Fresh Ella's Ice Cream and Sundries

You can use a hot market afternoon to learn how ice cream works and what to ask for when you buy a scoop for your family. What follows stays with what can be checked about ice cream itself: ingredients, texture, serving, types, rules and history, rather than any particular truck's menu.

What goes into the scoop

Ice cream is a frozen dessert typically made from milk or cream that has been flavored with a sweetener, either sugar or an alternative, and a spice such as cocoa or vanilla, or with fruit such as strawberries or peaches. Food coloring is sometimes added, as well as stabilizers. If you shop with children, you can read a label with them and point to those parts: milk or cream, sweetener, flavor and stabilizer, and talk about why each one is there. For a central Maine market day, that habit helps you compare a dairy scoop with a fruit ice without guessing. You can also look at the Central Maine Farms Dairy Creameries and Maple Houses guide to place milk and cream in the local farm year.

Why stirring and cold matter

The mixture is cooled below the freezing point of water and stirred to incorporate air spaces and prevent detectable ice crystals from forming. It can also be made by whisking a flavored cream base and liquid nitrogen together. The result is a smooth, semi-solid foam that is solid at very low temperatures, below 2 degrees C or 35 degrees F, and it becomes more malleable as its temperature increases. That is why a scoop served very cold holds its shape and then softens in the dish. When you carry cups across a sunny field, you see the change fast, from firm to soft, and you can plan to eat near the stand and ask for spoons right away.

How do you eat it on a market day?

Ice cream may be served in dishes, eaten with a spoon, or licked from edible wafer handheld cones as finger food. It may be served with other desserts such as cake or pie, used as an ingredient in cold dishes such as ice cream floats, sundaes, milkshakes and ice cream cakes, or in baked items such as Baked Alaska. It is often sold in dedicated ice cream parlors, carts, stands or vans. On a family outing, you can match the form to the age of the eaters: a dish and spoon for a toddler, a cone for an older child who can finish it before it melts. You can check the Belgrade Lakes Sunday Market Guide and Season Calendar before you go so you know how much time you have for a sundae or a float.

Gelato, custard and soft serve

The Italian word for ice cream, gelato, which means frozen, is often used in English. Frozen custard is a type of rich ice cream. Soft serve is softer and is often served at amusement parks and fast food restaurants in the United States. If your children ask why one stand looks smooth and dense and another looks light and swirled, you can use those three names to describe texture. Gelato points to Italy, custard points to richness, and soft serve points to softness and to places where it is often served. You can ask the seller which style is in the case that day and how it is held at serving temperature.

Options without cow's milk

Ice creams made from cow's milk alternatives, such as goat's milk or sheep's milk, or milk substitutes such as soy, oat, cashew, coconut, almond milk or tofu, are available for those who are lactose intolerant, allergic to dairy protein, or vegan. Banana nice cream is a 100 percent fruit-based vegan alternative. Frozen yogurt, or froyo, is similar to ice cream but uses yogurt and is usually lower in fat. Fruity sorbets or sherbets without dairy content are also usually sold in ice cream shops. For families with mixed needs, that range matters. You can ask which tubs contain milk or cream, which contain yogurt, and which are fruit-only, then pick spoons that keep the servings separate.

What does the name mean in law?

The legal definition of the name ice cream varies from country to country. In some countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the term applies only to products meeting a defined specification, and most governments regulate the commercial use of the various terms according to the relative quantities of the main ingredients, notably the amount of butterfat from cream. Readers who want to know how ice cream is defined in different places can follow that rule further. In the United Kingdom, dairy ice cream is more restrictive than ice cream alone. Products containing milk or cream that do not meet the criteria to be called ice cream, usually due to being reduced-fat, are sometimes labeled frozen dairy dessert instead. In some other countries, the name of the dessert makes no mention of cream, and is applicable to non-dairy desserts.

Where did frozen dessert start?

