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It was in China 4000 years ago when a dessert based on milk and rice was frozen in snow. The delicacy quickly gained prestige, but only among the nobility, who could afford milk (then an expensive commodity) and were able to preserve snow until summer, making use of underground refrigerated chambers. On his trip to China in 1271, the Venetian Marco Polo would have found a wide variety of frozen fruit creams. The recipes came with him, but they didn’t leave Italy until the mid-16th century, when a certain Buontalenti, cook for Catherine de Medici (1519-1589), introduced the exquisite dessert to the French court. In 1670, the Sicilian Francisco Procópio opened a café in Paris that sold ice cream – the first ice cream parlor in history.
The success was so great that, six years later, there were more than 250 ice cream makers in the French capital. “In addition to being tasty, it is an almost complete food: it contains proteins, lipids, calcium, minerals, phosphorus and other essential components. The only thing missing is fiber”, says nutritionist Ana Célia Amaral Ayres Dellosso, from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).