I is for Ice Cream

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a version of this post after reading Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy’s marvelous book, which chronicles stories of individual firsts. My approach focuses globally rather than on firsts. So far we have journeyed around the world to see what humanity has created, from Siberia to Chile to Australia to Germany to Egypt and to the Fertile Crescent.

I’ve leaned into anthropology and archaeology fairly heavily, although today’s journey will be more standard history. For this particular topic, we need to stretch the boundaries of “ancient” forward a little, tiptoeing into the Middle Ages, to understand this marvelous creation. Really, it’s why probably humans learned to control fire, stand up, carry our babies with us, and build giant pyramids. We needed to develop knowledge and skills to invent Ice Cream.

The road to inventing ice cream was a bit circuitous and meandered from the ziggurat-days of Ur to the sophisticated empires of the Far East and back to Fertile Crescent. The most important part of the invention happened near the beginning. Because to make ice cream, you needed ice.

Today, in our technological superiority, we experience this miracle in many ways–sorbet, gelato, frozen yogurt, mochi, kulfi, real ice cream, fake ice cream, Icees, Slurpees, Ben and Jerry’s, Haagen Dazs, Tillamook… I’m starting to drool. My favorite combination at the Richardson’s Ice Cream Parlor in Walled Lake, Michigan, where I spent much of my pre-adolescent summers, was Blue Moon (pineapple, shaded blue) and Licorice, primarily I liked to turn my tongue black and blue. Now, older and wiser, I lean into cleaner flavors with “no bones” (nuts). I prefer lemon gelato, which seems only available in Italy; butter pecan, my dad’s favorite, and you were right, dad; and really good French vanilla.

As with previous posts:

1. How should we define ice cream?
2. Where and when was it developed, around the world?
3. Why was it important? Other than the obvious reason that Ice Cream is All.

A Dish Best Served Cold

Proper ice cream is cold, smooth, and sweet. Texture and temperature are vital. It needs to be blended so that the melt point is consistent throughout and the flavors mixed properly. This is the miracle of ice cream: it is colder than water, but not as dense as ice. It’s how you can tell real, full-fat ice cream from the chemically-enhanced stuff, which I also consume. You can tell when ice cream freezes hard and melts whether its density comes from chemicals rather than cream and eggs.

For the last few centuries, anyone could make decent ice cream with a churn, using salt, ice cubes, churning, cream, and eggs + whatever flavoring you crave. (In the modern ice cream factory, that combination might be achieved with all manner of chemistry we don’t want to know about.) The salt lowers the freezing temperature. Churning puts air and lightness into the mix. The eggs are an emulsifier, meaning they get the ingredients into a harmonious embrace–more consistency, airiness, creaminess.

Ice cream is not simply frozen milk or cream. The Internet dared to tell me that freezing whipped cream and condensed milk would make “ice cream.” That’s a Hard Fail, foodiecrush! Ice milk is not ice cream. We’re also not talking about frozen desserts, not a frozen cake, pie, cookie dough.

The technology for ice cream required inventing three distinct processes: freezing, thickening, and flavoring. The journey to invent ice cream passed through all those key stages. Hence, we need to talk about the icehouses and the amazing palace of Zimri-Lim, which presaged the yakhchal. We need to understand why the Greeks and Romans were not needed, neither Plato nor Nero. We must look to the miraculous technology of the Tang dynasty and the emperor’s ice chef. Lastly, we should credit the avoidance of alcohol by the Muslims in the Middle Ages. All of this pieces were needed, beginning with the icehouse.

Year 13 and the Amazing Palace of Zimri-Lim

It was in the Third Dynasty of Ur, Year 13 of the rule of Shulgi, builder of the Great Ziggurat of Ur (@2081 BCE), when the first great icehouse was noted in the cuneiform tablets. The scribes commented, according to ice history expert Fred Hogge, that it was twice as long as deep and insulated with branches of tamarisk. In honor, Year 13 was deemed the Year of the Icehouse.

It’s not clear whether Shulgi’s icehouse was the very first, but it must have been one of the most astounding, if the scribes named a year after it. Shulgi was further known for reforming the tax system, improving written communications, and reorganizing the army, so clearly he was a modern-thinking guy. It’s worth peeking at the map of Mesopotamia for a moment, and note that Shulgi was hanging out in Ur down in the southeast (green arrow).

