It's National Ice Cream Day, as celebrated on the third Sunday of every July by order of President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Here are 10 scoops of high-calorie facts:
1. Haagen-Dazs is not an exotic Scandinavian recipe. It's a brand name created by a Polish immigrant and his wife in the Bronx. Reuben Mattus' family sold ice cream for decades, but the product didn't really take off until the early '60s, when Mattus and his wife, Rose came up with the Haagen-Dazs name out of thin air and put a map of Denmark on the carton. They used an umlaut (two dots) over the first letter "a" in Haagen even though there's no such usage in Danish.
2. The Evinrude outboard motor was invented because of ice cream. A young man named Ole Evinrude was picnicking with his fiance on a Wisconsin lake island in 1906 when she expressed interest in a dish of ice cream. Evinrude rowed to shore to satisfy her desire, and en route realized that if he had a motor, the errand would be a lot easier -- and the ice cream would be less likely to melt. So inspired, he designed an outboard motor that made him famous.
3. When comedian Jackie Gleason dined out, he sometimes ordered roast beef with a scoop of ice cream on it.
4. In the ice cream industry, "overrun" is a term for the amount of air that's inserted into ice cream as it's produced. Without some aeration, ice cream would be a solid mass, difficult to scoop and serve. So overrun is a good thing, within limits: Cheaper ice cream has more overrun. Long before Margaret Thatcher became Britain's prime minister, she was a chemist investigating the air in ice cream. As the Times of London put it, she studied "methods for preserving the foamy quality of ice cream by injecting it with air."
5. Ice cream vendors in the Mexican town of Dolores Hidalgo have featured such flavors as beer, cheese, cactus petal, avocado, tequila, corn, black and red mole, pigskin and shrimp.
6. The Library of Congress houses many of Thomas Jefferson's writings, including a draft of the Declaration of Independence and his recipe for vanilla ice cream. Jefferson, an obsessive foodie, kept his ice house carefully stocked and corresponded with acquaintances in Paris to secure vanilla beans.
7. Who was the nation's first great ice cream entrepreneur? We nominate Augustus Jackson, an African-American. In the late 1820s -- when nearly 2 million other black Americans were still in bondage -- Jackson was a free man who left his job as a chef at the White House and moved to Philadelphia to establish a successful catering business that supplied ice cream to restaurants.
8. It's surprising that the Republicans didn't raise the ice cream issue against Barack Obama (right) in the last election. Most Americans like ice cream; Obama apparently doesn't. In an "Access Hollywood" interview during the campaign, Obama's daughter Malia said: "Ice cream is my favorite food. I could eat ice cream forever." Then Obama's younger daughter, Sasha, said: "Everybody should like ice cream. Except Daddy. My dad doesn't like sweets." Perhaps Obama's distaste stems from his part-time job at Baskin-Robbins as a teenager in Hawaii. But one of the most romantic scenes in the Obama biography also involves ice cream. On his first date with Michelle Robinson, Obama took her to a Baskin-Robbins. He later described the scene: "I asked if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate."
9. When actor Clint Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel, Calif., in 1986, a major issue was ice cream. Town leaders had banned the sale of ice cream cones, incensing Eastwood and his supporters. They won, and overturned the ordinance.
10. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote a letter to Ben & Jerry's last year urging the company to start making its ice cream with the milk of nursing mothers rather than the milk of cows. A PETA spokeswoman acknowledged that the idea was "somewhat absurd" but said it was intended to publicize the alleged cruelty of the dairy industry. There was no comment from People for the Ethical Treatment of Nursing Mothers.
mjacob@tribune.com
SOURCES: International Dairy Foods Association; Tribune reporter Hugh Dellios; "The Great Clowns of American Television" by Karin Adir, "Slavery in the United States" by Jenny B. Wahl of Carleton College, on eh.net; "Ice:
Great Moments in the History of Hard, Cold Water" by Karal Ann Marling; "Famous Wisconsin Inventors & Entrepreneurs" by Marv Balousek; "The Scoop" by Lori Longbotham; "Chocolate, Strawberry and Vanilla" by Anne Cooper Funderburg; "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama; evinrude.com; San Francisco Chronicle; Tribune news services.
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