The Story Behind the Story . . .

To research WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM!, I toured two ice cream factories and a dairy farm . . . interviewed industry taste testers. . . took scoop lessons from a former soda jerk. . . made ice cream, cones, and chocolate sauces in my kitchen. . . and tasted every brand of ice cream I could get a spoon into - - gaining six pounds in the process!

When I was a kid, just about every weekend my best girlfriend, Kristi, and I would ride our bikes three miles to the nearest Baskin-Robbins. One of my favorite flavors back then was Pink Bubblegum. I used to pick out all the gum chunks (saving them in my hand!), gobble down the ice cream, then snap, crackle and pop the gum on the long bike ride home. Today, my favorite flavor is McConnell's Chocolate Raspberry Truffle. Even though I'm a grown-up, I still love to mine the carton till I hit the motherlode, saving those chunks of mmm-good chocolate to eat after I finish the ice cream. YUM!

Ice Cream Trivia

• The United States makes over 1.5 billion gallons of ice cream a year. That's enough for every man, woman, and child in America to eat 184 single scoop cones: one a day for each of us for almost six months!
  
• Kids between the ages of 2 and 12 are the biggest ice-screamers, eating more than half of the ice cream sandwiches, bars, and prepackaged cones made each year.
  
• Iced dairy products made from the milk of horse, buffalo, yak, camel, cow and goat first appeared during the T'ang Dynasty in China (618-907 A.D.). King T'ang himself relished an iced-milk dish called kumiss. The frosty concoction included rice, flour, and "dragon's eyeball powder" - - better known today as camphor, a chemical taken from the wood of an evergreen tree.
  
• Café Procope became the world's first restaurant to serve ice cream when it opened its doors in 1686. The Paris café dished up chocolate, vanilla and strawberry - - considered exotic flavors back then. Today, you can still buy your old favorites there, more than three hundred years after the first scoop was served!
  
• The first recorded reference to ice cream in the New World was found in a journal entry dated 1744. It described a dinner party at the home of Maryland's governor, Thomas Bladen, who served a dessert of ice cream made with milk and strawberries.
  
• American presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all loved ice cream. During the summer of 1790, Washington ordered $200 worth of the delicious dessert: the equivalent of $96,400 today!
  
• Nancy M. Johnson received a patent for the first hand-cranked ice cream freezer in 1843. She later sold the patent for a mere $1500.
  
• Jacob Fussell, considered to be the Father of the Ice Cream Industry, opened the first commerical ice cream plant in America in 1851. At that time, the average American ate less than one teaspoon of ice cream a year.
  
• Some sources say the ice cream soda was created by two newsboys in 1872 at a candy shop in New York City, when they asked the fountain dispenser to plop a scoop of ice cream and a slice of pineapple into a glass of soda water.
  
• A teenager named George Hallauer accidentally invented the ice cream sundae in 1881 when he asked a soda jerk to pour chocolate syrup - - used in making ice cream sodas - - into his bowl of vanilla ice cream.
  
• The ice cream cone was invented in 1896 by an Italian immigrant named Italo Marchiony, who sold ice cream from a cart on the streets of New York. He received a patent in 1903 for the machine that made these delicious, edible holders.
  
• In 1904, at the St. Louis World's Fair, the ice cream cone was popularized by Ernest Hamwi, a waffle vendor. When the ice cream salesman in the booth next to Hamwi's ran out of serving dishes, Hamwi rolled a hot waffle into the shape of a cone, and offered it in place of a dish. The World's Fair "cornucopias" were an instant hit.
  
• The Eskimo Pie, invented by Chris Nelson in 1920, was originally called the I-Scream Bar.
  
• In 1921, the Commissioner of Ellis Island issued a delicious decree: all immigrants arriving in this country would receive a free scoop of ice cream with their first American meal.
  
• During World War II, cone manufacturers had trouble getting wheat flour since it was needed to make bread and other food products for American soldiers overseas. Several companies in Philadelphia solved this problem by making ice cream cones out of crushed, sweetened popcorn!
  
• An ice cream shop in Venezuela, Helados Coromoto, is listed in the Guinness book of World Records as serving the most flavors: 550! The specialty of the house is pabellon criollo, which is similar to the national dish of shredded beef, black beans, rice and plantains (a type of banana).
  
• 12 pounds of milk are needed to make one gallon of ice cream.
  
• It takes about 50 licks to eat a single scoop ice cream cone.
  
• The largest ice cream sundae in the world weighed in at a whopping 54,914 pounds. It was made by Palm Dairies Ltd. of Alberta, Canada, in 1988.
  
• You would need a tower of 1,209 Eskimo Pies, stacked end-to-end, to stand as high as the Washington Monument. It would take a chain of 3 billiion Eskimo Pies to reach the moon.
  
• According to the International Ice Cream Association, more ice cream is sold on Sunday than any other day of the week.
  
• A 19th century law is still on the books today in Newark, New Jersey, which forbids eating ice cream after 6 p.m. without a doctor's approval.

Ten Weirdest Ice Cream Flavors

1. Mashed potato and bacon
2. Tuna fish
3. Fried Pork Rind
4. Chili con Carne
5. Garlic
6. Sauerkraut
7. Horseradish and Beer
8. Mustard
9. Dill Pickle
10. Ketchup

Recipe for E-Z Ice Cream

Kids ages 2 to 102 can make this ice cream with little muss or fuss - - and it's delicious! You don't need an ice cream machine, and you don't need a freezer for hardening or storage, so you can make this recipe on camping trips, at parties, school, the beach - - just about anywhere!

You will need:

1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups ice cubes (about two large handsful)
6 tablespoons rock salt
1 Ziploc brand sandwich bag, or other sandwich-size plastic sealable bag
1 Ziploc brand freezer bag (quart-sized), or other large, plastic sealable freezer bag
1 pair of oven mitts
1 dishtowel
1 spoon

Step one: Pour the cream into the sandwich-sized bag.

Step two: Add sugar and vanilla extract to the same bag.

Step three: Seal the bag. (Make sure it's tightly closed, otherwise your ingredients will leak.)

Step four: Place the closed sandwich bag inside the freezer bag.

Step five: Pour the ice into the freezer bag.

Step six: Pour the rock salt into the freezer bag.

Step seven: Seal the freezer bag. Tightly, please!

Step eight: Put on your oven mitts; or wrap the dishtowel loosely around the freezer bag.

Step nine: Shake, rock, roll, and squeeze the bag for a full 5 minutes. (Note: the bag is going to get very cold, between 18-20 degrees F. The mitts or dishtowel will keep your hands from freezing.)

Step ten: Open the freezer bag and remove the sandwich bag. Using the dish towel, quickly wipe away any rock salt and water from the outside of the sandwich bag. (The ice will have almost completely melted, so the outside of your sandwich bag will be wet.) This will keep the salt and water out of your sandwich bag - - and your ice cream! -- when you open it.

Step eleven: Open the sandwich bag and . . . enjoy! You may eat the ice cream right out of the bag, or spoon it into a bowl. To remove every last delicious bit of the ice cream, turn the bag inside out and scrape the sides with your spoon.

Makes 1 serving.

Serving suggestions: Try drizzling chocolate sauce or other syrups atop your ice cream... sprinkling chocolate chips, jimmies, M & Ms, granola or nuts over it... or mixing it with fresh strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, or peaches.