Regional Ice Creams » Italian Carpigiani
Ice cream today is a very traditional dessert of Italy, where it is still mostly hand-made, even if one of the most known ice cream machine makers are Italian Carpigiani.
Before the cone became popular for serving the ice cream, street vendors would serve the ice cream in a small glass dish known as to a 'penny lick' or wrapped in waxed paper and known as a hokey-pokey (possibly a corruption of the Italian "echo un pock" - "here is a little"). The use of a cone for serving ice cream could be traced back to Mrs. Marshall's Cookery Book published in 1888. Agnes Marshall was a celebrated cookery writer of her day and helped to popularize ice cream. She patented and manufactured an ice cream maker and was the first person to encourage using liquid gases to freeze ice cream after seeing a demonstration at the Royal Institution. The first ice cream cone was introduced at the Word's Fair in 1904.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the ice cream sodas were probably the single most popular teen delicacy in the America, so much so that religious conservatives considered it sinful and also subversive, giving rise to actual legal prohibition of the stuff on holy days, which probably influenced the art and creation of the modern ice cream sundae.
The history of Carpigiani ice cream in the twentieth century is one of great change and increase in availability and popularity. Retail storefront outlets and developed as chains of ice cream stores, such as Baskin Robbins.
The popularity of selling the ice cream in cones increased greatly after Charles E. Menches of St. Louis, Missouri used them at the St. Louis World's fair in the year 1904. The story behind why ice cream was sold at the World's Fair is that the ice cream seller had ran out of small cups, and without them could not sell anymore ice cream. Next door to the ice cream booth was the waffle booth and the waffle maker offered to make cones out of stiff waffles, and the new product became extremely popular at the fair and was widely copied by other vendors.
Ice cream became extremely popular throughout the world during second half of the twentieth century after cheap refrigeration became common, and wages became high enough to indulge in such as luxury items. Soon there was an explosion of ice cream stores and their flavors’ and types.
One major development in the twentieth century was the introduction of soft ice cream. A chemical research team in Britain (of which a young Margaret Thatcher was a member) discovered in the method of doubling the amount of air in ice cream. This allowed manufacturers to use less of the actual ingredients and saving money. The ice cream was also very popular amongst consumers who preferred the light flavors, and most major ice cream brands now used this manufacturing process.
Interestingly enough the 1990s saw a return of the older, thicker, ice creams being sold as elite varieties. Both Ben and Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs fall into this category.
Recently, globalization has brought ice cream styles from around the world to various places. For example, Japanese mocha ice cream is now popular in California, even outside of Japanese restaurants and Little Tokyo’s.