We All Scream For Ice-Cream Trivia Quiz

Answer: To prevent ice crystals being formed

Large crystals can be formed in ice-cream during the freezing process even today unless it is thoroughly stirred a couple of times during setting. This also allows air to circulate through the product. This discovery was more a case of trial and error over ice cream's early beginnings rather than any instantly gleaned knowledge. Factory made ice cream today is constantly stirred while freezing.

In the case of home made ice cream, as in the early days, it is still advisable, but not to the degree as that used in factory manufactured products, to periodically maintain stirring as it freezes.

This most delightful of treats should be taken out once, but preferably twice, during the setting process, and given a hearty whipping with the eggbeater. You haven't lived unless you've tasted home made ice cream made with all natural products. Oh, yum.

Answer: Persian

The Persian Empire was more a series of individual and distinctly different empires, rather than one long dynasty that ruled continually for very many centuries. It commenced in 550 BCE, with the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire. Continuing from that time, in one form or another, and with many large hiccups along the way, it lasted until 1979 when the last dynasty, the Pahlavi regime, fell under the onslaught of the Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Onto more pleasant subjects however. A form of early ice cream was known to be eaten by those ancient Persians from all that time ago. This was created by pouring concentrated fruit juice of various kinds over bowls filled with snow. Snow for this purpose was collected from the mountains and stored in underground chambers where it remained solid even in the hottest months.

Answer: Arabs

As the fruit juice and snow combination for early ice cream spread westward towards Europe, and time marched on, the practice was eagerly taken up by the wide-ranging peoples of the Roman Empire (approximately 500 BC until 500 AD) as well. It would be the Arabs, however, who came up with idea of freezing a combination of sugar and milk that moved us one step closer to the ice cream our taste buds would easily recognise today. To this they added various other favours as well, including currants, sultanas, other fruits, nuts and a product known as rose water, made from the distillation of rose petals.

Answer: A combination of snow and saltpetre

Initially only the ruling emperor and his court ate ice cream, for the simple reason that he had ice imported from the local mountains for the freezing process. This was then combined with various fruit mixes. Also used to freeze a combination of rice and milk, the Chinese later began freezing other combinations of fruit or milk based desserts by pouring a mix of snow and saltpetre over the containers that held the combinations. This lowered the temperature within the containers to below zero degrees.

(Saltpetre is also used in the manufacture of gunpowder, and when I first read this, I mistakenly thought they mixed it in WITH their recipes, and was no longer surprised that the Chinese invented firecrackers. They probably exploded, thought I, with eyeballs popping out of my head in astonishment)

Answer: Marco Polo

Perhaps he did. We'll never know for certain. What we do know however is that ice cream was being manufactured in Italy, whether from techniques adopted from China or elsewhere, by the 14th century. Marco Polo (1254-1324) was a famous Italian traveller whose wanderings took him all over much of the known world, including China, for almost a quarter of a century. On his eventual return to Venice, he was thrown into the cooler (I couldn't resist) for a short time during a war between the land of his birth and Genoa.

While there, he wrote a book, which became famous, about the many amazing places and things he had seen on his travels.

Answer: Relays of very fast horseriders

That's incredible. Hindu Kush is a long mountain range located between Afghanistan and the north of Pakistan. On the other hand, the Mughal emperors, who ruled from approximately the early 1500s until the early 1700s, spent most of their time in Delhi.

The distance between the two locations is over 600 miles! Yet, those incredibly skilled horsemen on their brilliant steeds, by working in teams of relays, managed to keep up the supply of unmelted ice for the royal ice cream of those early emperors as a matter of course.

Answer: Took a team of Italian chefs with her

Ah the ladies, God bless 'em, practical to the last. Catherine and the future King Henry II of France were married to each other when they were only fourteen years old, the poor little things, so perhaps it's not surprising that ice cream, rather than her conjugal duties, held precedence in the girl's mind.

She needn't have worried. After the obligatory wedding night when the marriage was consummated, Henry displayed no further interest in his wife for another ten years, and dallied with his mistresses instead.

It wasn't until his older brother was killed that he became heir to the throne of France, whereupon he hastily bedded his wife to in order to produce legal offspring for the royal heritage. He protected the royal heritage ten times in all, as a matter of fact. One wonders, if the hitherto rejected Catherine, with her imported Italian ice-cream making chefs, calmly continued to consume those delicious treats as the royal nursery finally began to fill.

Answer: Charles I

Charles I was King of England from 1625 until 1649, at which time he was beheaded by the parliamentary forces headed by Oliver Cromwell. This ushered in the brief period of a parliamentary controlled country and the Commonwealth of England that came to an end in 1660 when Charles II, head firmly in place, took the throne once more.

One of the many charges brought against Charles I during his trial was the accusation that he used "his power to pursue his personal interest rather than the good of the country". There is absolutely no truth to the freshly manufactured rumour that this charge was based on his trying to keep the formula for making ice-cream secret from everyone else and that he tried to bribe his ice-cream maker with a life time's pension for doing so.

Answer: Oxford

The Oxford English Dictionary of 1860 was instigated as a project by a group of English intellectuals who were discontented with the haphazard methods used to define words in previously existing word finding books. Their initial idea was to eliminate words that were previously poorly defined, obsolete, inconsistent and incorrectly dated. They ended up with a list that was so long, however, that they basically decided to compile an entirely new dictionary from scratch instead. Ice cream, described accordingly in this new much respected work, was now official.

Recipes for making ice cream had been printed earlier in other works of course, but to have it mentioned in the Oxford dictionary, now that was really something. They did get the date incorrect however, by stating that the earliest written reference to ice cream was from 1744. Mrs Mary Earle might have objected somewhat if she'd still been alive in 1860 when the Oxford Dictionary came out, as she had published a book of recipes, "Mrs Mary Earle's Receipts" (sic), in 1718. This included instructions for making ice cream. Here is a copy of same (spelling intact) for your interest:

"Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them with any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten'd, or Fruit in it; shut your Pots very close; to six Pots you must allow eighteen or twenty Pound of Ice, breaking the Ice very small; there will be some great Pieces, which lay at the Bottom and Top: You must have a Pail, and lay some Straw at the Bottom; then lay in your Ice, and put in amongst it a Pound of Bay-Salt; set in your Pots of Cream, and 93 lay Ice and Salt between every Pot, that they may not touch; but the Ice must lie round them on every Side; lay a good deal of Ice on the Top, cover the Pail with Straw, set it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes, it will be froze in four Hours, but it may stand longer; then take it out just as you use it; hold it in your Hand and it will slip out. When you wou'd freeze any Sort of Fruit, either Cherries, Rasberries, Currants, or Strawberries, fill your Tin-Pots with the Fruit, but as hollow as you can; put to them Lemmonade, made with Spring-Water and Lemmon-Juice sweeten'd; put enough in the Pots to make the Fruit hang together, and put them in Ice as you do Cream".

Answer: Quakers

Member of the religious movement known as the Religious Society of Friends, or the Quakers, began moving to the north east of the United States from the late 1600s. This had a two-fold purpose, the first of which was to find a more tolerant environment in which they could practise their faith. The second major reason for that immigration was in seeking a new life with more opportunities for economic prosperity.

Along with their arrival in this new land came their knowledge on how to make ice cream - and, because this skill has since been turned into something approaching a gastronomical art form in that country, Americans have been thanking them ever since. Such was its popularity even in its early days in the United States that many of the Founding Fathers of that great nation, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, have gone on record as regularly delighting in same.