing it cool as we explore the history of ice cream. And to help us separate the soft serve from the sorbetto, we're joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a best-selling author and food historian. You'll recognise her from regular TV appearances, such as programmes like Victorian Bakers and The Sweetmakers. She's also the resident food historian on BBC Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet, a fantastic show, and is the author of some splendid books, including Victory in the Kitchen, The Life of Churchill's Cook, and a biography of Queen Victoria's

food tastes. It's Dr Annie Gray. Welcome, Annie. How are you? Hello. Very well, thank you. And in Comedy Corner, he is a television and publishing titan who you will recognise from all the TV. Pointless, House of Games, Insert Name Here, Taskmaster, Child Genius, plus many, many more. He's also the new reigning monarch of crime novels, having smashed the charts with his Thursday murder club. But undoubtedly his greatest achievement was appearing on our History of Chocolate episode of You're Dead to Me. It's the remarkable Richard Osman. It's ice to have you here, Richard. Hello, Greg. How are you?

I'm excited because I think you and I are fellow ice cream lovers, I hope. We are. I'm just wondering why, I know you cover all sorts of issues on this podcast. Why do you never ask me for like the Industrial Revolution, its impacts and, you know, the fall of the Roman Empire? It's always chocolate and ice cream. If you ever do the history of the Sherbert Fountain, I'm going to expect a call. We come to you for this stuff because you are an evangelist for the delicious sweet tasty treats that everyone enjoys for sure i am a viennese evangelist you're me too yeah we know from the previous chocolate episode richard that you are obsessed with what you call street chocolate 12 twixes that sort of thing

so you might be interested to know that annie's dad was a food scientist no come on who helped developed street ice cream back in the 90s. First question I'm going to ask you, Richard, is if you could have any recipe, any ingredient, any design, what would you try and conjure up? You know, I like a twister. I like a feast. So maybe something that combined the two, something with a thick chocolate outer layer, but with like a raspberry sorbet middle, something like that might be fun. Annie, did your dad come up with any raspberry chocolatey designs? and did he come up with anything that didn't quite make it to the shelves yeah we um i've moved to france with my father when i was 16 and one of his tasks was to try and look at why chocolate cracks on things like choc ice is to try and stop it falling off

and down people's tops but he ended up being sidetracked and nestle at the time were working with disney on their tie-up films so he was involved with things like mulan and also winnie the pooh there was a film called pooh's grand adventure in 1997 i actually had to look up the date uh and apparently in the film i haven't seen it pooh gets stuck in a big pit. So one of the things they developed was this ice cream called poo in a hole. And the idea was that it was a little jellied poo, Winnie the Pooh, obviously, stuck in a pit with ice cream all the way around it, or maybe it was a honeypot. Anyway, this thing was thought to be absolutely brilliant and clearly hilarious, and nearly got to the shelves until somebody pointed out that a small jellied poo was also a choke hazard,

given it was aimed predominantly at children. So it was quietly dropped in favour of honeypots and tigger tails, which, to be honest, they just are not as cool, are they, really? Who in the hole? Wow. Honestly, this is nothing against your father, but quite how he kept his job, I find that extraordinary. So, what do you know? This is the first section of the podcast where I have a guess at what our listeners know about the subject.

And frankly, why am I even bothering? It's ice cream. You know what ice cream is. We all scream for ice cream. Maybe you've got some tucked in the freezer right now. Or if your tastes are more luxurious, perhaps you're into your Italian gelato or your towering sumptuous sundaes. Or you just want to go out into the park, find a van, get yourself a 99 with a little flake on top. Maybe you're thinking in terms of the history of ice cream though. Fancy Victorians in fancy hats with fancy parties. Maybe you are thinking of the ice cream van playing green sleeves. There's quite a lot of iconic imagery, I think, with ice cream. But I'm not sure any of us know how far back it goes. So let's grab some spoons and get the scoop on the history of ice cream. And Annie, let's

start at the very beginning with all the myths and legends and the stuff that we cannot in any way prove, but people like to talk about. Can we whip through, or rather Mr. Whippy through, some of the legendary stories of where ice cream comes from? So the first one is Mongolian horseman, who apparently accidentally discovered ice cream while riding around the freezing deserts with cream stored in animal guts. I mean, you only have to think about that one for 30 seconds to just go, no. There's always a food myth involving Marco Polo, who in this case was supposed to bring ice cream to Europe after discovering it in China. The variant on that is Catherine Medici. She's always involved as well. I mean, I think generally speaking in food

history, if you hear the names Marco Polo or Catherine de Medici, you can just assume that it's rubbish. He invented the polo though, to be fair. Yeah, no, no, that's obviously true. Good. In terms of actual history, we do know that there were ancient societies that did enjoy chilled drinks. So the ancient Greeks, the Romans, Chinese, Persians, and they were enjoying chilled drinks and chilled desserts made usually with snow or sometimes with ice. with snow or sometimes with ice. And generally speaking, it is accepted that the first food that kind of resembles ice cream, in that sometimes there's milk involved, dates to the Tang Dynasty in China. It wasn't ice cream, though. It was a very, very distant ancestor.

Sounds more like a sorbet, doesn't it? Tang. But, I mean, Richard, there are some pretty unusual culinary components in these Tang Dynasty dishes. Do you want to have a guess at what the ingredients were? Let's say chicken's feet. Whenever you're in a Chinese supermarket, and I've been over there for a few times, I love it. Whenever you, in the distance, spy what looks like an incredibly cool bag of sweets, it's always a bag of chicken's feet. Always. The Chinese green tea.

That's a nice flavour, actually, for an ice cream. I wouldn't mind that at all. Annie, the ingredient I've got written here, slightly rarer to find. Frozen dragon brains? Yeah, the basic mixture was usually something like rice or milk, cow, goat, buffalo milk usually. And then there were flavours added. So camphor was one which was supposed to make the whole thing look like snow. And then there were these sort of unidentifiable things, like dragon brain fragment and also dragon eyeball powder. And the idea was you loaded all of these into sort of metal tubes and then buried them in snow, and they were chilled rather than ice cream. And they were healthy.

