The History of Ice Cream

There was once a TV commercial in which a chef was frustrated to find that the Italians did not invent spaghetti -it was supposedly the Chinese. It ended by saying at least the Italians invented ice cream. Well, that's not exactly true, either. It turns out that earliest form of ice cream was made in -you guessed it- China.

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 milk that was then frozen by being packed in snow. The Chinese King Tang of Shang is thought to have had over ninety “ice men” who mixed flour, camphor, and buffalo milk with ice. The Chinese are also credited with inventing the first “ice cream machine.” They had pots they filled with a syrupy mixture, which they then packed into a mixture of snow and salt.

But frozen dairy desserts popped up in various places over history, making it hard to pin down any one place of origin. Read about the history of ice cream at Today I Found Out. Link -via Digg