Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making

Five. Screaming for Ice Cream

five Screaming for Ice Cream 103 When ice cream peddlers began appearing on city streets in the early nineteenth century, children were no doubt delighted. Adults had a more ambiguous reaction; initially welcoming, their response quickly turned sour. Before long,they questioned the quality of the ice cream,the cleanliness of the vendor, and the health problems associated with ice cream made in less-than-pristine environments. When vendors cried their products in the streets, the noise offended some ears. Fashionable confectioners and ice cream shopkeepers disdained the peddlers. Social reformers didn’t approve of them,because they believed the poor should not waste what little money they had on such frivolities. The fact that by the latter part of the century many, if not most, of the peddlers were immigrants also raised issues of prejudice and cultural misapprehensions. For ice cream peddlers, life was anything but sweet. Peddlers had begun selling ice cream on American city streets in the early part of the nineteenth century, with some coming to the city from the surrounding countryside to hawk their products. At first, their ice cream was praised, albeit faintly. In 1850, a writer in the Philadelphia area, identified only as “an Observer,” published a book called City Cries about the city’s various street vendors. Under “Ice Cream!” he wrote, “The countryman . . . sells an excellent article. It is really country ice cream,fresh from the farm,and although cried and sold in the streets,the market, and the public squares, it will please the most fastidious palate.” The “loudest criers of ice cream,” according to the author, were blacks who carried tin cans of lemon and vanilla ice creams on their shoulders. He had not tasted their ice cream, he admitted, but said he had been told that, although “the African article will not bear a comparison with Parkinson’s [the highly regarded Philadelphia confectionery shop], it is by no means unpalatable.”1 In London, where everything from apples to eels was hawked on the streets, ice cream was still not well known in 1851, when Henry Mayhew, the renowned chronicler of street life in Victorian England, asked a peddler about it. The peddler replied in astonishment, “Ices in the streets! Aye, and there’ll be jellies next, and then mock turtle, and then the real ticket,sir. . . . Penny glasses of champagne,I shouldn’t wonder.”2 When,despite the peddler’s skepticism,ice cream was sold in the streets, those who tasted it for the first time sometimes found the experience distressing . Mayhew wrote about a street seller at the Smithfield Market in London who had a handsome pie-cart drawn by a pony,from which he sold pies, milk, and ice cream, crying, “Raspberry cream! Iced raspberry-cream, ha’penny a glass!” Mayhew wrote: This street-seller had a capital trade. Street-ices, or rather ice-creams, were somewhat of a failure last year, more especially in Greenwich-park, but this year they seem likely to succeed. The Smithfield man sold them in very small glasses,which he merely dipped into a vessel at his feet,and so filled them with cream.The consumers had to use their fingers instead of a spoon, and no few seemed puzzled how to eat their ice, and were grievously troubled by its getting among their teeth. I heard one drover mutter that he felt “as if it had snowed in his belly!”3 In the second half of the century, the street vending of ice cream expanded rapidly as a result of an influx of immigrants from Italy. Destitute Italians were flooding into American and English cities, fleeing the political upheaval and poverty of their home. Rural Italy, in particular, had suffered as a result of revolution and changes in the feudal system.Even after the establishment of the new Italian state in 1861, peasants and laborers faced many hardships, and many sought a better life in other countries, 104 / Screaming for Ice Cream particularly England and the United States.When they arrived,they faced all the problems of finding their way in a foreign land, along with widespread prejudice against immigrants. Prominent politicians and writers used language such as “good-for-nothing mongrels,” “small, swarthy, black-haired, long-skulled people,” and “human flotsam”4 to describe them. A widely published turn-of-the-century poem titled “Unguarded Gates” railed against the “wild,motley...