Dragon brain fragment would presumably be a medicinal ingredient. Sorry, Greg, were you trying to get me to guess that? Yeah. Tell you what, Richard, Why don't you take a little guess at what they used to have? Oh, let me have a little think. Is it dragon brain? It's the obvious guess, Richard. I don't know why you're complaining about it. I'm annoyed I didn't say rice, to be fair. Yeah, actually, rice was probably the obvious one. Should have thought of that. In medieval India, we've also got kulfi, which is made from evaporated milk flavoured with pistachio and saffron.

There's also Turkish dondurma, which is at least 300 years old, we think. That's a very thick type of ice cream made with flour milled from wild orchids. So we've got a really lovely start to this episode in terms of getting around the globe, different types of ingredients and flavours. But how on earth does anyone keep this stuff cool, Annie? I mean, let's talk very basic food technology here. How do you freeze or chill cream or water in these pretty warm climates? These were all chilled rather than frozen.

That comes a bit later. But they all used ice or snow. And ice at this point is what we would now call, or what was called in the Victorian period, really, natural ice, which meant that you had to harvest ice. And there was a whole ice harvesting industry. Often you would go up a mountain and you would harvest your ice from a mountaintop, or you might chisel ice out of frozen fields in the winter, so frozen rice paddies a lot of the time, and then you'd store it in an ice house. The oldest recorded ice houses were recorded 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, so around Iran

and Turkey in modern parlance. And then they spread really quickly and they evolved into loads oldest recorded ice houses were recorded 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, so around Iran and Turkey in modern parlance. And then they spread really quickly and they evolved into loads of different designs. There were ones above ground, ones below ground, and the ice would keep for years, two or three years in some cases. So these were amazing pieces of technology. Pretty impressive. I'm not sure I'd go up a mountain to get ice though. I mean, I like ice cream, but it's a long way to go, isn't it? It lot further than the corner shop would you make your own ice cream richard if you had to fetch it first i wouldn't make my own ice cream if i had to go and buy the milk you know there are people who will make it for you right it literally is their job

they spent millions there's a guy who invented a thing called poo in the hole there's people out there who are making ice cream. But when do we get a familiar ice cream dish that's starting to look like what I'm thinking of in my head as ice cream? The big breakthrough is finding out how you can freeze a mixture rather than just chill a mixture. That comes really in the 16th century. And it's the realisation that if you add salt or saltpeter to the ice, you will lower its temperature, you'll therefore create an endothermic reaction, and any liquid that is then placed in a metal tube into that ice and salt mixture will eventually freeze.

So there's quite a bit of debate as to where that reaction was first discovered. Some people say it was in India, some in China, and certainly we know that in Italy it was also being written about at the same time. So there are written depictions of this process from the 1530s, and then it's described properly by a Neapolitan alchemist called Giovanna Battista della Porta in 1589. And it really is magic. I mean, this thing is written about as something you can do as a table trick. You can turn this liquid into something frozen at the table and wow your guests. And it slowly spreads across Europe. But at that point, they're still not making ice cream. They're making partially frozen drinks, I would say. Kind of your slush puppy.

It's thought that European travellers had seen chilled Arab drinks known as shirab or shirabd, which were flavoured with fruits. Kind of are talking about sherbet fountains, really. But not quite. They become a bit of a craze, especially in Italy. And it's exotic, and it's interesting, and it's cold as well. I mean, this is really quite funky. Okay, so there's a cool new craze sweeping through European nobility. How do you think the medical profession react to this, Richard?

Do you think they're keen? Yeah, my understanding of ice cream is, I imagine, right from the beginning, they knew it was good for you. Obviously, medical science knows now that it's very good for you but uh so yeah perhaps right at the beginning they thought it was bad for you but seemed laughable now you are correct the quacks indeed believed it would cause paralysis uh which is quite severe I mean it's worse than an ice cream headache isn't it wow is it foodie at this time or is it still liquidy drinky and out of a cuppy in the 17th century? We hit peak ice cream. We hit the actual birth of ice cream and water ices, which is what we would now call sorbets,

some point in the middle of the 17th century. We've got the civil war in Britain with people cutting heads off kings and you've got war everywhere else and you've got all these new ingredients arriving. And they usually start off as being based on water so what became known as water ices and it's water plus fruit usually or some other flavouring but there are also variants that use cream that use milk which are of course what we would now call ice cream and at the time they were called cream ice so cream ice and water ice there are recipes in printed manuscripts from the 1670s. But usually things don't get into print for about 30 years after they first start circulating. So by the time someone's actually thought

to write it down and print it, people are already eating it. The earliest printed recipe comes from a man called Sûr d'Emery, who might be Nicolas Emery, who might have been Louis XIV's apothecary, but by the time you get to that many mights, he also might not have been. So we're not quite sure who it was.

He's also, he's quite dodgy with his instructions because he forgets the crucial bit where you can't just put the mixture in a metal pot and bury it in ice and salt. You actually have to churn it. Otherwise you just get literally frozen cream. So then you sort of go forward a bit and by the 1690s, you've got proper recipes that we could almost follow. There's a book called Le Scalo alla Moderna in 1692. There's a book called Le Scalo alla Moderna in 1692. There's a book called La Maison Reglée by a man called Nicolas Audigier, also 1690s. And you really do start to see the birth of ice cream as something that people can pick up a book and read about and go, wow, that sounds weird, but I'll have a go.

And it does spread out and become a really, really kind of fantastical thing that people want to eat very quickly. And it's spreading through cafe culture too. We get the birth of cafes in France in the 1680s with the Procop Cafe, which is a very fancy restaurant. And we get people like Voltaire, the great philosopher and writer and historian, saying that ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal, which is a great line. I love that. So we've got some fancy types. They're writing recipes. People are eating it perhaps in cafes, restaurants. They're having it at fancy dinner parties.

