Some ice cream history (yep, it exists people! Ice cream has no mercy)
Already before 1000 BC the Chinese whipped together and froze cream, eggs and sugar to make a delicious ice cream. It was probably introduced to the barbarian Europeans by Marco Polo. Some people (Ouroboros might be one of them) think it was actually Marco Polo who first added milk to frozen liquids, since only the Mongols, the Xiugurs and the Tibetians eat milk products. There is, however, no proof of that, although there is some evidence that the Chinese indulged in iced drinks and desserts, which gives some weight to the Marco Polo theory. Water ices were known in ancient Greece and Persia.
Italy and Russia were renowned for their ice cream (handmade in a large bowl) even before it became a mechanized industry some hundred years ago. The ice cream industry started off in the United States and England. In 1774, a caterer named Phillip Lenzi announced in a New York newspaper that he had just arrived from London and would be offering for sale various confections, including ice cream. A New Jersey woman, Nancy Johnson, invented the hand-cranked freezer in 1846. Only from the 1950s, technical developments made possible for 'soft' ice cream to be mass distributed, resembling the original Chinese type in appearance.