Rédey Judit: Hideg nyalat és spanyol tekercs. A fagylalt, a jégkrém és a parfé története (Budapest, 2007)

and it was hard to spread it among the homes of the aristocracy. Later on in the 17

lh century, when the consumption of cooled drinks became a vogue in every house that mattered, a royal decree provided for the regulation of acquisition rights for snow and ice. Those rights could be leased from the King, thus the profits derived could serve an even greater pomp of the royal court. The price of snow and ice skyrocketed within a brief period of time, which resulted in a fallback of demand for frozen dainties. The recipe for genuine ice cream was surrounded by secrecy for a long time. Louis the 14

lh was said to have been acquainted with ice cream through a special person named Audiger, who was a world traveler, a soldier, an agronomist and a master of cuisine and lemonades, as well as a noted author of cookbooks. (He was the author of the book La maison réglée.) Audiger not only betrayed the secret of preparing ice cream to the Sun King, he was also purported to be the first person to present him with green peas. No one could steal the secret of the preparation of ice cream. Later on, however, La Quintinie, the Chief Inspector of the Royal Fruit and Vegetable Gardens published the recipe lor its preparation. A very similar story is remembered of Charles I, King of England, who found ice cream so pleasing to his palate at a reception that he ordered his cook, a certain Maestro De Mirco to keep the recipe secret. The Maestro was to receive five hundred pounds annual allowance in consideration. Still, the creamy soft luxury, cold as fresh snow, became widely known. The cook's significant income came to nought when Charles was beheaded in 1649. Certain researchers working on the history of ice cream today (e.g. Caroline Liddell, Robin Weir) are of the opinion that the ice cream legends attributed to Marco Polo, Catherine de Medici and Charles I are not grounded m truth - these explanations of the origin of ice cream were only recorded in the 19

,h century. Whatever the truth ol those legends is, ice cream and artificial cooling continue to triumph later, while data and the sources have only become more trusthworthy and controllable. Besides natural cooling matenals (snow and ice) and evaporation, so-called cooling mixes were discovered relatively early. People in India already in the 4

h century A.D. knew that an admixture ol salt would make water cooler. In 1550 a Spanish doctor in Rome, a certain Blasius Villafranca diluted nitric acid in water, and kept drinks in that cooling mix. He even wrote a book on this invention. Aldrovanni's mineralogy textbook, published in 1648, recommended table salt as part of a cooling mix. The Prince of Mantova was reported to possess a powder in 1650 which instantly froze water even in the hottest summer. Latinus Tancredus, a medical professor of Naples was the first to mention artificial ice in his work published in 1607. Descartes wrote in 1650 that water could be frozen by a mix of ice and saltpeter. These were the precursors of the later manufacture of artificial ice. The first ice cream - as understood in the modern age - was served to guests by Francesco Procopio del Coltelli, an Italian who settled in Pans, and later became well-known under the Francophone version of his name: Procope Couteaux. Procopio's parents originated in Sicily. His ancestors arrived in France with