And there's also Filippo Baldini, Annie, who produces the first book dedicated solely to making desserts. Richard, you've already said that ice cream is good for us, as we well know. Well, this is Baldini's idea. He's saying he's got a variety of flavors and they cure a variety of ailments. So which three flavors and which three ailments do you think he was joining up? I dread to think what ailment poo in the hole would solve. Listen, vanilla, I'm guessing there must be a reason we still have vanilla today. So that must have been a very early flavor.

Interesting. Everything they claimed solved consumption. So maybe vanilla for consumption good guess maybe hazelnut and that would be for dysentery famously vanilla hazelnut coffee and that would be for uh color blindness well i think you'd make an excellent 18th century doctor. I mean, that's very convincing. None of those are right, but that doesn't matter. So, Annie, what were Baldini's suggestions?

So cinnamon was for pain relief and calming the nerves. And then you had lemon, which was for stomach upsets. So, you know, I mean, really, it's not so much consumption as constipation that people are very worried about in the 17th century. And then chocolate, which was to improve your move and also relieve gout i mean they're not completely without scientific merit although he did also say that goat's milk ice cream would help with scurvy so i think those sound pretty medicinal to me cinnamon lemon chocolate for mood for relief of aches and pains i mean that's my diet that's certainly how I would treat a headache or a dog's tummy is get the ice cream out.

So I have no problems with Baldini. There were some slightly less appetising flavours though. Annie, 1768, a Frenchman called Monsieur Emy published a compilation of ice creams and there's some pretty interesting flavour combinations in here. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on your point of view as to whether or not you'd find them disgusting or not. But the saffron, fine. Rice, okay, I mean, I think it depends on your point of view as to whether or not you'd find them disgusting or not. But the saffron, fine.

Rice, OK, I get that. Parmesan, which I've made and is absolutely delicious, but it is an acquired taste. Truffles, not the chocolate type. And a thing called huacaca, which was a spice blend, which he said probably mainly included ambergris, which is a waste product expelled by whales through their mouth. So whale vomit. And he also likes adding texture to things. So he uses filberts, which are nuts, macaroons, rye breadcrumbs.

Often he sieves them out before serving, but then he also then puts them on top. And he has a brilliant one called potpourri, which isn't dried flowers that smell of old ages knicker drawers, but it's just his version of everything put together. And then there are other authors as well who do things with herbs like rosemary or tarragon. And also there are vegetable based ones, which my favourite one is with artichokes, to think of globe artichokes, which would be probably okay. I grew up in the very vanilla era of ice cream, but literally. And it was only sort of in the 90s when all these ridiculous flavours came along,

and Ben & Jerry's. But that sounds like that's what they were doing back then, putting different textures in them, throwing everything in. That's like a rocky road. So we obviously went from that to a very boring palette of ice creams when they got into the British supermarkets. I'd say that the flavours were better in the 18th century, to be honest. There was a far greater range, and they were less based on chocolate i'm not convinced about parmesan

though i'm sorry that just weird to me it's one of my absolute favorites really annie it really is yeah if you serve it today and you just try this serve it today at a really posh dinner party with your mates around and serve it with a little fan of melon and some shavings of parma ham and then some micro herbs on top and maybe a little bit of basil oil drizzled on top. And people would just be like, oh my God, you're so Michelin starred. Where did you learn this?

Was it on the bake-off? Was it on MasterChef? It's almost like a really intense vanilla. It's not that feety. I honestly, honestly, it isn't. They put that on the side of the packet. Not that feety, honestly honestly it isn't they put that on the side of the packet not that feety dr annie gray okay so you've got artichoke avocado anise violet asparagus whale vomit grated cheese and textured ice cream in the 18th century richard so as you say ben and jerry's ain't got anything on the frenchman monsieur me this is still an elite food, right? This is a food for rich,

for posh, for people who can have dinner parties where servants present the food to them. Sugar being a key ingredient, which of course enslaved people are forced to work on plantations far away, so it's shipped across. It's hugely expensive. It's kept under lock and key. Sugar is that valuable. And then you've got kings and queens consuming ice cream. We know Catherine the Great had her own special ice cream serving dishes and cutlery. But let's get back towards Britain. Is it Charles II of England who's the first British monarch to have ice cream? He's the first person recorded as having ice cream, certainly. There's a feast of St George at Windsor in May 1671, and we've got the menu for it. So we know there was ice cream along with a gallon of red strawberries and two gallons of white menu for it so we know there was ice cream along with a gallon of red

strawberries and two gallons of white strawberries so you know quite exclusive lovely stuff. James the first had an ice house the first ice house in Britain was 1622 at Greenwich and that was one which was the kind of classic British design which is essentially a massive great hole in the ground with a kind of brick igloo on top so you filled your massive great hole with ice your brick igloo kept all of the heat and the air out and then your ice would keep in that for really years and years but that was probably just for these chilled drinks that were so popular so royalty certainly helped to put it on the map in Britain but it wasn't just because of them that it started to spread the other royal connection is of course until Henry VIII wrote Greensleeves you never knew when the ice cream van was coming

now I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to fact check richard osmond because you are a national treasure and i know he didn't write green sleeves he didn't write it and it's a famous thing but annie we want to know about ordinary people having ice creams when do we start to get it trickling down into the middle classes are they making it at home have we got recipe books not in the 17th century but it does spread out fairly fast. So like a lot of these new foods, they come in via people that have worked abroad and tasted them abroad. So the first recipe in Europe actually to be written down is written down by an English woman, Lady Anne Fanshaw, in her manuscript cookery book, which dates to the mid-1660s. She makes the same mistake that

early authors make and forgets to tell you to churn it so you end up with a block of ice. It's fine. It is still a recipe for icy cream, as she puts it. Icy cream. Lovely. Icy cream. Her husband had been the ambassador to Spain,

so it's very much part of this sort of pan-European tradition. Her friend, Grace Countess Glanville, also wrote a recipe for icy cream into her book, flavoured with orange flower water. And then after that, there's this steady trickle into books. There's a woman called Mary Eales who claimed that she was the confectioner to Queen Anne, but probably wasn't. Do you know what?

