Marco Polo probably did not bring ice cream to Europe
Popular legend credits Marco Polo, or Catherine de' Medici, or a secretive royal cook of Charles I. None of those stories holds up. Frozen desserts needed a trick of chemistry, salt lowering the melting point of ice, and Europe only picked that up in the sixteenth century.
Chilled sweets are ancient. Some accounts trace them to Persia around 550 BC, where engineers developed ways to store ice; a first-century Roman cookbook sprinkles desserts with snow. In Heian Japan, winter ice was shaved in summer and doused in syrup for aristocrats, a treat mentioned by Sei Shōnagon in The Pillow Book. In the sixteenth century Mughal rulers had ice relayed by horsemen from the Hindu Kush to Delhi to make kulfi, though the historian Charmaine O'Brien thinks the idea probably came from Persia or Samarkand.
Before salt, cream could be cooled but not frozen. Adding salt to ice triggers an endothermic effect, pulling heat out of whatever sits in the mixture. European writers noted this in the 1500s, and by the late 1600s sorbets and ice creams were being made with it. Polo never mentions frozen desserts in his writings; ice cream existed in France before Catherine de' Medici was born; and there is no evidence for the pension supposedly paid to Charles I's cook to keep his recipe secret.
Paris took to the novelty fast. The Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli opened an ice cream café there in 1686, and within 50 years another 250 had followed. England's first recorded ice cream was a single plate at Charles II's table during the Feast of St George at Windsor in 1671. By 1789 Frederick Nutt, trained at Domenico Negri's confectionery in Berkeley Square, published 31 recipes, including flavours of brown breadcrumbs and Parmesan.
Across the Atlantic, merchant records show George Washington spending about $200 on ice cream in the summer of 1790. Thomas Jefferson kept an 18-step recipe and helped popularise vanilla, though he did not introduce ice cream to America as often claimed. Hand-cranked freezers, invented by Agnes Marshall in England and Nancy Johnson in America in the 1840s, finally brought it into ordinary kitchens.
Source: Ice cream
