The Scoop on Ice Cream
How science, invention, and human curiosity shaped the world’s most beloved frozen dessert
The heat has settled over Los Angeles like a heavy quilt. By five, I’m up, leash in hand, Paddington trotting beside me as we chase the last scraps of cool air before the sun bares its teeth. Neither of us has the will for anything more once the streets begin to simmer. The oven sits cold, the stove ignored. Lunch has been little more than crisp salads, sandwiches straight from the fridge, and generous bowls of ice cream. So this week, it feels only right to turn to one of my truest comforts: ice cream in all its glory.
The Scoop on Ice Cream
There are few foods that capture both memory and science like ice cream. A crack of the spoon through its surface, the first silky cold bite, suddenly you’re five years old again, chasing the music of the ice cream truck. Yet beneath the nostalgia lies an extraordinary story of chemistry, physics, and culinary invention. Today, we’ll peel back the layers of ice cream: its history, the science that makes it work, and the machines and cookbooks that have carried it into our kitchens.
A Brief History of Frozen Pleasures
It begins in ancient China, around 200 BCE, where someone thought to stir rice and milk together, sweeten it, and chill it with snow. Not simply a dessert, but a small miracle in a bowl, cold and fleeting.
A few centuries later in Persia, the royal courts sipped sharbat, fruit syrups cooled with mountain snow. A drink with sunlight in its flavor and winter in its chill, the ancestor of sherbets and sorbets to come.
By the sixteenth century in Mughal India, ice was carried down from the Himalayas on horseback to cool fruit and milk puddings. Kulfi was born here: milk slowly caramelized until nutty and golden, then frozen in metal molds. It is still eaten today, dense and creamy, the taste of centuries held on the tongue.
Then Italy, during the Renaissance, where sorbetto (sorbet), light and tart, became the pride of Florence and Naples. Entire courts competed for supremacy, the frozen fruits of summer turned into works of art.
France followed in the seventeenth century. Parisian cafés began to serve crème glacée to the aristocracy. Cold, rich, and impossibly decadent, it was spooned out as if the very essence of luxury could be captured in ice.
Across the ocean in the United States, George Washington reportedly spent a small fortune on ice cream one hot summer, while Thomas Jefferson carefully wrote down one of the earliest recipes for vanilla ice cream. You can almost picture the ink drying on the page as the dessert began to melt in the heat.
And here is the cool fact. Before refrigeration, the ice trade was a global enterprise. In the nineteenth century, blocks of ice cut from frozen New England lakes traveled by ship to India and the Caribbean, packed in sawdust to slow the inevitable melt. The idea of carrying winter to the tropics feels almost romantic now, a gesture of excess and longing.
The Science of Ice Cream
The Architecture of Ice Cream
At its heart, ice cream is a small piece of alchemy, a dessert built on a multi-phase system that somehow tastes like happiness.
There are the ice crystals, tiny shards of frozen water that, if kept under fifty microns, give that elusive smoothness. Then come the fat globules, drifting in from cream or other fats, half-joining as the churn whips through the mixture, helping to trap air. The air itself is another layer, what ice cream makers call overrun. Premium ice creams hold only about twenty to thirty percent air, while cheaper ones can be puffed up to nearly double their volume. Finally, there is the unfrozen sugar solution, the part that stays liquid, keeping everything scoopable rather than turning into an icy brick.
Together, these phases give ice cream its paradoxical nature: frozen yet soft, solid yet melting.
Sugar: The Quiet Magician
Sugar is not there only for sweetness. It lowers water’s freezing point, so the mix never becomes a block of ice. Each sugar behaves differently. Sucrose, our everyday table sugar, gives balanced sweetness and moderate freezing. Glucose or corn syrup keeps more water locked in, lending a gentle chewiness. Invert sugar, honey, and agave resist iciness altogether, keeping the texture velvety.
Emulsifiers and Stabilizers
Egg yolks, with their lecithin and proteins, hold fat and water together while giving a custardy richness. Starch, often cornstarch or arrowroot, has long been used in Italian gelato to add body. In the modern world, stabilizers like guar gum, carrageenan, and locust bean gum keep ice cream creamy for longer and prevent those dreaded shards of ice from forming as it sits in the freezer.
