From our history
Our products
Product development
|
|
Ice creams
The history of ice cream began in China more than 3000 years ago. Their emperors were the first to enjoy one of the most popular treats today. When they wanted to have something refreshing and sweet the chefs mixed fruit, wine and honey with the snows from the mountains.
In 1295 the great traveller Marco Polo returned from China to Italy and brought with him the recipe for ice cream. According to this recipe they mixed snow into yak's milk and thus obtained a creamier texture. Adding milk to the snow took root and the Italian nobility soon enjoyed this frozen milk. In 1533 Catarina De Medici married the French King Henry II and became the Queen of France. One of the things she took with her to France was the recipe for frozen milk. A French chef even opened a shop where he sold this delicacy. He was the first to add flavours like chocolate and strawberry.
In the first half of the 17th century the English king Charles I (1600-1649) threw a marvellous banquet for his friends and family. The dinner included numerous most exquisite dishes but he saved the biggest surprise for last. A French chef created a new dish after a lot of effort. It was cold and it resembled freshly fallen snow, only it was creamier and sweeter than any other dessert. The king and guests loved it, so he offered the chef 500 pounds a year not to reveal the recipe and thus keep the speciality for the English court. The king later fell out of favour and was beheaded. The cook DeMirco, of course, did not keep his promise.
These are only a few stories which reveal the origin of the most popular dessert in the world. Ice cream was more than likely created after thousands of failed trials and changes. From Europe it moved to the United States. In 1700 the governor of Maryland Bladen offered it to his guests. Seventy-one years later the first ice cream parlour was opened in New York. The president's wife Dolly Madison adored ice cream and always offered it to her guests. In 1842 Jacob Fussel from Baltimore opened the first ice cream factory in the USA and sold the ice cream from the wagon; a year later Nancy Johnston invented rotating hand freezer for home use, which made ice cream production easier. In 1899 a Frenchman August Gaulin invented homogeniser. This invention made ice cream even creamier. Soon after he also invented an ice cream freezer which enabled even faster freezing.
Then the cone was born ...
The first cone was made in 1896 by an Italian immigrant Italo Marchiony. He got his idea, because customers broke or stole the cups in which he served his ice cream. He registered it at the patent office on December 1903. A similar innovation was introduced a year later at the world fair in St. Louis. Charles Menches, who was selling ice cream at the fair, invented the cone by coincidence.
As was the practice at the time, ice cream was sold in cups. The fair was overcrowded with people who wanted ice cream in the August heat and so he ran out of cups in the middle of the day. He looked around and started thinking. There was a stall nearby where his friend Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian, sold Zalabia, a sweet from the Middle East, similar to waffle, which is eaten with syrup. Menches asked his friend for a Zalabia, rolled it up, put a ball of ice cream in it and the cone was born.
... and the ice cream on a stick
Eleven year old Frank Epperson one winter day forgot a glass of juice on his front porch, with a swizzle stick in it. The next day he discovered the frozen delight. A few years later, in 1923 to be exact, he protected his invention at the patent office. Until 1928 more than 60 million delights on the sick were produced.
Three decades later Ljubljanske mlekarne first made ice cream on stick: in 1958 a new unit for ice cream production was opened and in the first year it produced 1999,589 kilos. The ice cream was called Lučka, after a girl with ponytails and ice cream in her hand. Its name caught among the people so that lučka became a generic name for all ice creams on stick. The success of Lučka was followed in the next years by Ježek, Tom, Cone Zlatorog, ice cream in a cup and family size Planica and Otočec ice creams. |
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
|