Nobody's fact-checking in the 18th century. By the time you get to the middle of the 18th century, really, there are recipe books being aimed very much at the gentry and the upper middle class. Books like Hannah Glass, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, and they do have instructions in. We're pretty certain that ice cream was certainly within reach of those with a bit of money. By the time you get to the end of the 18th century,

I mean, you only need to read the novels of Jane Austen to read about people nipping down to Pulteney Bridge to go and get some ices. At that point, you can go out and you can have an ice with your friends and gossip about the gorgeous Colin Firth, I mean, Mr. Darcy. Or even if you don't have the capacity or the knowledge to make them at home, by this point, you can order ice cream or ices as they were known. So you just call out or call into a caterer or a confectioner. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility to think of an upper middle class family going, right, we need ice cream for our dessert tonight.

We're going to have it ordered in. It's going to arrive. It's going to be beautifully moulded and we're going to be able to put it on our table. And hey, presto, Parmesan ice cream for all. You mentioned mould there, actually. Richard, there's a chap called Frederick Nutt who published a book in 1789 that recommended freezing mixtures in moulds. Do you want to guess what shapes he's recommending? There's some fun ones. Like a castle, sandcastle type of mould. The Royal Pavilion.

Oh, look at you. Yeah, you like? I've just been in Brighton for the last two weeks. Hold on, Brighton dog track? I'm trying to think. Pineapples, pears, gherkins, asparagus and a wild boar head. So it's quite a weird change of pace to go from gherkins and then go, you know what? No, that's not it.

Wild boars. I like your architectural journey there. I bet they did that as well. There was one called a turban. The turban was also a specific dessert. But I suppose if you sort of squint, that would look a little bit like those beautiful tops to the Brighton Pavilion so not a million miles away that's a point for me we should also talk about 18th century America because this ice cream fashion crosses the Atlantic and it gets across to the house of Thomas Jefferson he's got an ice house he's a big fan

of ice creams and so is George Washington, the first American president. In the year 1790, he spent $200 on ice cream, which in modern money, £5,000. That's like going to the cinema. And then we get America's first ice cream parlor in 1790. Opens in New York. And then we get a series of new pioneers. And it's quite interesting here, because we have women and also African Americans who are contributing quite importantly to the growth of ice cream in American society in the 1800s. So do you want to run us through a few

of the names? There's always been a link between confectionery and women. And I think that sort of drove it. But also, of course, in America, an awful lot of domestic servants were either enslaved or free blacks. So that link between African Americans, in America, an awful lot of domestic servants were either enslaved or free blacks. So that link between African-Americans, in particular African-American women, there were lots of reasons for it. But it's good and nice, I think, that we actually know some of the people's names attached to them. So there was a woman in Wilmington in Delaware, a freed black slave called Mrs. Jeremiah Shad, who was known usually as Aunt Sally Shad, which is a great name. is Jeremiah Shad, who was known usually as Aunt Sally Shad, which is a great name. And she was very, very famous for her ice cream, to the extent that it's said that Dolly Madison traveled to Wilmington just to try it. And then James Madison, obviously Dolly's husband, who was I think the

fourth president of the States, employed a man called Augustus Jackson, who became known later on as the father of ice cream. There's not a lot known about him. We know he worked as a cook in the White House in the 1820s. And then he moved to Philadelphia in the 1830s and opened his own catering and confectionery business. And he became incredibly wealthy and passed his business on to his children. So later on, he was kind of rediscovered and people were going, oh my goodness, look at this amazing man who we've never heard of. It's absolutely great. So there are these sort of quietly iconic figures. And those are just really two of them. His children were called Hagen and Das.

Yeah, so Augustus Jackson is a big deal. He's the father of ice cream in the USA. They're making it by hand, but we then get the arrival of machinery. But it's not quite industrial practices. We're not talking big old factories churning out the ice cream. Not yet. Up to this point, your basic mechanism is a wooden bucket full of ice and salt, crushed ice and salt. And into that wooden bucket, you have what's called a freezing pail or a sorbetier. And it's basically a pewter cylinder with a lid on top. It's not sophisticated,

but it does work. So you put your pewter freezing pail in your ice and salt, you put your mixture into that, you stir it, you put the lid on, you go away your rice and salt you put your mixture into that you stir it you put the lid on you go away you come back you stir it and that's it it is quite time consuming it takes about 45 minutes to make ice cream but then in 1843 you get two patents one in philadelphia from a housewife apparently called nancy johnson and then the other one is in london and that's from a man called thomas masters and these are a step beyond so these have still got a pewter freezing pail and they've still got a wooden bucket but now they have this affair of cogs and a handle on top

and the idea is you put your mixture in and you turn the handle and they're absolutely bloody stupid quite frankly because the ice corrodes them and they stop working really, really quickly but they promise magic and they do get used. I mean an awful lot of people between you me and the entire audience carry on using the basic pail and bucket scenario because it's kind

of foolproof and it won't break and every single one i've got hold of so far i've broken very quickly thomas masters also promotes his stuff by publishing a book of ice cream recipes to go with his pail he also suggests that you should use the leftover ice as a glittering sculpture for the table, which is equally bloody stupid because it's covered in salt and it will leave stains on absolutely everything. On paper, and to our modern eyes, it looks like an improvement, but it's not really. But it does pave the way for later proto factories using this idea of hand-cranked technology, scaling it up but all of it to me is a bit of a distraction because in the 19th century you also get one of the absolute heroes

of ice cream in the uk a woman called agnes marshall who was known as the queen of isis the queen of isis the queen of isis oh i see it's few you don't want to get the queen of isis and the queen of isis mixed up no yeah so So the Queen of Ice is Agnes Marshall. She's a proper food pioneer. She's very cool. And she's doing some really state-of-the-art food tech stuff, isn't she, Annie? She's really innovating. Agnes Marshall is absolutely brilliant.