The origins of frozen desserts are obscure, although several accounts exist about their history. According to some accounts, the history begins in ancient Persia around 550 BC and Persian engineering techniques for storing and using ice led to the forerunner of all frozen desserts. A Roman cookbook dating back to the first century includes recipes for sweet desserts sprinkled with snow, and there are Persian records from the second century for sweetened drinks chilled with ice. Kakigori is a Japanese dessert made with ice and flavored syrup, and its origins date back to the Heian period, when blocks of ice saved during the colder months would be shaved and served with sweet syrup to the Japanese aristocracy during the summer. Its origin is referred to in The Pillow Book, a book of observations written by Sei Shonagon, who served the Imperial Court during the Heian period. The earliest known written process to artificially make ice is known not from culinary texts but from thirteenth-century writings of the Syrian historian Ibn Abi Usaybia in his Book of Sources of Information on the Classes of Physicians, concerning medicine, in which he attributes the process to an even older author, Ibn Bakhtawayhi, of whom nothing is known.

How did Europe learn to freeze cream?

Ice cream production became easier with the discovery of the endothermic effect. Prior to this, cream could be chilled easily but not frozen. The addition of salt lowered the melting point of ice, drawing heat from the cream and allowing it to freeze. In the sixteenth century, the Mughal Empire used relays of horsemen to bring ice from the Hindu Kush to Delhi, which was used to create kulfi, a popular frozen dairy dessert from the Indian subcontinent often described as traditional Indian ice cream. The technique of freezing was not known in any European accounts prior to the sixteenth century. During the sixteenth century, authors made reference to the refrigerant effect that happened when salt was added to ice, and by the latter part of the seventeenth century sorbets and ice creams were made using this process. The spread through Europe is sometimes attributed to Moorish traders, but more often to Marco Polo, though it is not mentioned in any of his writings. Legend says Catherine de Medici introduced flavored sorbet ices to France in 1533 and that Charles I of England offered his ice cream maker a lifetime pension for a secret formula, yet the page reports no evidence to support these legends.

What changed in England and America?

The first recorded mention of ice cream in England was in 1671, when Elias Ashmole described the dishes served at the Feast of St George at Windsor for Charles II and included one plate of ice cream, and only the table of the King had it. The first recipe in English was published in Mrs. Mary Eales Receipts in London in 1718, with tin ice pots, eighteen or twenty pounds of ice for six pots, bay salt, straw, a pail in a cellar where no sun or light comes, freezing in four hours, plus fruit versions with cherries, raspberries, currants or strawberries and lemonade made with spring water and lemon juice sweetened. Later came Hannah Glasse in 1751, M. Emy in 1768 with a book devoted to flavored ices, Domenico Negri in Berkeley Square in 1769 at the Sign of the Pineapple, and Frederick Nutt in 1789 with 31 recipes including ginger, chocolate, brown breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese. An early North American reference is from 1744 at a dinner held by Governor Thomas Bladen, with fine ice cream eaten with strawberries and milk. Confectioners sold it in New York and other cities during the colonial era; Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson ate and served it; Washington spent about 200 dollars on it in the summer of 1790; Jefferson held an eighteen-step recipe and helped introduce vanilla; and Dolley Madison served it at the Inaugural Ball in 1813. Hand-cranked freezers were invented by Agnes Marshall in England and Nancy Johnson in America in the 1840s, and Agnes Marshall, called "queen of ices," wrote four books in 1885, 1888, 1891 and 1894, gave public lectures and suggested liquid nitrogen. Carlo Gatti sold penny scoops in shells outside Charing Cross Station from 1851, stored ice cut from the Regent Canal and later imported from Norway. New Zealand print first offered it in Wellington in 1866; commercial making followed by 1875; and by 2018 matcha suited Asian markets. Soda appeared in the 1870s, sundaes in the late nineteenth century with claims from Buffalo, Two Rivers, Ithaca and Evanston, and cones and banana splits in the early twentieth century, with Marshall in 1888 describing almond cornets baked in the oven and the cone popularized at the 1904 World Fair in St. Louis. You can bring that timeline to the market and browse the Belgrade Lakes Market Vendors Farms Food and Crafts list, then ask your children which old flavor they would have picked and which new fruit they want to try in a cup.