National Ice Cream Day!

When: 3rd Sunday in July

When you get the urge for a snack on a hot, humid summer night, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? That's right....Ice Cream! Therefore, it's only fitting that ice cream be given it's own special day. On this day, we hope you enjoy an ice cream cone, a sundae, or a milk shake. Set the diet aside and splurge a little...have one of each!

Ice cream is nutritious. A little heavy on the sugar and calories, ice cream is otherwise good for you. Its base ingredient is milk, which is loaded with healthy vitamins and minerals.

Did you know? The ice cream cone was invented be Charles E. Minches of St. Louis, Missouri. On July 23, 1904 at the World's Fair in St. Louis, he filled a pastry cone with two scoops of ice cream to make the first ice cream cone.

The following material has been extracted from "The History of Ice Cream", written by the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers (IAICM)

Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, Charles I of England hosted a sumptous state banquet for many of his friends and family. The meal, consisting of many delicacies of the day, had been simply superb but the "coup de grace" was yet to come. After much preparation, the King's french chef had concocted an apparently new dish. It was cold and resembled fresh- fallen snow but was much creamier and sweeter than any other after- dinner dessert.

The guests were delighted, as was Charles, who summoned the cook and asked him not to divulge the recipe for his frozen cream. The King wanted the delicacy to be served only at the Royal table and offered the cook 500 pounds a year to keep it that way. Sometime later, however, poor Charles fell into disfavour with his people and was beheaded in 1649. But by that time, the secret of the frozen cream remained a secret no more. The cook, named DeMirco, had not kept his promise.

It is likely that ice cream was not invented, but rather came to be over years of similar efforts. Indeed, the Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar is said to have sent slaves to the mountains to bring snow and ice to cool and freeze the fruit drinks he was so fond of. Centuries later, the Italian Marco Polo returned from his famous journey to the Far East with a recipe for making water ices resembling modern day sherbets.

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