She's an entrepreneur. She's an absolute powerhouse. She was born in 1855. And then in 1883, she and her husband took over the Mortimer Street School of Cookery, which was a quite well established and quite well known cookery school. And she ran an employment agency for superior cooks. And she also ran this school specialising very much in ice cream. She published four books, two of which are generic cookery books. And then she published these extraordinary ice cream books and the Book of Ices. I think it deserves to be in everybody's kitchen still. She was also an

inventor. She invented an ice cave. So when you've moulded your ice cream, you put your mould in your ice cave covered with lard and brown paper and then it will set properly. She also pioneered an ice cream maker, a hand-churned one, which promised to freeze ice cream in three minutes. It might inadvertently kill you because it was made of zinc, let's not worry about that and she sold petrochemical dyes and flavorings which were just coming on the market so you could not only make ice cream in three minutes and mold it and freeze it in her ice cave but you could also dye it with agnes marshall's patent food coloring so you could have bright purple ice cream flavored with artificial violet i mean honestly what's not to like?

Sounds very much like a proto-Heston Blumenthal, someone who loves cooking but also loves the science of it and is pushing it in various different directions and playing about with texture and colour and all sorts of things. Yeah, and you're right with the Heston analogy because Heston famously would get his gloves and his goggles on and Agnes gets there first. She uses liquid nitrogen.

This is 120 years ago. That's cool. Where's her TV show? So Agnes Marshall. Someone should get a movie made about her. It'd be fun. Marshall Law. She fights crime by hurling ice cream at it.

Perfect. So it's time we get on to everyone's favourite, the hokey pokey. You know what the hokey pokey is, don't you? Oh, do I ever? Yeah, listen, my assumption is it's something like the tutti frutti, but perhaps it's not. Hokey pokey, anything to do with poo in a hole? Hokey pokey is pretty straightforward. You put your left arm in, your left arm out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about, and ice cream. And a hokey pokey, if I remember rightly, mangled English equivalent of an Italian phrase. Is that right? Yes, it probably comes from ucci poco, which is oh how little, i.e. really, really cheap.

And it's cheap street ice cream. So we're now in the middle of the 19th century. This is the big phase of the working class ice cream expansion. What kind of happened was you got these street vendors and they found they didn't really have a market of the working class ice cream expansion what kind of happened was you got these street vendors and they found they didn't really have a market among the working classes except among maids who had tasted ice cream in the big houses they worked in and spread the joy of it among their relatives and their friends so slowly the craze for ice cream spread out and by the time you got to the 1870s you also had a lot of political turmoil,

especially in Italy, which of course, going back to the beginning was very much part of the home of ice cream. So a lot of Italians fled, many of them came to Britain, and they started working as itinerant ice cream sellers. And they would be operating on incredibly small margins selling really cheap ice cream. And hokey pokey was this generic street cry. But there was also a specific type of ice cream, just to confuse matters, called Hokey Pokey, which was a bit like the Neapolitan. It was multicoloured, stripy ice cream sold in little grease wax paper twists. So you could buy it and then you could take it away and you could stuff it into your face. One writer said it was dreadfully sweet, dreadfully cold and hard as a brick. And there were lots of rumours that it was actually made from turnip

because turnips were cheaper than milk. And then you also got a thing called the penny lick, which was a small, thick glass designed to look bigger than it actually was. And you would put a little bit of ice cream in that, hand it to the punter who would literally lick it out and just hand the glass back again. Does that glass get washed? Well, of a sort.

It gets sort of dipped in water, which is kind of sitting on the counter. Yeah, conditions were pretty awful for the Italians. They were working in kind of dank, slum-like cellars. And this penny licks business was pretty awful. There was a set of scientists that went out to really uncover some of the abuses of street foods in 1981. And they examined examples of water used by the street vendors. And they described that water as being evil smelling, thickish, slimy liquid, full of bacteria and sediments. And when they looked at it under a microscope, they found

there was human hair, animal hair, coal dust, saliva, fleas. Basically, you got a penny lick. And if you were really lucky, you got free tuberculosis or free cholera. So the government banned them in 1899. Yeah, and I think they called that hooky-pooky. Hokey-pokey wasn't banned, but penny licks were banned. Is that right? Yeah. London City Council also managed to pass regulation to ban ice cream being manufactured in a living room or a room containing a toilet shows you the conditions that people were working under this is not a great era for food hygiene no proper poo in the hole are you backing away from liking ice cream now oh listen you'd have to go a lot further than that for me to not like ice cream the fascinating

thing all the way through this is it must be very rare in history for a new food stuff or drink to turn up that was so unlike anything that anyone had ever had before one of those things where the first time you taste it you think god i've literally never had this experience you look sometimes on youtube and i'm not saying do this but occasionally you'll see people have filmed their baby having its first ever taste of ice cream and the babies go absolutely crazy and that would have been the same for like the whole population right they would have like one penny lick and they it doesn't matter what's in it they just go wow i have never tasted anything like that before which is one of the beauties of ice cream yeah it absolutely is obviously ice cream is made of milk and in the 19th century we don't have

pasteurization yet and so we've got quite a lot of pretty horrible diseases associated with ice cream is made of milk. And in the 19th century, we don't have pasteurization yet. And so we've got quite a lot of pretty horrible diseases associated with ice cream. Cholera, TB. it. I mean, if you're doing gelato, a custard-based ice cream, then great, because you will be boiling that custard, or at least you'll be taking it up to high enough temperatures to kill off most of the bacteria. Americans had a particular issue. So American ice cream was often based on urban cows. Kind of sounds quite cool, doesn't it? You've got urban cows wandering around the streets. I love the idea of an urban cow. Beating up the rural ones. They tend to be fed on the refuse from distilleries so they were very badly fed they never saw sunlight they were often very diseased themselves so of course their milk was then diseased then you've got the milk sitting out a lot of the time so notoriously

british milk sometimes was adulterated with things like sheep brains to make it more creamy the milk could be lethal in the us it ended up being pasteurised after the 1890s and in the UK it wasn't until the 1940s. So even if you went to a really high class establishment you'd probably be okay because reputation mattered but you always risk getting really ill from ice cream in particular. I think I would have recommended that perhaps you stuck to a nice water ice but then even then you've got the water problem too.

