Ice Cream

major bill

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Aug 25, 2012
In another thread we discussed a helmet as looking like an ice-cream freezer. so my question is how common were ice-cream freezers during teh Civil War? I would take it that in Northern states ice was common and ice cream not completely rare, but what about in the South? To make ice cream one must have ice and ice houses were common in Northern states, but were ice houses that common in the South? Ice could be shipped by sea and by rail by the time of the Civil War so I am sure that there was some ice in the South. However small Southern towns may not have seen all that much ice. Some rural Southerners may have rarely seen ice.

Question two. What was the most common flavor of ice cream during the Civil War? The use of flavored ice goes back for 4,000 years and was mostly fruit. I have seen vanilla raspberry and peach ice cream but no blue moon ice cream. I think Civil War soldiers would have like bacon ice cream, but hardtack ice cream? Well you could use the hardtack instead of cones.
 
In another thread we discussed a helmet as looking like an ice-cream freezer. so my question is how common were ice-cream freezers during teh Civil War? I would take it that in Northern states ice was common and ice cream not completely rare, but what about in the South? To make ice cream one must have ice and ice houses were common in Northern states, but were ice houses that common in the South? Ice could be shipped by sea and by rail by the time of the Civil War so I am sure that there was some ice in the South. However small Southern towns may not have seen all that much ice. Some rural Southerners may have rarely seen ice.

Question two. What was the most common flavor of ice cream during the Civil War? The use of flavored ice goes back for 4,000 years and was mostly fruit. I have seen vanilla raspberry and peach ice cream but no blue moon ice cream. I think Civil War soldiers would have like bacon ice cream, but hardtack ice cream? Well you could use the hardtack instead of cones.

While I can't speak of ice availability in the South I can tell you that ice cream was first mentioned in an advertisement in the New York Gazette in 1777 wherein a shop keeper mentioned the availability of ice cream available almost daily. George Washington purchased pewter ice cream pots for Mount Vernon. And I think most are familiar with Dolly Madison and her ice cream desserts served at the White House way back when. As to it's popularity it wasn't common except among the rich. You'll notice a lot of recipes cropping up in period cookbooks in the 1870's and beyond with very few in older cookbooks.

Until 1800, ice cream remained a rare and exotic dessert enjoyed mostly by the elite. Around 1800, insulated ice houses were invented. Manufacturing ice cream soon became an industry in America, pioneered in 1851 by a Baltimore milk dealer named Jacob Fussell. Like other American industries, ice cream production increased because of technological innovations, including steam power, mechanical refrigeration, the homogenizer, electric power and motors, packing machines, and new freezing processes and equipment. In addition, motorized delivery vehicles dramatically changed the industry. Due to ongoing technological advances, today's total frozen dairy annual production in the United States is more than 1.6 billion gallons. Source

Here are some posts from Albert Sailhorst on period ice cream recipes from Housekeeping in Old Virginia -

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/chocolate-ice-cream.136752/#post-1596042
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/buttermilk-ice-cream.136753/#post-1596047
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/lemon-ice-cream.136750/#post-1596034

Hopefully someone else knows a little more about ice availability in the South around the Civil War era. As for flavors judging from the period recipes flavors like chocolate and even strawberry were common (Dolly Madison served strawberry ice cream at the White House), so not too different from our current palate. Granted we don't have buttermilk ice cream sold commercially today - at least none that I've ever seen, but it's very similar to a frozen type of custard from the ingredients. I imagine though Civil War soldiers might like fruit based ice creams best because of the ices and sherbets that were more popular in the era.

And I do believe you might want to email your bacon and hardtack ice cream idea to Ben & Jerry's :thumbsup:



 
This got me curious,so I did a quick search thru my links and I found a recipe for ice cream from a cookbook published in 1840.what is different is that this was the 10th edition of the book,so I do not know the earliest date it was published.the cookbook is "Directions in Cookery,In Its Various Branches" by Eliza Leslie.
Her recipe calls for the use of a vanilla bean for flavor,but if you like you can use a lemon.
She also said that you could make strawberry ice cream by using strawberry juice from squeezing the berries thru linen.
As a thought by her mentioning vanilla first it might have been as popular back then as it it today.
The process to go thru is so involved it really seems not worth the effort as it is really a lot of work.
 
While I can't speak of ice availability in the South I can tell you that ice cream was first mentioned in an advertisement in the New York Gazette in 1777 wherein a shop keeper mentioned the availability of ice cream available almost daily. George Washington purchased pewter ice cream pots for Mount Vernon. And I think most are familiar with Dolly Madison and her ice cream desserts served at the White House way back when. As to it's popularity it wasn't common except among the rich. You'll notice a lot of recipes cropping up in period cookbooks in the 1870's and beyond with very few in older cookbooks.

Until 1800, ice cream remained a rare and exotic dessert enjoyed mostly by the elite. Around 1800, insulated ice houses were invented. Manufacturing ice cream soon became an industry in America, pioneered in 1851 by a Baltimore milk dealer named Jacob Fussell. Like other American industries, ice cream production increased because of technological innovations, including steam power, mechanical refrigeration, the homogenizer, electric power and motors, packing machines, and new freezing processes and equipment. In addition, motorized delivery vehicles dramatically changed the industry. Due to ongoing technological advances, today's total frozen dairy annual production in the United States is more than 1.6 billion gallons. Source

Here are some posts from Albert Sailhorst on period ice cream recipes from Housekeeping in Old Virginia -

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/chocolate-ice-cream.136752/#post-1596042
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/buttermilk-ice-cream.136753/#post-1596047
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/lemon-ice-cream.136750/#post-1596034

Hopefully someone else knows a little more about ice availability in the South around the Civil War era. As for flavors judging from the period recipes flavors like chocolate and even strawberry were common (Dolly Madison served strawberry ice cream at the White House), so not too different from our current palate. Granted we don't have buttermilk ice cream sold commercially today - at least none that I've ever seen, but it's very similar to a frozen type of custard from the ingredients. I imagine though Civil War soldiers might like fruit based ice creams best because of the ices and sherbets that were more popular in the era.

