By Suzanne Sparrow Watson
Well, here we are in the dog days of summer. The Olympics are over and college football is still a couple of weeks away. My house is a construction zone, resplendent with caution tape, and the forecast predicts temperatures over 103 for the next week. So what’s a girl to do? The only solution is to eat ice cream. I love ice cream in the summer, but the prices of those little pints at the grocery store are ridiculous. So, a couple of months ago I bought the Ninja Creami “frozen treat” machine and I’ve been eating ice cream every day since. Sometimes twice a day. The fantastic thing about the Creami is that you really can make anything in it – sorbet, smoothies, gelato and, of course, ice cream. I realized in researching the machine that there was potential that I could end up with my doctor ordering Ozempic for me by the end of summer – everything made in the machine looked so good. Luckily I found a couple of groups on Facebook that are dedicated to making healthy, high protein, frozen desserts. Which is why I have indulged so much and lost weight in the process. More on that in a bit.
Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar
Eating ice cream every day got me to wondering what genius came up with it to begin with. Oddly, no specific person has officially been credited with inventing ice cream. Its origins date back as far as 200 B.C., when people in China created a dish of rice mixed with buffalo milk that was then frozen by being packed in snow. Somehow that doesn’t grab me. Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar of Rome was said to have sent people up to the mountains to collect snow and ice which would then be flavored with juice and fruit—kind of like a first century snow cone. These early “ice creams” were obviously a luxury indulged in by the rich, as not everyone had the ability to send servants up the mountains to collect snow for them. One of the first places to serve ice cream to the general public was Café Procope in France, which started serving it in the late 17th century. The ice cream was made from a combination of milk, cream, butter, and eggs. However, it was still primarily a treat for the elite and was not yet popular among every class.
Jefferson and his ice cream
The first mention of ice cream in America appeared in 1744, when a Scottish colonist visited the house of Maryland Governor Thomas Bladen wrote about the delicious strawberry ice cream he had while dining there. Our Founding Fathers were great lovers of ice cream; in between writing up of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote his own recipe for vanilla ice cream. Talk about multi-tasking! Up until the 1800s, ice cream was mostly a treat reserved for special occasions as it couldn’t be stored for long due to the lack of insulated freezers. People would have ice cut from lakes in the winter and store it in the ground or brick ice houses, which were insulated with straw.
Ice cream wasn’t big business until Jacob Fussell built an ice cream factory in Pennsylvania in 1851 and industrial refrigeration came into being in the 1870’s. In the late 1800s, ice cream soared in popularity and new recipes began to emerge. Soda fountains emerged in 1874, and with them came the invention of the ice cream soda. Religious leaders condemned indulging in ice cream sodas on Sundays and set up “blue laws” banning their serving, which is thought by many to be how ice cream sundaes came about. Evidence seems to indicate that shop owners got around the problem by serving the ice cream with syrup and none of the carbonation and called them “ice cream Sundays.” Today, it is estimated that over 1.6 billion gallons of ice cream and related frozen dairy products are produced annually in the United States alone.
The latest data I could find indicates that Americans eat four gallons of ice cream per person each year on average. Four gallons is child’s play when you’re eating “healthy” ice cream. I figure that a conservative estimate is that I’ve eaten 12 gallons of it since Memorial Day. But here’s the secret: I use reduced fat milk, almond milk or protein shakes as my base. I put in a little non-fat cottage cheese and yogurt, then add flavorings (usually cocoa, peppermint or coffee), protein powder, collagen peptides, and truvia to sweeten. Sometimes if I’m feeling extra healthy, I’ll make a pint of fruit ice cream. But regardless of the flavor, I ALWAYS add in dark chocolate chips at the end. I know it sounds like it would taste healthy vs decadent, but believe me, it tastes like the real thing. I never want summer to end.