So it was a little bit death in the freezing pot. Crikey. My favourite ever ice cream story from my life was when I was a student, I worked at Blockbuster Videos and one day the manager phoned me up and said, the ice cream freezer has broken. By law, we're not allowed to sell it, but it's still cold.

Get down here fast. I raced down there with a bin bag and I went home with 18 tubs of haagen-dazs and i got back into my flat with my girlfriend now wife and said remove all the food from the freezer we're just putting ice cream in and so brilliant loved it best day ever we both got diphtheria but come on we knew the risks in terms of health reforms we do get pasteurization coming in in the 1890s and then in 1940s in the UK. The 1890s is a bit of a golden era, particularly in American ice cream history, because we do get several classic ice cream desserts.

Do you want to guess what they are, Richard? I'll say Arctic Roll, Baked Alaska. Baked Alaska, yes. The first ever Cone. Oh, interesting. We'll get to Cones later. We're not quite there yet. So in the 1890s, we get ice cream soda, the first ice cream sundae, we get Neapolitan ice cream, that lovely vanilla strawberry chocolate combo, and we get baked Alaska, one of my favourites, and banana split as well. Last time we had you on, you talked about that decade where

all the chocolate bars came out. 1930s. Yeah, and so here we have our golden period of ice cream designs. 1890s, wow. Thank you, 1890s. It's's not bad is it? But the ice cream cone, this is a story in itself. Firstly wafers go back to the Romans we think, Romans and Greeks. We know people ate them in medieval times, that's no problem. But the ice cream cone, there's a lot of people claiming to have invented it. The cone might have appeared in 1807 in France. There's a picture of a cafe called Frascati's which seems to show people probably eating ice cream but there's no evidence beyond this picture Agnes Marshall had a recipe in one of her books an 1888 volume for ice cream cornets but they were made out of nougatine apart from anything else

some of the others were wafery things and and also they weren't cones to pick up any ice cream from they were a way of presenting ice cream at the dessert table so very much intended to be eaten with a knife and fork then there was an american patent in 1903 but that was more of a sort of edible cup than a cone exactly and then you get the 1904 world fair in st louis missouri now the 1904 world fair is one of those things where it's a little bit like Catherine Medici and Marco Polo. Everything in America was invented at the 1904 World Fair, except obviously it wasn't. It seems to have been the location for popularising a lot of things, including ice cream cones. Some people have suggested the cones at the St. Louis World Fair were actually waffles,

but actually waffles and wafers are very related. And then by the middle of the 20th century, there were five different individuals who were all claiming that they invented the cone, including the man who had the patent in 1983 for the cone that wasn't a cone because it was a cup. So it is quite a complicated and very contested story. Richard, where do you stand on the waffle wafer debate? Well, you get cones that are waffle. They a waffle pattern so i don't know if that makes them a waffle but yeah we used to call them ice cream cornets and i completely forgot until you just said ice cream cornet which i guess is where we get cornetto from as well but we don't call them cornets anymore right we call them cones what happened there i don't know listen maybe if

we had an historian here but we used to call them ice cream cornets when i was little but they're all related i mean corn just means horn in most of the Latin languages. And of course, a cone is a horn shape. And cornet just means hornet. I've never heard ice cream cornet. But now you say Cornetto, I'm like, yeah, obviously. Of course. But that's never occurred to me.

The Cornetto trilogy of films clearly dates back to the early 1800s. So in the end, the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers, they evaluated the five competing claims in 1952 and decided that the winner of the Cone Inventor Award was Ernest Hamwe, who was a Syrian immigrant to America. But it's not the end of the drama, Annie, because there's another health hazard in American history with ice creams. 1910, boric acid.

That sounds bad. Can you tell us more? It's not a great thing to be eating, to be honest. I mean, a little bit of it won't kill you but it probably give you a horrible stomach by 1910 demand was absolutely booming for cones in the states and of course people were competing on price as much as they were on anything else and boric acid really helps to stiffen your cone in the mold um but goodness i mean well done everyone for not commenting anyway so boric acid really helps to stiffen your horn i mean cone and it got into a lot of cones a lot of people were very ill because of it they confiscated 4.5 million cones in new york and they prosecuted a lot of manufacturers but

the thing is cones are a really good delivery mechanism for ice cream and even if they're going to give you a really horrible upset stomach because of the acid they're not going to necessarily give you cholera so ultimately a really horrible upset stomach because of the acid, they're not going to necessarily give you cholera. So ultimately, they remained really popular, especially because of the prosecutions which showed people were taking food hygiene and food safety seriously. In the 20 years after they were first introduced in the States, they sold 245 million cones. So that just shows that not only were cones popular, but ice cream was now really something that was absolutely universal, very much for the masses. And then we get quite an important shift in the 1920s, where we get that move away from natural ice, you know, the stuff that people find up a mountain,

and we see the introduction of artificial refrigerated ice, which means obviously we've got refrigerators now and freezers and that kind of technology. And we're getting pre-packed ice cream being sold in shops, in freezers. And we also get the first ice cream van 1925 in the usa and then there's another chap we should probably mention richard are you familiar with the walls ice cream company oh gosh very much so yeah yeah founded by thomas walls and of course he got his start in which food industry sausages it was sausages yeah maybe it's obvious but how do you pivot from sausages to ice cream? And also, why? Well, have you ever tried selling hot sausages in the middle of summer? Is the kind of short answer. And Thomas Walls was one of these amazing entrepreneurs that you get in these periods where you kind of look at them and think, well, life wouldn't have been the same without them.

