Carlya Tucker, age 11, of East Lansing, Mich., for her question:
HOW DID WE GET ICE CREAM?
Summertime's favorite food seems to be ice cream although frozen dairy products are tremendously popular all the year around. More than 1 billion gallons of the nutritious and refreshing dessert is produced in the United States every year. We enjoy ice cream in sodas, shakes, malts and sundaes, eat it like a sandwich between cookies and with pie and cake and devour it in cones and bars.
As an average American, you should be putting away about 23 quarts of ice cream each year. About half of the total you select is vanilla flavored, statistics say. Your second choice in flavors is chocolate with strawberry coming in third on the popularity scale.
We aren't sure who first came up with the idea of ice cream although we do know Marco Polo brought back to Italy from China in 1295 some recipes for water ice. In the 1600s, recorded European history tells us, people enjoyed a mixture of cream, spices and fruit that was frozen with snow and ice.
A type of ice cream was enjoyed by the American colonists in the early 1700s. It was strictly a luxury item and made at home.
A milk dealer by the name of Jacob Fussell established in 1871 in Baltimore, Md., the nation's first ice cream plant. By the early 1900s the delicious frozen product was available in larger volume and soda fountains blossomed across the nation. The World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904 had a brand new invention: the ice cream cone. Ice cream bars were introduced to the public in 1921.
Food and drug laws regulate the standard necessary for ice cream production today. At least 20 percent of the ice cream's weight must be milk fat and other milk solids. Ice milk must contain 11 percent of milk solids.
Sherbet, you may be surprised to learn, contains about twice as much sugar as does ice cream. It contains a minimum of two percent milk solids, however.
A type of ice cream called mellorine, which contains 20 percent milk solids along with coconut, cottonseed or soybean oil instead of milk fat, is being made today in about a quarter of the states in the United States.
Almost all of the nation's ice cream production today is handled by commercial manufacturers, although the good product is still made in a limited number of private homes occasionally. Hand cranked or electrically¬driven freezers, packed with shaved ice and rock salt, are used to make the home made ice cream that has an especially good taste. Andy's favorite home made flavor is fresh peach.