Old Uncle Gaylord's Ice Cream

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That incredibly inventive period that brought us the cotton gin and the assembly line culminated, in 1846, with the invention of the churn-type ice cream freezer, brought to perfection by Mrs. Nancy Johnson, a New England housewife. With the slight improvement of adding a crank to the top of the churn, the crank ice cream freezer, much as we know it today, was patented by William Young in 1848.

Before Nancy Johnson's day, ice cream was strictly a handmade item. Rather than the wooden (or most often today, plastic) tub to hold the ice and salt for freezing, our forefathers and foremothers used a pewter bowl. A smaller container of the same material held the concoction of milk, cream, eggs, sugar, and flavorings. . he small pot was shaken up and down by one person while another held the bowl with the ice and salt. George Washington had such pots (and the slaves to do the Shaking) at hi Mt. Vernon estate.

Such primitive manufacturing methods coupled with the unavailability of ice in large quantities, made ice cream (understadably) a rare and expensive treat. It took the development of the insulated ice house, the "Johnson Patented Ice Cream Machine", and the addition of a motor to bring ice cream to the masses. America ate well and often of this wonderful, healthful dessert for the next 50 years or so,

As America changed, however, so did As ice cream. Just as the automobile and mass communications were speeding up and homogenizing American society, a comparable development revolutionized the ice cream industry: the invention of the air-inject freezer in 1927. Until this invention, ice cream was a fairly heavy, textured product with no need for gelatins, chemicals, stabilizers, or such. The air-inject changed all the rules. Air could now be directly injected into the mix! While old-fashioned ice cream contained 10 to 15% air, it now became possible to make "ice cream" containing as much as 60% air, bound into the mix by stabilizing chemicals. The ice cream industry learned (much as the baking industry was to learn a few years later) how to sell air. The process was quicker and cheaper large-scale volume became possible, and the industry quickly leaped into the modern era of mass merchandising, multimillion dollar profits, high pressure lobbyists and self-protective manufacturers' associations, consolidation, merger, and general product deterioration. A microcosm, perhaps, of much that has gone wrong with modern American technology.

While eggs and cold had been enough to hold the product together before, the air-inject freezer required chemical stabilizers to keep all that air in long enough for the customer to buy it. The first stabilizers were animal gelatins and corn starch, both somewhat foreign to real ice cream, but harmless enough.

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