So he looked around at the hot sausage market and thought this isn't happening. But ice cream market that's pretty good so i'm still laughing at the idea of the hot sausage market that sounds like someone's tinder just flicking through for some hot sausage it's the name of a club in vauxhall isn't it sausage market so he bought 10 ice cream tricycles that would go around london this again is the beauty of that delivery system where you've just got a pewter pail in ice and salt because you don't need anything really expensive you can literally have a tricycle with a box on the back full of ice and salt and you've got your pewter freezing pail in it and you can scoop your ice cream out of it so it's quite a canny move so he had these 10 tricycles all with signs saying stop me and buy one and people did so he expanded and expanded and expanded and by 1939 the company had 8,500 tricycles 160 depots across Britain and it was absolutely huge but the tricycles were

requisitioned during the second world war and they never really came back again because ice cream was very much I mean it wasn't banned per se but it was pretty difficult to get hold of what with you know milk and sugar and all of those other rationed ingredients. We are racing towards the end of the episode, but Annie, we haven't mentioned the 99 Flake, an iconic thing for, I'm guessing, around the world. I was going to say for Brits. Richard, I mean, you've travelled more than I have, I'm sure. Have you seen the Flake further afield? No, pretty much. It's a British, again, that was a really early chocolate bar invention, like the 1910s and 1920s, where it would feel like a kind of very modern one because it feels very unusual. But yeah, I think it was a British invention. Yeah, I think, Annie, is that right? Do we have a date on the flake?

We do. It's a 1930s invention developed by Cadbury's very specifically for use in ice cream, because according to my father, there's a lot of tech that has to go into when you make chocolate and ice cream and wafers and things like that meat. What else happens between the wars? You've got soft serve ice cream as well. That's a really big thing that comes in. It comes in the States just before the Second World War

and obviously it takes a bit longer to get going here because of the sort of 14 years of rationing scenario. And soft serve is one of those things that some people say is really dodgy but it largely depends if you know what's in it and you don't mind paying for air and you like the texture then what's the problem there's a thing called overrun which is how much air you can whip into your ice cream and normally if you buy a sort of good commercial ice cream you'll have something like 20 to 40 percent overrun so 20 to 40 percent air in it and that will give you

that beautiful fluffy mouthfeel mr whippies and mr softies and the kind of soft serve ice cream have up to 150 percent so you're you're more than doubling how is that possible the magic of science is there more air than ice cream far more air than ice cream one of the big developments between the wars and after the war is development within food tech so that you can play with emulsifiers and gelling agents, milk powders and various things that you can put in your ice cream, which to purists are making it all a horrible industrial product that you shouldn't touch. And to those that really like Mr. Whippy, Mr. Softy and those things are actually a miracle of science because they mean that ice cream can be cheaper and more stable and safer for everyone to eat. And what's the truth of Margaret Thatcher being one of the research scientists behind Mr. Whippy, which I think is often said?

She was a very, very small part of a small paper published that looked at some of the science behind Overrun. So she had nothing to do with the invention of Mr. Whippy. That was all in the States. I knew it. That's always the case on these podcasts. You know that thing that we've always held to be self-evident? Is that true? Oh, it's not true. Oh, it isn't true. Okay, good. I think usually with food history, certainly, if it seems too good to be true and it seems like too nice a story, it's going to be rubbish.

But I thought I would ask because otherwise everyone on Twitter will ask, won't they? Oh, goodness me. Yes, yes, yes. But Margaret Thatcher invented Mr. Whippy. At the 1904 World Fair, right? That's where she did it. Exactly, exactly. Having sort of based it on a recipe by Marco Polo who married Catherine Medici. Exactly. The Nuance Window! That brings us on to The Nuance Window.

This is where Richard and I get to chill out and listen to Annie as she gets two minutes to tell us something we need to know about the history of ice cream. But actually, not just the history of ice cream, you're going to tell us how to make ice cream. Without much further ado, Dr Annie Gray, how do we make ice cream, please? The thing about all of this stuff is we've talked about the exothermic reaction

and we've talked about freezing pails, but you can do it at home. And I would urge anyone to try it because it's not only really, really good fun, the exothermic reaction and we've talked about freezing pails but you can do it at home and I would urge anyone to try it because it's not only really really good fun but you also end up with really good ice cream. So what I want you to do is I want you to get yourself a big plastic bowl, it's important that it's plastic or possibly metal because otherwise you're going to smash your ceramic bowl. You're going to get a bag of ice, one of those standard supermarket ones, preferably crushed but if not then you're going to crush it yourself by using a big hammer or mallet. Then you're going to put a layer of your crushed ice in the bottom of your bowl and you're going

to cover that with just salt. Any salt will do, even that sort of really awful dodgy stuff that's really fine-grained. So there's a layer of that in the bowl. Then you need a metal lidded container. It can be a biscuit tin, it can be a coffee canister anything as long as it's sort of vaguely tubular and will fit in your bowl and has a lid stand that in with the lid on in your bowl full of crushed ice and salt and then pile around the edges of that more ice more salt you cannot put too much salt in so keep going and shrimp it down a bit with a wooden spoon make sure that you've got a rag a wet rag next to you just to wipe your hands on. Otherwise, you're going to get salt absolutely everywhere.