The War on Ice Crystals
The enemy of good ice cream is large ice crystals. The faster the freeze, the smaller they stay. That is why factories use blast freezers at minus thirty degrees Celsius. At home, patience and planning help. Chill the base overnight, pre-freeze your equipment, work quickly, and you will be rewarded with a smoother, creamier scoop.
Styles Around the World
French custard ice cream begins with a cooked egg yolk base, a custard as lush and silky as velvet. Philadelphia-style skips the yolks altogether, leaving the flavor of cream to shine through, lighter and cleaner.
In Italy, gelato is churned more slowly, served warmer, with less fat than traditional ice cream. The result is denser, the flavors more intense, the texture almost elastic on the tongue.
Sorbet is fruit and sugar syrup, nothing more, no fat at all, while sherbet adds just a touch of dairy for creaminess. In India, kulfi starts with milk slowly reduced until thick and nutty, then scented with cardamom, saffron, and pistachios before being frozen solid. Dense, chewy, fragrant.
Soft-serve, a twentieth-century invention, is held at warmer temperatures so it flows out in those familiar swirls, kept stable with modern ingredients.
And here is a story I love. In 1904, at the St. Louis World’s Fair, an ice cream vendor ran out of cups. A waffle seller at the next stall rolled his waffles into cones. The ice cream cone was born in that moment, by accident and necessity, and the world never looked back.
Inventions and Machines
In 1843, Nancy Johnson in Philadelphia patented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer, a simple device using ice and salt brine to chill the base quickly. For the first time, households could make their ice cream without waiting for winter.
In the 1930s, Clarence Birdseye’s work on rapid freezing transformed commercial production, creating smoother textures. A few years later, in Illinois, the McCullough family invented soft-serve, and Dairy Queen began.
By the 1960s, Häagen-Dazs took ice cream in the opposite direction, reducing the air for a dense, rich style that set the standard for premium ice cream.
Modern Tools
Today, compressor machines do it all in one step with their built-in freezers. Freezer-bowl machines are simpler, more affordable, but need overnight chilling before you can churn. And then there is the dry ice method, which freezes the base almost instantly at home, filling the kitchen with clouds of cold, white vapor. At home, I use the Breville the Smart Scoop, which comes with its built-in freezing unit; it’s a lot more convienent especially if you don’t have space to pre-freeze the bucket.
Cookbooks for Ice Cream Enthusiasts
Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home — my number 1-go-to cookbook for ice creams, the ideas, her iconic cream cheese technique, and the methods are a game-changer.
The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz — approachable, timeless.
Frozen Desserts by Francisco J. Migoya — the Culinary Institute of America’s Ice Cream textbook. This book is geared towards chefs, but it does a fantastic job of explaining the science behind frozen desserts and is chock-full of ideas.
Science Spotlight: Freezer Burn and Recrystallization
Why does ice cream sometimes turn grainy, littered with tiny shards of ice? The culprit is recrystallization. Each time the temperature wavers, small ice crystals melt and then refreeze into larger, crunchier ones.
Keep your ice cream in the coldest, most stable corner of the freezer. Lay a sheet of parchment against the surface before sealing the lid to limit moisture migration. And resist the temptation to dip in for “just one spoonful” and put it back. Those cycles of thawing and refreezing are what give you that unwelcome crunch.
Commercial stabilizers are formulated to slow this process, which is why a supermarket pint lasts longer than any homemade batch, no matter how careful you are.
Ice cream may seem like pure whimsy, but every scoop carries history, invention, and science within it. From the first sharbats to kulfi, from the birth of gelato to Jeni’s Splendid, from freezing point depression to the happy accident of the waffle cone, it is one of the most remarkable culinary creations we have ever dreamed up.
Here are some of my favorite ice cream recipes just for you!
So what is your favorite ice cream memory? A kulfi dripping down a stick on a hot Bombay afternoon or a passion fruit ice cream in Auckland? Gelato eaten too quickly by the Arno? A neon-bright swirl of soft-serve at a state fair? Write back and tell me. I would love to share a few of your stories in a future issue.
A treat’s on its way to your inbox. I won’t say more, but you’ll know it when you see it.
Until next time,
Nik