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Would you like some sorbet or ice cream? Ice cream as a product of early modern alchemy

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2022

Abstract

As a cultural product of our modern menu, ice cream has a firm place in our eating habits. But when eating sweet, or nowadays also salty or other flavoured, cold delicacies, one rarely thinks about what the beginning of chilled and frozen food was like, not only in terms of the development of its tastes, but also in terms of cooling and freezing technology; where and when it actually comes from, by whom they were consumed in the past and why they are so popular today.

This study offers not only a cultural anthropological view of the origin and development of sorbets and ice creams from the point of view of their kitchen technology, but also provides insight into our own attempts to make ice creams and sorbets same way as they have been made and served at the royal and noble courts of Europe in the 18th, 19th and even at the beginning of the 20th century.