The History of Ice Cream, One of the World’s Oldest Desserts

To have ice cream, you need to have a way to keep it cold. And in the days before refrigeration, that meant you needed ice if you wanted chilled food. “It’s tough to pinpoint the origin of ice cream or even the ancestors of ice cream, but the general consensus is that in the ancient world, people got ice a couple of different ways,” Wassberg Johnson says.

Some harvested ice that formed on natural sources, but that wasn’t always as easy as stepping outside into a wintry wonderland. “In the ancient world, lakes didn’t really freeze in the Mediterranean and Middle East, so they were getting glacial ice and snow from high up in the mountains,” she says. All the time and effort that went into collecting ice made it something that only the wealthiest people could afford.

Getting ice in the desert—in places like Ancient Egypt—was another story. According to Wassberg Johnson, there’s evidence that people would use evaporation for cooling purposes. “When you put water in a porous clay container and wrap it with a wet cloth, evaporation would pull the heat out of whatever was in there,” she explains. “Or, in desert areas where it would freeze at night, they would put out very shallow dishes filled with water and get a thin piece of ice that way.”

As with many aspects of food history, there’s no way to definitively know who invented ice cream, or which country it originated from. The first references to ice houses and actually eating snow come from 11th century BCE China. “Then, around 200 BCE, there’s a reference to people in China eating [a combination of ] milk and rice that was frozen in the snow,” she says.

How did we go from that to something that more closely resembles our modern types of ice cream? We have the Persians to thank. Around 400 BCE, they invented the predecessor to artificial refrigeration: a large pyramidal structure called a yakhchal that used evaporation and insulation to keep things cool.

By the 11th century CE, Persians were making something called sharbat, which Wassberg Johnson says is “probably the closest ancestor, at least linguistically, to ice cream, and where the word ‘sherbet’ comes from.” Thanks to trading with the Indian Empire, Persians had access to sugar, which they combined with water and flavourings to create sharbat.

The icy treat “came to Europe through Moorish influence after the Crusades,” she explains. As with many aspects of food history, there’s no way to definitively know who invented ice cream, or which country it originated from. The first references to ice houses and actually eating snow come from 11th century BCE China. “Then, around 200 BCE, there’s a reference to people in China eating [a combination of ] milk and rice that was frozen in the snow,” she says. How did we go from that to something that more closely resembles our modern types of ice cream? We have the Persians to thank. Around 400 BCE, they invented the predecessor to artificial refrigeration: a large pyramidal structure called a yakhchal that used evaporation and insulation to keep things cool. By the 11th century CE, Persians were making something called sharbat, which Wassberg Johnson says is “probably the closest ancestor, at least linguistically, to ice cream, and where the word ‘sherbet’ comes from.” Thanks to trading with the Indian Empire, Persians had access to sugar, which they combined with water and flavourings to create sharbat.

So there we have it Icecream was invented by the Persians and the Chinese it seems.