🍦 Ice cream maker

An ice cream maker (ice cream vendor) is a person who makes or sells ice cream. It used to be a treat for the rich: in the 1700s ice cream was made by hand and eaten at once. Cheap street ice cream arrived in the 1840s, and one of its main figures was the Swiss-born Carlo Gatti.

Gatti was born in 1817 in the Blenio Valley in Ticino. He reached London in 1847 and first sold waffles and chestnuts. In 1851 he set up a stall at Hungerford Market, near Charing Cross, where he sold ice cream in small shells for a penny. People called it penny ice. Next to it came the penny lick, a cheap glass cup that the customer licked clean and handed back. Some sellers filled the glass almost to the brim so a scoop looked bigger.

The hard part was ice. Gatti shipped it from Norway; the first recorded cargo, around 1857, was 400 tons. It was stored in wells dug beside Regent's Canal, rather like a cellar, only colder.

Today everything depends on cold. In a store case, ice cream should sit at 0 °F (-18 °C) or colder, and above 10 °F (-12 °C) is too warm. At home, set the freezer between -5 and 0 °F and keep the tub in the main compartment, not the door, where the temperature swings. Serve it at 6 to 10 °F, when it scoops easily. Do not let it soften and refreeze, or big crystals form. Unopened, it keeps up to two months; once opened, eat it within 7 to 10 days.

Ice cream, coffee and milk often share a counter; see barista and coffee shop. For the product itself, see ice cream.