Shulgi’s amazing icehouse did not start an icehouse revolution. A full two centuries went by before the topic cropped up again, and this time not in Ur. A new king of a small city called Mari cropped up named Zimr-Lim (northwest). Zimri-Lim became legendary because he built a fantastic palace–six acres, 260rooms–rival perhaps to the Palace at Knossos that was the pride of the Minoans. Zimri-Lim became well known for hosting eye-popping banquet tables, replete with chickpea salad, delicacies like fried locusts, and desert truffles. Zimri-Lim also built at least two icehouses, one right up the river in Terqa:

The main component of the [icehouse] system would be a shallow, rectangular pond 10 to 20 meters wide and several hundred meters long. Its long axis would run east-west, and a wall would be built along its south side to a height sufficient to keep the entire width shaded from the low winter sun during ice-making season. There would also be lower walls on the east and west ends to shield the pond from early morning and late afternoon sun… almost a dozen or so Mari citations [mentioned the icehouse].

From “Thoughts of Zimri-Lim” by Jack Sasson.

Why did Mari become ground zero for icehouses, when they originally started in Ur? It might be because Shulgi married a princess from–you guessed it–Mari! Perhaps the great-great-grandchildren kept hearing about that ol’ icehouse of Ur, until Zimri-Lim decided to build one of his own. The scribes of 1780 BCE said that “never before had any king built” such a marvel. Surely, we can imagine King Z-L walking foreign dignitaries through the grounds of his expansive palace, waving vaguely in the direction of a strange rectangular building with a foreboding wall. “Oh, over there? That’s a new creation of my underlings that provides frozen water at my command.”

We don’t have a picture of Zimri-Lim’s marvelous ice house, but we do know that his engineers had invented technology that created and preserved blocks of ice, even in a place with soaring temperatures on summer days.

Law Giver and Ice Breaker, the Scurrilous Hammurabi

I can’t leave Zimri-Lim without mentioning–briefly! I promise–what happened to the palace. The reason that its hundreds of rooms, statues, and cuneiform tablets are still with us is that it was burned down but in a way that preserved much of its frescoes and other features. Who could do such a thing? Destroy the icehouses of Zimri-Lim?

The old eye-for-an-eye dude, ooh, I have a code, I’m known as the first lawgiver, that’s who. While Hammurabi was not making himself famous by dictating innovative legal ideas, he was conquering and attacking nearby cities, with a bloodthirstiness that makes the Mongols look like the United Nations (which actually they were, but that’s for another post). Hammurabi decided that all of Mesopotamia belonged to him and started absorbing his rivals. Mari was an ally, not a rival, and supposedly submitted with no struggle, yet Hammurabi razed the palace and executed the majority of the population. Clearly, he had no proper regard for preserving the icehouses. They disappeared, at least until…

Ice in the Desert: Yakhchāl

Over a thousand years later, @400 BCE, the Persian Empire discovered an even more effective approach to storage. The scientists under Darius, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius II, Xerxes II–well, you get the drift–-found ways to create large-scale irrigation using qanats, underground aqueducts. One of those scientists also noticed that water below ground was very much colder–aHA! and that such water could be gathered in pools. But how to keep it cold? That’s where the yakhchāl came in.

The yakhchal consisted of a an underground tunnel for water which ran into a structure that had a well below and a dome above. The dome structure of the yakhchāl extended upwards to a peak with a hole in the top, but also allowed air in through vents at the bottom. The hotter portion of the air would rise up and out, while the colder air would drop downward, further cooling the pool of water. The water channels were located in on the north side, the coolest side, to speed up the freezing process. Thus, Artaxerxes, like Zimri-Lim, could create ancient versions of shaved ice, flavored with pomegranate, orange, or lemon juice. This was not yet ice cream, but the ability to make ice was a crucial step in the process.

Sorry, Plato. Fugeddabout it, Nero

The classicists like to think that the Greeks and Romans invented everything. One thought maybe Plato used ice cream to explain the concept of akrasia, the idea that people sometimes perform actions not in their own best interests. Scholar Cynthia Hampton argues in “Pleasure, Truth and Being in Pluto’s Philebus” that Plato might have envisioned an ancient Greek dieter stuck between going without for the greater good of the body or giving in for the greater good of the lizard brain.