And I do believe you might want to email your bacon and hardtack ice cream idea to Ben & Jerry's :thumbsup:




I know when I see some one eating bacon flavored ice cream and see the piece of bacon sticking out of the top, I think it is something my dad would have liked. To me bacon goes on your eggs not on top of your ice cream.
 
Did ice boats still run during from Northern states to Southern states during the Civil War?
 
From The Surprisingly Cool History of Ice: "The 1860s became the peak competitive period of American ice harvesting... Even during the Civil War, when the South was cut off from ice supplies in the North, the ice industry continued to grow in New England and in the Midwest." Ice was known as "white gold". Before the Civil War, it was a luxury item but after it, ice became usual.

edited for spelling
 
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Ice was cut in my area. During the winter it does get on the cold side about here.
 
One of the first acts of the US Quartermasters after the fall of Nashville in January 1862 was to refurbish the icehouse on the River front.
Did it get cold enough? Ice used to be harvested from the river down the street from me--the ice had to be so thick that men and all their implements could work on it. It takes pretty cold weather to do that.
Mrs Chestnut & other lady chroniclers of the era speak glowingly of the restorative effect of a iced drink. Cold compresses were a welcome solace to fevered brows. A trip to one of the new ice cream parlors was memorialized in many a young lady’s journal. Having a store of ice laid in to last summer was an essential element of a civilized life.

The ice harvest was a major industry in New England. During the winter, highly organized work gangs sawed ice on lakes & ponds into blocks. By hand or with teams of horses, the blocks were taken to a ramp that led to an insulated ice house.

The discovery of the insulating property of an air gap/void was what made the ice industry possible. Even in the hottest of climatic conditions, what amounted to a building within a building was an extremely effective insulator.

Special built fast schooners carried tons of New England ice to New Orleans, as well as the other eight seaports in the South. There were huge ice storage facilities in N.O. The ice would be transferred to special built ice barges. The barges would then be towed to points northward for distribution.

I assume that there was a similar ice business upriver as well, but I have never had reason to investigate it. No doubt someone on CWT is conversant on this topic.

Here in Murfreesboro TN, private homes had ice houses. I don’t have to imagine how thankfully a cool drink or compress would have been during the summer months.

To give an illustration of how important ice was, at one point during the Vicksburg Siege, Grant turned over 40 barges of ice to the US Sanitary Commission for distribution to hospitals. The US Hospital Ship Red Rover had been a luxury packet boat. It had both a built in ice house & dedicated dumbwaiters to bring the ice up to the wards. The restorative effect of cooling drinks & ice water towels were an essential part of the Red Rover’s impressive recovery rate.

During the siege of Nashville in 1864, a very fancy ice cream parlor was having its grand opening. There was also a circus with a long list of attractions performing three times a day. Restaurants offered oysters that had been packed in barrels of ice & shipped from N.E. A soldier with a pass could have treated himself to ice cream, a delightful circus performance, a full course meal including oysters & ended his evening at a legal brothel where a frosted julip cup would have resorted him for the taxi ride back to camp. All of this was advertised with pages of adds in the Nashville Union Banner News Paper.

What, exactly Hood’s starving “besiegers” thought about that when they read paper & heard the steam calliope from the circus is anyone’s guess. They did, however, get plenty of ice on their own. One of our indescribable ice storms turned their world into glittering glass.

Note: The Union Banner News Paper for the CW period is available from the Library of Congress. It makes for a chronology of what soldiers knew about what was happening. Official reports are printed entirely. Soldier’s letters are very frank. The adds are a revelation. Had things gone wrong with his visit to the brothel, clinics specializing in cures for STD’s offered very reassuring adds.

One aspect of the ice trade that is highly improbable involved tea clipper ships. Ordinary cargo would have left malodorous evidence of months in the holds of China bound clippers. One solution was to deadhead outbound in ballast. That, of course, was not profitable. Just who it was that came up with the bright idea of shipping ice to China is lost to history. Packed in insulating straw, N. E. ice sold for premium rates when off loaded in Canton.
 
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I don’t know how far back it goes, but at least in the 1920s my grandparents who lived in the rural Upper Cumberland Valley of Tennessee near the Kentucky border had what they called an ice cellar. It was a standalone small structure over a deep excavation. For a single family, they could reliably harvest the ice from creeks and smaller streams.This was different than the spring house that was the equivalent of a refrigerator.
 
See my post. The ice trade from New England to New Orleans was very brisk during the war. From there, special built ice barges carried it up River. See my post in this thread.
If your sources are southern, they may contain a misconception that I've often seen on this board: that New York is a part of New England. Before ACW, the greatest source of ice was from the Hudson in New York. The ice trade was briskest to other parts of the east coast and to the midwest. New England shipping had a hard time of it during the war. Confederate privateers were decimating; Maine never recovered. Coming at the same time was the highly effective Union blockade.

The south was pretty much cut off from the ice trade (or "frozen water" trade) during the war. The lack of ice effected Confederate hospitals which came to employ a French technique for a type of artificial ice (something with ammonia so it couldn't be used for ice cream).

From https://stringfixer.com/ar/Ice_trade "The war disrupted the sale of Northern ice to the South, and Maine merchants instead turned to supplying the Union Army, whose forces used ice in their more southern campaigns"
 
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