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Here’s the Scoop: A Reading List on Ice Cream
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One of the most vivid memories of my childhood involves an ice cream. My mother and father kept a relatively treat-free house, with desserts reserved for special occasions, but their standards loosened during summer vacations. During a visit with relatives we didn’t see very often, my parents decided to make the day even more special; they gave my sister, my two cousins, and me money to buy something from the ice cream truck that made a regular circuit around the neighborhood. Thrilled by this rare indulgence, I rushed down the sidewalk, delighted to finally take part in this classic summertime ritual, eating dessert in the middle of the afternoon!
I can still remember the thrill of holding that much-anticipated cone, taking my first lick . . . then watching the scoop roll off its biscuity throne to the sidewalk.
Perhaps that is why, as an adult, my freezer is always stocked with at least two flavors of ice cream, which I eat year-round. It’s my go-to way to reward myself after a productive day, or to make a bad one better. While I tend to keep things simple (and have been known to eat directly out of the carton), I love ice cream for its versatility. It can support a piece of apple pie or be the main event in a fudge-slathered sundae. Its near-infinite variety of flavors offers something for everyone, from no-frills vanilla to chef-inspired gastronomic experiments.
That ability to shape-shift has made this humble dessert a mirror of sorts, reflecting cultural changes. It even goes back to the founding of the country: Thomas Jefferson was the first known American to write down an ice cream recipe (though it’s only fairly recently that historians have begun to acknowledge his problematic relationship with the enslaved workers who produced such delicacies for his guests). A century later, advances in refrigeration transformed ice cream from a luxury good to a mass-market phenomenon. As immigration surged in the US, peddling ice cream on the street became a way for new arrivals to grasp the American dream. During World War II, the dessert symbolized the country’s can-do attitude: Despite the many logistical obstacles, the US government shipped it to troops as far away as the Pacific.
In our current Age of Ozempic, while celebrities get ever slimmer and our screens fill with physical-optimization hacks, desserts may seem like an endangered species. But I believe it’s more important than ever to take guilt-free pleasure in food that brings you joy. And if you still feel a twinge of hesitation before digging into a bowl of your favorite flavor, multiple studies over the past 20 years have shown that ice cream actually has real, measurable health benefits (see David Merritt Johns’s piece from The Atlantic below). No less an authority than Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist and oncologist, titled his most recent book on healthy living Eat Your Ice Cream.
So go ahead and have a scoop. Think of it as doctor’s orders.
How Ice Cream Became the Ultimate American Comfort Food (Matt Siegel, Eater, August 2021)
This entertaining account traces ice cream’s transformation from an expensive luxury to an all-American dish in the early 20th century, when advances in refrigeration made it more widely available. Prohibition played a part, too: When alcohol was banned nationwide in the 1920s and early ’30s, some breweries switched to making ice cream instead, “a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.”
But what really stands out in this story is the role ice cream played in World War II, when it became a symbol of American patriotism. Siegel weaves together historical anecdotes that show the enormous effort the US military put into embedding ice cream throughout its supply lines. Why go through all that trouble? Siegel makes a compelling case that getting ice cream halfway around the world, under such difficult circumstances, was a way of putting American exceptionalism into action. If we can do this for our soldiers, we can do anything.
By the time World War II came around, ice cream . . . had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. The rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars), but the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines; delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.
And you’re goddamn right we won the war.
Fifteen Iconic Ice Cream Flavors and How They Were Invented (Vanessa Barron, Tasting Table, October 2025)
This engaging survey of popular ice cream flavors is filled with trivia-night-worthy fun facts: that vanilla is consistently the best-selling flavor worldwide; that chocolate ice cream may actually have been created first (cocoa being more readily available than vanilla); and that mint chocolate chip got an international popularity boost when a British culinary student created the dessert “Mint Royale” to celebrate the marriage of England’s Princess Anne in 1973.
But such is the nature of culinary history that not all lineages are straightforward. I appreciate the way Barron analyzes all the possible origin stories, even when they contradict. While some flavors have a single known inventor—such as the Grateful Dead fan who suggested “Cherry Garcia” to the hippie entrepreneurs Ben & Jerry’s—others resulted from experimentation over time. Some even have shameful associations: Butter pecan, for example, became popular in the American South, where the nuts were plentiful and used to dilute vanilla ice cream when serving it to Black customers.
