From the July/August 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here . Back in the 1960s I discovered a tiny threadbare volume among my grandmother’s things called The Book of Ices (1885).
Its author was Agnes Marshall, who ran a cookery school just north of Oxford Circus. To a greedy 13-year-old, Marshall’s ice-cream flavours sounded irresistible, but what appealed even more were the sumptuous chromolithograph illustrations of her frozen delights. I could not believe my eyes.
There were trompe l’oeil ices in the form of courting doves, swans, cauliflowers, pineapples and a host of other glacial fantasies. Ice cream in 1960s England was predominantly vanilla-flavoured, factory-made and served in a cone. My teenage brain started working overtime.
How could Victorians have made ice cream without electrical freezers? And how did they conjure up these extraordinary ice-cream birds and hilarious joke vegetables? The numerous advertisements in Marshall’s book provided some answers. She was the inventor of a hand-cranked freezer, which she boasted could make a pint of perfectly frozen ice cream in five minutes, merely by rotating the ingredients in an ice and salt mixture. There were also dozens of steel engravings of ‘fancy pewter moulds’ in the form of life-sized cucumbers, hens on nests, melons, asparagus spears and giant strawberries.
All could be purchased from her Mortimer Street cookery school, together with the necessary ingredients. But this establishment had c.
