The History of Chocolate Ice Cream

In its earliest form, ice cream dates all the way back to the Tang Dynasty in ancient China. But what about the fan favorite flavor, chocolate ice cream? The first mention of a chocolate frozen dessert (in this case, sorbet) dates back to Antonio Latini’s 1693 cookbook, Lo scalco alla moderna ("The Modern Steward"). However, the oldest mention of dairy-based chocolate ice cream dates to 1775, when an Italian doctor named Filippo Baldini recommended chocolate ice cream as a remedy for gout and scurvy in his treatise, De sorbetti. Interestingly, vanilla ice cream is thought to have been created by the French around the 1760s, where it caught the attention of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote down a recipe for it and brought it back home with him. However, neither vanilla nor chocolate were the first flavors of ice cream. According to a memoir written in the 1660s by an English woman living during the Stuart era named Lady Anne Fanshawe, one of the earliest known recipes for a cream-based frozen dessert was called Icy Cream and was made with frozen cream and sugar that had been flavored with either mace (derived from nutmeg seed), orange flower water, or ambergris (a substance derived from sperm whale excrement!). This early form of modern ice cream was considered very elite and was even included on the menu for a 1671 banquet hosted by Charles II. Today, chocolate ice cream is thankfully much more popular than ambergris-flavored ice cream and is now one of the most popular treats around.