Today is Saturday, February 23, 2008. This is the 54th day of the year, with 312 days remaining in 2008.
Fact of the Day: ice cream
People have been eating ice cream for 3000 years, originally as flavored snow or ice. Ice cream evolved from flavored ices that were popular with the Roman nobility in the 4th century BC. The emperor Nero is known to have imported snow from the mountains and topped it with fruit juices and honey. In the 13th century, Marco Polo was reported to have returned from China with recipes for making water and milk ices. Early colonists poured maple syrup over snow. Both Washington and Jefferson owned a "cream machine for making ice" and Dolly Madison's White House dinner parties were talked about for the "large shining dome of pink ice cream" as the centerpiece. Colonists talked about going to ice cream houses since the 1700s, which weren't generally called ice cream parlors or ice cream stands until the late 1870s. The discovery that salt would lower the freezing point of cracked ice led to the first practical method of making ice cream. Making ice cream in the home was greatly simplified by the invention of the wooden bucket freezer with rotary paddles. In 1846, Nancy Johnson, a Philadelphia dairy maid, invented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer. In 1851 the first wholesale ice cream was manufactured in Baltimore. With the development of mechanical refrigeration, widespread distribution of ice cream became possible. After the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, people started asking for ice cream cones, invented at the fair when an ice cream vendor ran out of dishes and a nearby vendor of the crisp pastry, salabria, twisted it into a cone to hold the ice cream. Haagen-Dazs began manufacturing in 1959 and Ben & Jerry's was created in 1978.
