Getting the Scoop on Ice Cream : Exhibit Offers Facts and Fancy

As is often the case with truly monumental discoveries, the exact origin of ice cream has been lost to history.

No anthropologist has detected traces of hot fudge on the pots found in the ancients’ graves. No etymologist can say with certainty who first uttered the term ice cream , let alone who first ate it. So, anyone searching for the cold, hard facts will have to sift through legends of the past as well as the advertising slogans of the present.

Both fact and fancy are presented in a new exhibit, called The American Ice Cream Experience, that opens at the California Museum of Science and Industry today. The traveling exhibit, which has already been to Washington and Dallas, is being shown in conjunction with a museum-sponsored summer workshop for children called “Ice Cream for Science.”

No Taste Test

The exhibit includes a video about ice cream manufacturing, a “hands-on” exhibit in which visitors may test their knowledge of ice cream trivia via touch screens and displays that explain to the uninitiated the difference between, say, ices and sorbets.

Conspicuously absent, however, is a mouths-on opportunity to taste the subject of the exhibit. “We regret that it was not possible to have ice cream,” said a spokesman for Glendale-based Baskin-Robbins, which sponsors the exhibit. “We just did not have freezer facilities for the thousands of people expected to visit.”

So, anyone desperate for the likes of mint chocolate chip or jamoca almond fudge will have to make due with a soft-serve cone offered by another corporate exhibitor down the hall: MacDonald’s.

Principal Feature

The principal feature of the display is a time line in which the invention of the ice cream cone and the establishment of the first Baskin-Robbins store are right up there alongside the discovery of iron and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

It seems that ice cream probably evolved from iced drinks adored by King Solomon and Nero. A thousand years later, Marco Polo supposedly returned to Italy from the Orient with a recipe resembling sherbet. Italy, however, claims to be the first country to have added cream to the ice in the 16th Century.

King Charles I of England began eating something called “cream ice” in the 17th Century and liked it so much that he paid his chef to keep the recipe a secret. The chef was beheaded in 1649 after the secret got out.

The first time that ice cream is recorded as being served in America is 1700, when a guest at the home of the governor of Maryland wrote that he had eaten “some fine ice cream . . . most deliciously.” It was strawberry.

Dolly Madison is credited with introducing ice cream to the White House when she served it at her husband’s second inaugural ball in 1812. It too was strawberry.

After the invention of the hand-cranked freezer in New Jersey in 1846 by Nancy Johnson, the first ice cream factory in the United States was established in Baltimore in 1851 by Jacob Fussell.

In 1899, 5 million gallons of ice cream were produced in the United States. By last year, 924 million gallons of ice cream products worth about $9 billion were produced in the nation--enough for every American to eat 15 quarts a year. Californians consume an average of 16.42 quarts, while New Englanders top the list with 22.

Vanilla still outsells chocolate almost four to one. Despite its historic early lead, strawberry has dropped to eighth place, according to the International Assn. of Ice Cream Manufacturers.

It seems that many ice cream novelties were born by accident: the ice cream soda when a Dennison, Tex., waiter squirted soda water onto ice cream by mistake in 1873; the cone when a Syrian waffle maker helped out a neighboring ice cream vendor who had run out of plates at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis; the Popsicle when an Oakland man left a spoon in some lemonade overnight in 1926 and it froze.

A discriminating visitor to the museum might notice a few critical details are missing from the exhibit.

For example, while the display points out that a million cows (one-tenth of all dairy cattle in the United States) spend their days making ice cream, it fails to mention the unfortunate fact that only 80,000 of them are working on chocolate.

Moreover, while the exhibit accurately notes the prevalence of vanilla, it conveniently omits from history those less popular flavors, such as jalapena, dill pickle, kidney bean and yam, that have been tried and abandoned by various ice cream makers. (Baskin-Robbins identified its least successful flavor as sunflower seed.)

A reviewer might also point out that, while museum-goers learn that Baskin-Robbins came up with “baseball nut” when the Dodgers came to Los Angeles in 1957, and “lunar cheesecake” after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, the company has failed to remain au courant.

Where, Irv Robbins, a co-founder of the chain, was asked, are the Contragate flavors of “oh Ollieberry” and “partial imprunity?”

Robbins, who sold his namesake firm several years ago, but is inaugurating the exhibit, chuckled.

“Too controversial,” he said. “The most political we ever got was ‘candi-date” during the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles.”