Rocky Road could be considered the ice cream world’s first mix-in flavor, blending creamy ice cream with crunchy and chewy additions. According to legend, its creation dates back to 1929, when ice cream maker William Dreyer and candy maker Joseph Edy teamed up in Oakland, California. During the Great Depression—a “rocky” time for America—Dreyer supposedly invented the flavor by using his wife’s sewing scissors to cut marshmallows into a chocolate ice cream base studded with walnuts. The duo mass-produced the new flavor, giving the country a bit of sweetness and humor during a bleak decade.
But the name “Rocky Road” may have existed long before. In the mid-1800s in Australia, settlers used the term for a confection of sweets, nuts, and dried fruit; essentially, a proto-trail mix. And just down the road from Dreyer’s and Edy’s, Fentons Creamery also claims to have invented the flavor, swapping walnuts for almonds in their signature version.
The Museum of Ice Cream is a Horrifying Fun House (Brianna Wellen, The Takeout, July 2022)
Brianna Wellen had one overarching question when she visited the Chicago outpost of The Museum of Ice Cream: What is this place? I had the same thought as Wellen when it started showing up on Google Maps as a must-see attraction in my hometown—is this “an influencer’s paradise? A children’s playground?”
The answer, it turns out, in her snarky-but-fair review, is both. A privately owned chain with five locations in the US and one in Singapore, it started as a pop-up “experience” in New York, with an aggressively pink aesthetic that bridged the line between kids’ party and Instagrammable photo op. If you’re looking for “an anthropological look at the history and cultural impact of ice cream,” she writes, this isn’t it. (Though I’d happily visit that museum.)
It’s more fun to write a scathing review than a positive one, but Wellen doesn’t take the easy route and go full hater. She acknowledges that the people around her are having fun taking pictures in the giant pool of faux sprinkles, and that the unlimited ice cream samples may be worth the price of admission for some, even if the Chicago hot-dog-style signature treat looks better than it tastes.
What she points out so effectively is the chasm between the museum’s ethos of lighthearted escapism and its grim reality: It is housed in a building that used to be the headquarters of the prestigious Chicago Tribune newspaper, now given over to an ephemeral, commercial experience dependent on overworked, demoralized employees.
There’s something extremely dystopian about these bright, colorful, somewhat functionless installations popping up inside closed businesses, which is how the project started. And seeing Chicago’s iteration in the storefront of the now empty Tribune Tower, which once housed some of the most influential journalists the city had to offer, was disappointing, signaling that while the media industry is on its deathbed, people will form a line down the block to snap a photo with a plastic sprinkle.
There was something about the staff’s demeanor that led me to believe they weren’t as excited to be there as their oft-repeated scripted banter made it seem. The logistics of certain experiences seemed like a mess; the large, unending crowds needed to be endlessly wrangled; and the loud music meant that their faux cheerful taglines needed to be screamed right into the ears of visitors to be heard. Smiles were pasted on as impatient guests asked why they couldn’t just go into the Ice Cream Lab already. When Angela and I kindly told one worker that there was no rush in letting us into a particular room and then complimented her ice-cream-themed hair clips, she reacted with such graciousness at our attitudes that I thought she was about to start sobbing.
Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result (David Merritt Johns, The Atlantic, April 2023)
I still remember my visceral reaction on reading this Atlantic story a few years ago: Is ice cream actually good for me?
In this exhaustively researched and reported piece, Merritt Johns explains how a statistically significant finding can be pushed aside when it doesn’t fit an accepted narrative. For more than 20 years, nutritional studies have shown that diabetics who eat half a cup of ice cream a day have a lower risk of heart problems, and people who eat two or more servings of ice cream a week had a significantly lower risk of developing diabetes in the first place. Yet those findings seemed so contrary to public health advice that alternate explanations kept being pushed instead—it’s just dairy that’s good for you, especially if you choose low-fat milk or yogurt. “As academia’s public-relations machinery came to life,” he writes, “nuance went out the window.”
Poor ice cream never got its due—until now.
Every day brings another health story about a so-called “superfood,” but Merritt Johns’s relentless focus on the facts sets this one apart. Rather than relying on an academic study or two, he tracks down all the key researchers involved in what I like to call the Great Ice Cream Cover-up: “I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before.” Some refuse to be interviewed (more proof of a conspiracy?), but most seem relieved to finally admit that seemingly set-in-stone advice about what’s good for us is more malleable than we think.
In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.
The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.