Then you're going to get your ice cream mixture. And the easiest mixture, and this comes from Aggie Marshall, of course, in the 1880s, is a pint of water, the juice of one lemon and then a cup. So about 120 milliliters of jam, whatever jam you want to. It can be anything. I tend to use marmalade because I really, really like it. You're going to mix all of that up and then you're going to put that in your canister in the middle and you're going to put the lid on and leave it and then come back and stir it and you will see it start to freeze on the outside. So you go away, you come back,

you keep churning it. The secret to this stuff is to churn it and churn it and churn it and churn it. Give yourself about 30 minutes and you will have the best ice cream you've ever tasted and you're going to love yourself forever. Amazing. Richard, you said before you get people to make it for you, but are you tempted? No, I'm still going to get people to make it for me. But if my kids were still young, yeah, that would definitely kill an hour, which is all you're ever looking for when your kids are young, isn't it? Exactly the children the hammer is all i'd say but yes apart from that all good i'm surprised about the jam bit that took me by surprise i didn't see marmalade coming anywhere into this it's a really good way of just making a fruit ice cream you can do it with milk or with cream you just swap the water for the cream and then you've got ice cream but it's much easier

with water and also if you are doing it with children you can see the color change so if you use marmalade it will go from being a sort of slightly wee, kind of like Uranus, kind of weird fawn colour. And then as it freezes, it will go sort of white, which is slightly less alarming, to be honest. So what do you know now? Well, with all that new knowledge in our heads, it's time to see how much knowledge has gone into Richard's head.

Famously, Richard, you are renowned for being brainy and for hosting quizzes. So the tables have turned. I forgot about this bit, though. I get to wield a tiny bit of power here. How are you feeling? Feeling confident? I feel, well, listen, even if I do badly, I've learned a lot and I've enjoyed it. So, listen, I've had a great day, Greg. I've met a lot of lovely people.

So anything else is a bonus. Fabulous. All right. So here we go with the big quiz. Question one. Name one of the probably not true, but still fun origin myths for the history of ice cream.

Brought back by Marco Polo from his travels. Very good. Question two. From which ancient civilization do we have the earliest evidence of ice houses? Mesopotamia. It is, 4,000 years ago. Name one of the medical benefits Filippo Baldini claimed his ice cream recipes had on the eater's health.

He said it was a painkiller, pain relief. Yeah, absolutely. Also, you could have stomach complaints or chocolate for mood. Question four. Name three of Monsieur Emy's wildly bold 18th century ice cream flavours. Artichoke. Yes. Parmesan, of course. Of course. And my favourite, whale vomit. Absolutely. Delicious. Ambergris. Very good. Question five. Which African-American confectioner, caterer and ex-White House cook has been called the father of ice cream in the USA?

Oh, I remember his kids were called Hagen and Daas and he was called Augustus... Augustus Jackson. Yes, well done. Jackson, absolutely. Augustus Jackson. Question six. Hokey Pokey was one popular form of street ice. What was its other great rival? The Penny Lick. It was the Penny Lick. You've done really well so far. Question seven. Which British ice cream pioneer and Victorian-era celebrity chef was known as the Queen of Ice-is, not Isis?

Agnes Mitchell. Agnes Marshall. I'll give you half a point. Agnes Marshall. Oh, Marshall Law, of course. Question eight. Name two classic ice cream dishes introduced to the USA in 1890s, the golden era. Baked Alaska.

Yep. And ice cream sundaes. Absolutely. Question nine. In the 19th century, unpasteurised dairy led to the outbreak of various diseases. Name one. Cholera. Yes, you could have had bovine TB, scarlet fever, diphtheria.

And question ten. This is for nine and a half out of 10, which is almost perfect. In 1952, to settle a heated debate, the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers named Ernest Hamwe as the inventor of what? He was a Syrian immigrant and he was the inventor of the ice cream cone.

Nine and a half out of 10 is very strong. I mean, it's so nearly perfect. I think I got nine out of 10 because I didn't get Augustus' surname either. I missed two surnames. We'll do the VAR adjudication later on. It's fine. Thank you. What did you think of the history of ice cream?

Have you enjoyed it? Yeah, it was fascinating. Thank you so much. And again, you forget what an extraordinary thing it is. We take it for granted, don't we? We've got freezers full of it in supermarkets. And actually, such an extraordinary confection, such an extraordinary thing to invent and invented pretty much purely for pleasure as well so it's uh listen don't eat too much of it kids do make some of your own you

can make it healthily but uh you know everything in moderation but the world would be a poorer place without it and listeners if you want more food history you can listen to our history of chocolate episode also with richard we've also done an episode on Tang Dynasty China, which we mentioned briefly today. We've also got over 50 other different episodes about different stuff, all available on BBC Sounds. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, then please, you know, tell your friends, leave a review online, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds, so you never miss an episode. I'd like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, or Food History Corner, I suppose, with a cherry on top, we've had the marvellous Dr Annie Gray.

Thank you, Annie. Thank you. And in Comedy Corner, the 99 flake of comedy himself, the delicious Richard Osman. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Annie. And to you, lovely listener, make sure to join us next time as we serve up a new scoop of historical delight

with two different delectable guests. But for for now i'm going to grab my bin bag and go and tamper with an ice cream freezer in my nearby shop bye you're dead to me was a production by the athletic for bbc radio 4 the research was by chris wakefield the script was by emma naguse chris wakefield and me the project manager was cypher mio and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez. If I think I've made a mistake, I'll just sort of pause and try and read it again so you can get your scissors in. Paul McCartney as you've never heard him before. Are you ready?

Revealing the stories behind his life and music. We hear about superstardom. When the show aired, 73 million people watched us. Drugs. What we had to get into our lives, it seems, was marijuana. Falling out with John and Yoko. The thing is, so much of what they held to be truth was crap. His grief after Lennon's death.

I was just sitting there in this little bare room thinking of John and realising I'd lost him. And his sense of wonder. Sometimes I pinch myself and think, were we there? To hear all ten episodes from BBC Radio 4, just search for Paul McCartney inside the songs on BBC Sounds.