(8 of 10)
Industry conservatives point out that not all natural flavors are vivid enough (Mattus has failed so far to make a peach ice cream that he considers good, and Häagen-Dazs will not sell peach until he succeeds). Raising butterfat much above the 16% or 17% level can produce a greasy mix that for some reason resists flavoring. Staleness kills ice cream, and natural brands, such as Breyers or Häagen-Dazs, to some extent become unnatural when they are shipped across the country and stored for too many weeks. Ice crystals form and texture coarsens when any ice cream is melted even slightly and then refrozen.
The reason that the ice cream in the best scoop shops tastes so good does not seem very mysterious. The player piano helps, and so does the chance to feel like Diamond Jim Brady and still get change back from a $5 bill. But what is most important is that the ice cream is likely to have been made the day before from the best ingredients that the local markets are offering ("Use overripe peaches!" yells Vermont's Cohen to Mattus).
How did we reach this pinnacle? Ice cream was perfected in the U.S., as all honest chauvinists know, but it was not invented here. Nero liked to eat flavored ice, according to Paul Dickson's scholarly and amusing The Great American Ice Cream Book, and in the 13th century Marco Polo returned from the Orient with a recipe for some sort of frozen dessert with milk in it. Catherine de Medicis appears to have introduced sherbets and ices, possibly ice cream, to France in 1533, when she arrived there with her retinue to marry the future Henry II. Beethoven, during the mild winter of 1794, feared that there would not be enough ice for the next summer to make ice cream in Vienna.
Ice cream is American by right of conquest, however. George Washington owned a gadget for making ice cream. Thomas Jefferson loved it. An American woman named Nancy Johnson invented the hand-cranked, rock salt-and-ice freezer in 1846, although she neglected to patent the machine. Robert M. Green, a Philadelphia visionary, gave the world the ice-cream soda in 1874. The ice-cream cone was the hit of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis. Christian Nelson, an Iowa candy-store proprietor, thought up chocolate-covered ice cream in 1919 but got nowhere until Russell Stover, an ice-cream company superintendent, searched the firmament and invented the name Eskimo Pie. By 1922 the pair were selling a million pies a day. A Youngstown, Ohio, confectioner named Harry Burt refined the idea by developing chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick, and the Good Humor bar was hatched. In 1924 the Individual Drinking Cup Co. (what a dull name!) came up with an ice cream container called the Dixie Cup (what a great name!). From 1930 to 1970, the inside of the paper lids carried pictures of movie stars, sports heroes and the like.