The Bottom Line: Sweet facts about ice cream!
The Full Story:
- Ice cream as we know it seems to have emerged in 17th-century France. (A first-century Roman emperor is said to have sent runners into the mountains for snow to be flavored with juices in the 13th century.)
- Marco Polo brought back from China descriptions of a sherbet dessert.
- The cone didn't appear until 1904, when a Syrian waffle maker at the St. Louis World's Fair began rolling his pastries into horns to help an ice cream vendor who had run out of dishes.
- The idea of the ice cream cone had been patented a year earlier, in 1903, by an Italian in New York City, but the fair popularized it.
- Today the average American eats about 20 quarts of ice cream a year―the world's highest per capita consumption, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.
- Top-selling ice cream flavors are: vanilla, with 33% of the market, and chocolate, with 19%.
- It takes 5.8-pounds of whole milk and one pound of cream to make one gallon of ice cream.
- Farmers in Vermont used to feed leftovers provided by Ben and Jerry's to their hogs. The hogs didn't seem to care for Mint Oreo Cookie.
- The largest ice cream cone measured 9-feet, 2.63-inches in height and was achieved by Mirco Della Vecchia and Andrea Andrighetti of Italy.
- Some weird flavors of ice cream include buckwheat ice cream, beer flavored ice cream, and Parmesan gelato.
- June is the month that the most ice cream is produced.