Nothing satisfies your craving for a cold, sweet treat like a scoop of ice cream. Homemade with a , purchased from a local stand — even will do. And people have been serving it up for centuries.
As it turns out, ice cream, in one form or another, has been around for thousands of years, with its forerunners, iced beverages, appearing in ancient Mesopotamia around 4000 BCE and ancient Greece in the 400s BCE. Elsewhere in the ancient world, Romans mixed snow and ice with different fruit juices to make frosty desserts and beverages. The true ancestor of our modern-day ice cream was invented in ancient China.
Chinese farmers began domesticating animals and producing milk by around 2000 BCE. Soon after this, the nobility of this country figured out that they could turn one of their favorite rice-y milk dishes into a cool treat with snow sourced from the mountains. What started at the top made its way down to the everyday people of China, who were able to purchase milk ice from street vendors.
A bit of cream and salt, and voilá If we're talking about the beginnings of actual ice cream (rather than milk ice), that takes us back to Medieval Italy, where the recipe for Chinese milk ice finally reached Europe, no doubt in large part due to Italy's prime geographical location as the gateway from the East to Europe. By the 1500s, milk ice (supposedly) made its way to France when Catherine de' Medici of Venice married Henry II. Though this story is apocryphal, it may be that the cooks .