The dieter’s akrasia is generated by the interplay between the true belief he rationally holds, i.e. that it is better to be physically fit than to eat the ice cream, and an opposing nonrational belief that ice cream is pleasant and therefore good to pursue.

This Platonic anecdote has two inherent problems. First, Plato would clearly be confused if he ever devised an example where ice cream would not be in someone’s best interests. How is that possible? Physical fitness and ice cream are not diametrically opposed. It is the amount of ice cream, not the Platonic “idea” of ice cream that is the problem. Secondly, the Greeks didn’t have icehouses. The best they could do was when Alexander the Great dug a few “refrigeration pits” and that was only after his on military campaigns in Persia and India. Alexander didn’t bring back the idea to Greece, and no one in Persia or Greece mentions frozen milk. Not to mention that Alexander comes along after Plato. Plato didn’t eat no ice cream.

This silly notion of ice-cream-slurping by Plato and Alexander is sometimes extended to Nero, who “may have sent” runners into the roman hills to get ice. This is also unlikely. The Romans had figured out that ice from the ground added to drinks gave them the flux. They sanitized their water by filtering it, which meant ice would have to be melted first. And they didn’t have ice-making technology, either. No ice for Nero.

The 94 Ice Men of the Tang Dynasty

With the fall of the Persian Empires, the ice manufacturing secrets would resurface only after a dozen centuries and thousands of miles to the east. Chinese scientists figured out the endothermic property of salt. In non-technical language, that means adding salt to ice assists in the freezing process. The Egyptians and Indians knew this, too, but they didn’t follow the ice cream path.

During the Tang Dynasty (~620 CE), a chef in Emperor Taizong’s entourage created the special combination with salt, ice, and milk for a unique dessert. Taizong employed 2271 chefs and wine stewards for the food in his palace, including 94 “ice men.” While the duties of the ice men aren’t described, one of those clever ice chefs came up with a frozen milk recipe, described as using fermented mare’s milk, kumis. Kumis was a common drink among the horse cultures from the steppes, the Mongolian version of beer.

According to Ice Creams, Sorbets & Gelati: The Definitive Guide–and what more definitive guide to life would you need than THAT?–Caroline and Robin Weir describe how our clever ice chef mixed frothy frozen kumis with flour and camphor to create a creamy consistency. Camphor is a tree extract that can be used as a lotion, thickener, mosquito repellent, perfume, or plastic. Like modern ice cream, best not to think about the ingredient list too closely.

Taizong’s chef then added flavorings from honey, melon, and tea, and voila! ice cream. I hope the emperor rewarded him handsomely for that! Centuries later, poets were waxing…. poetic… about the heavenly mixture.

It looks so greasy but still has a crisp texture.
It appears congealed and yet it seems to float,
Like jade, it breaks at the bottom of the dish;
As with snow, it melts in the light of the sun.

Frozen milk, described by the Sung poet Yang Wanli (1127-1206)

The Scientific Value of Teetotaling

The last piece of the puzzle comes from the Arabs and the House of Wisdom, i.e. the Islamic Empire of the Middle Ages. That was the other place that advanced scientific knowledge, certainly in medicine and military technology. The Arabs traded extensively across Asia with the Chinese and Indians, and further were veterans of ice knowledge from those ancient Persian Empires. They would have known about salt and making ice, perhaps learned about iced cream from the Tang culture. What the Muslim scientists pioneered was in sugared syrups.

Because they did not drink alcohol, Muslims created a variety of excellent chilled alternative adult non-alcoholic drinks. Some were called sharbats, and they used unusual ingredients like rose water and cinnamon, but also oranges and lemons from the Spanish parts of the Empire. Across their territories, the Muslims also cultivated sugar cane, which by the 1400s became an extremely valuable commodity. Thus, by the time of the Renaissance, the Italian traders also learned to develop sugared-creamed-iced-concoctions which would eventually become sherbets and gelatos. The Accademia of the Medici brought in their own scientists to perfect recipes.

Within ten years of the Medici scientific experiments, ices and ice creams began appearing at the banquet tables of Louis XIV in France and Charles II in England. By 1695, there were recipe books for sorbetti, and the culmination of all the work work by the Medici brothers, Taizong’s chef, the Persians, and King Zimri-Lim had come to full fruition. It took a global village, but ice cream at last had taken its rightful place among the greatest of inventions.

Humanity evolved at last.