The first frozen desserts were invented by the Chinese and Arabs over 2000 years ago. The Khalifs of Baghdad were trailblazers who drank syrups cooled with snow. This delicious drink was originally called "sharbet" (fruit ice, in Arabic.) Little did they suspect that the name and the recipe would travel around the world and give rise to sorbetti and many other variations.

Many famous and courageous conquerors had a little weakness: ices! The first fruit ices made their appearance some four centuries before the Christian era at the court of Alexander the Great. The precursors of modern ice cream, these early versions consisted of various fruits mixed with honey and chilled by contact with snow. It was an ingenious low-tech idea!

Three centuries later, ices were still all the rage with Roman emperors. Nero's lucky guests enjoyed fruit mixed with honey and snow from the Apennines at every imperial banquet!

In the 12th century, returning from China with an ice-cream maker in his luggage, the adventurer Marco Polo expanded the circle of the initiated. The Italian kingdom encountered the first real recipes for ice cream.

Sorbetto, which had become very popular in Italy, became a hit in France after the marriage of the Florentine Catherine de Medici to King Henri II. The new queen introduced her husband and the whole court to the pleasures of this dessert.

Gradually ices came down into the street…
In 1660 a Sicilian named Procopio di Coltelli opened the first café in Paris. There he sold coffee, of course, and… ice cream! He offered 80 varieties, each with a flavor more amazing than the last: rose, elderberry, toasted orange flower. In response to the public's enthusiasm, in 1676 la corporation des limonadiers - the café owners' guild - was officially granted the right to make ice cream.

Eventually new recipes were created, such as tortoni, an ice-cream filled cake, named for its Italian creator who came up with the idea in 1798.

At the end of the 19th century, the first ice cream street peddlers made their appearance as significant developments were made in the area of refrigeration. Americans opened the first factory in 1851 and their sherbet quickly became a success! The American word "sherbet" is close to the Arab "charab" - unless it's from the Turkish "chorbet"…

In 1862, during the London World Exposition, the French engineer Ferdinand Carré presented a machine that could manufacture ice cubes continuously at a rate of 200 kg per hour. A few years later, Charles Tellier invented the first ice box.

The first ice cream cones made their appearance at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Twenty years later, the first ice pops, invented by the American Christian Nelson, debuted in France.

In 1929 another American, Clarence Birdseye, perfected the fast-freezing process.

And to end this chapter on a cool note, we should mention in no particular order a few ice cream desserts that are among the great inventions of pastry and ice-cream makers: Baked Alaska, vacherin, frozen nougat, bombes, "mystère" (ice cream filled with meringue and decorated with hazelnuts), and iced panettone, an Italian specialty.