Ice Cream: The Delicious Story – Book Review
In the White House, what was often on the menu that George Washington was crazy about and Presidents Madison, Andrew Jackson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon wouldn’t want to do without? The answer is ice cream, without a doubt. Ice cream was also declared “moral food” by the US Army during World War I. These bits of information I learned from Marilyn Powell’s book, “Ice Cream: The Delicious History.”
Powell must have a real passion for ice cream to have gone to great lengths to bring the history and legends of ice cream to his readers with such enthusiasm. The book is as tasty as the cream, sugar, and egg parfait most of us enjoy, and the author’s writing style is not frozen at all, but warm, lively, and engaging.
The history of ice cream is universal and begins in the most ancient times, perhaps biblical, when snow was a precious article and people collected it. There were ice wells in ancient Britain dating back to the Iron Age. Then, in ancient Greece, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, warned people not to eat it, because he would suddenly throw “the body into a different state,” but people ate it anyway. Even Marco Polo could have seen it sold on the streets of China.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, dour Europeans had to be cajoled into letting the cold stuff into their bodies, since most illnesses were blamed on ice cream. However, convincing the Europeans turned out to be not too difficult, given the taste of the dessert.
Delving into the histories of ice cream and its variations like the banana split, Powell takes the dessert’s history through Europe and the United States to Andy Warhol’s ice cream cone paintings to the present day.
To garnish all these embellished facts, “Ice Cream: The Delicious History” has delicious drawings of old ice cream makers and gadgets, ice cream recipes old and new, President Jefferson’s recipe for vanilla ice cream, and another for black cow soda. .
According to the book’s publisher, the author, Marilyn Powell has taught at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. An award-winning writer, broadcaster and producer, her work has been published in Saturday Night, The Canadian Forum and Books in Canada. Her short stories have appeared in Toronto Short Stories and Aurora III. Powell has a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard University.
The book is in hard cover with 256 pages and ISBN: 1585677973.
It is very appropriate to end this article with Powell’s own words in the afterword. “Ice cream is a delight, a triumph, a treasure trove of invention. As Voltaire is reported to have remarked, ‘Ice cream is exquisite. Too bad it’s not illegal.”
Enjoy the book. I did.