Eating California’s Most Controversial Ice Cream (Amy Ettinger, Literary Hub, June 2017)
Who thought foie gras ice cream was a good idea? And more importantly—what does it taste like? Amy Ettinger took on these pressing questions with a visit to Humphry Slocombe, a “kid-unfriendly” ice cream shop in San Francisco. Chef and co-owner Jake Godby admits the controversial flavor is only rarely on the menu (it’s too expensive and takes too long to make), but the debate surrounding it has been good for business. Hardcore foodies rush to buy it when they can, while the protests of animal-rights activists only raise the shop’s profile.
More than a food review, Ettinger explores why people make and eat extreme flavors. She argues that American palates have expanded over the decades; we’ve gotten used to ordering Korean barbecue tacos and sushi burritos, mash-ups unknown (and unthinkable) to our great-grandparents. To grab attention—and prove your chops as an out-of-the-box culinary thinker—you have to raise the stakes: “One person’s gross-out experience seems to be another person’s gleeful experimentation.”
As I took another bite, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill. There was something decadent in eating a treat that so many people would be upset about. The wrath I could incur by simply opening my mouth, chewing, and swallowing made me feel powerful. And maybe that perceived transgression is itself a flavor enhancer, much like artificial coloring can ramp up our experience of “lime” or “banana” in some mass-produced, neon-colored taffy or gum.
Is that why Godby put it on the menu—so he could wield that kind of power? Why continue making food that would anger people? Was it to get attention?
99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History (Olivia Potts, Longreads, August 2025)
Who knew the simple ice cream truck had such a dramatic backstory? As an avid collector of historical trivia, I devoured this account of ice cream’s mobile history, starting with 19th-century immigrant street peddlers through controversies over the trucks’ music, cleanliness, and supposed ties to organized crime (the notorious Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars ended with six people killed in a fire).
What gives this piece a lovely personal touch is the way Potts weaves this past with her own memories of growing up in an English seaside town, where she and her father would pick up ice cream treats in the summer: “An unspoken secret between us, given that Mum had dinner waiting on the table when we arrived, and would have been appalled to know that a mere seven minutes earlier, we were driving along the seafront, car top down, the salty air whipping my long hair into the ice cream and sticky sauce.”
As she interviews ice cream van owners whose vocation goes back generations—along with the entrepreneurs adapting their vehicles to new technologies—she is struck by how many people in the business are following a family tradition. “It’s an industry that remains strong, with an uncanny ability to adapt to changing times,” she writes. “I am fascinated by its survival.”
While it may be more common now to see an ice cream truck at an event or on TikTok, we still crave those summer days when jaunty chimes call us out to the street. The odds can feel stacked against the old-school icey men, with legislation that limits their movement, environmental and nutritional campaigners who demand more and more restrictions, rising pitch rents, the price of vans, the difference, even, in the way children play outside. But they’re still there, still clinging on. Why?
The Secrets of an Italian Gelato Maker (Erla Zwingle, Craftsmanship, June 2016)
This portrait of master gelatiere Andrea Soban oozes with admiration for its subject—and had me craving his signature mandarin orange flavor. From his base in Valenza, Italy, halfway between Milan and Torino, he continues a family tradition that goes back at least five generations: creating the most flavorful, creamy gelato free of artificial ingredients or colors.
The word gelato—Italy’s lower-fat, lower-sugar version of ice cream—literally means “frozen,” but making it at Soban’s level involves science-whiz levels of knowledge. Zwingle shows the intricate steps he takes to get the right balance of ice crystals, fat droplets, and air bubbles. While he sources ingredients from around the world, most of his favorites come from specific parts of Italy; the best pistachios, for example, are grown in one small Sicilian town.
This story gave me a new appreciation for the effort that goes into making a seemingly simple dessert—when the person making it wants to be the very best, that is. Anyone want to join me on a field trip to Valenza?
“Try this,” Andrea said, as he handed me a tiny spoonful of a just-made mandarin sorbetto. Sensations of cold, and a smooth wave of extraordinary citrus flavor, blended into a faultless harmony as the whole combination swept up to my brain. It tasted juicier than the juice of the fruit itself. And then it simply disappeared. No loading my tongue with a mass of flavors jostling together, struggling for dominance, leaving assorted clinging aftertastes as my stomach braced itself. It left only the desire for more.
Suddenly I understood the hidden power of fine gelato. It doesn’t aim only for my mouth, and my stomach is really of no interest. It aims for the dopamine reward system lurking in my brain, the part that says, “You don’t need this, but you’ve got to have it.” We did these little teaching-tastings intermittently all morning. I paid close attention to everything he said, but the voice in my head kept crooning incoherently about what was happening in my mouth.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
