Cool stuff

Sunshine equals ice cream. Food historians have long portrayed ice cream as a luxury product confined to the elite until freezing technology brought it to the masses. Now research by Cambridge University historian Melissa Calaresu suggests that in Italy iced products were enjoyed by rich and poor alike as long as 300 years ago. The passion for iced water is so great and so general in Naples, that none but mere beggars would drink it in its natural state." - —Henry Swinburne, English traveller in Naples, 1780s Our appetite for ice cream is as fickle as the British weather: a hot spell sees sales peak while demand dips when the sun disappears. Street vendors of ice cream, kiosks and ice-cream vans are particularly vulnerable to a grey and gloomy summer. It's not surprising that much of the earliest evidence of ice-cream making dates back to places where the weather is reliably hot. The Romans loved the cool taste of ice mixed with fruit; the Emperor Nero reputedly ordered snow to be brought down from the mountains to make into refreshing desserts.