A lip-licking indulgence

Sudhirendar Sharma

Sudhirendar Sharma

Ice cream is a growing indulgence that few would choose to go without. Be with sugar or without, high fat or low, soft serve or kulfi, ice cream will always stand as the world favorite treat. It adorns restaurant menus and home freezers across the world in multiple forms. Once considered an indulgence befitting only the elite, this sweet treat has evolved into one of the most popular mass-market food products ever developed. In Ice Cream: A Global History, journalist Laura B. Weiss takes us on a fascinating journey through the ages to tell the lively story of how this delicious dessert became a global sensation.

Ice Cream, A global history

Featuring emperors, kings, inventors, and entrepreneurs, Ice Cream makes for a surprising and delightful read. Unlike other places, India boasts a venerable indigenous ice cream culture. Mughal emperors enjoyed flavored ice brought down from nearby mountains. Later, confectioners developed kulfi, a milk-based dish. It isn’t churned like ice-creams, but the mixture is cooked before frozen in small metal cones. Sprinkled with photographs, illustrations and recipes, this is a tasty history of everyone’s favorite childhood treat.

It is a short book that has scooped almost everything about ice cream. Where it was first invented, how it travelled across the world, and evolved into many variants. How ice cream as we know it came about, and how it went from being a dish for the elite to one that today has a ubiquitous appeal? With technological advances beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and with the widespread emergence of street vendors, regular folks could scrouge up few coins for a ice cream scoop. Laura B. Weiss touches on various aspects of ice cream, from different ways of using ice, and to making ice cream; the important people who helped make ice cream what it is today, and how ice cream features in popular culture. Different graphic representations of ice cream, including a painting by Picaso, adds rich cultural scoop to ice cream’s history. 

I learnt a good deal of stuff that I hadn't known before, and since it's an easy read, I found Ice Cream: A Global History pleasant reading. US has the largest ice cream market, followed by Italy. The Italians, the originator of modern ice cream, were ill equipped to spearhead the drive to commercialize ice creams. Their refrigeration technique lagged, and Italian gelato – which means ‘frozen’ in Italian – was hand-made. The quality of even the best American ice cream – its taste, texture and richness – couldn’t match the gelato.

Whatever be the type of scoop, it is the art and science of licking an ice cream through a cone testifies to its enormous popularity the world over. It was way back in 1904 that the cone came into being, as we know it today. A sensation in its time, it was at the St. Louis fair in 1904 that attracted thousands of visitors who could walk with an ice cream scoop in a cone. It takes about fifty licks to polish off a single scoop of ice cream nestling in a cone, but just a few bites to gobble down its cakey container. It has been a winning combination since then. 

The book makes interesting revelations. It lets us know the ice cream creation of banana split, and the great dessert innovation called the Sundae. But it is emphatically not a global history as it confines to US, Europe, Middle East, Asia and East Asia. The greatest surprise was the complete lack of any mention of Africa. Wonder why this continent with some of the highest temperatures in the world has been left out? How has the African flavors, the Kenyan classic dessert called coupe Mount Kenya and South Africa's iconic Tapi Tapi Ice Cream, remained unknown? Africa did know its ice cream as well as others across the globe. 

Ice Cream: A Global History 

by Laura B. Weiss

Pan Macmillan, New Delhi. 

Extent: 176, Price: Rs. 474.

Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma is a writer and researcher specializing in development issues. He is based in New Delhi, India.

First published in New Indian Express on June 15, 2025.