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Like any normal person, I've given considerable thought to what I would do if I were sent back in time to the 1630s (without an entire town including functioning coal power plant).
Making ice cream seems like a good way to get your initial social capital. Like, before you can embark on your hygiene and gem theory programs, and to raise capital for your experiments to create a steam engine, you can bring modern-ish ice cream to whatever town you end up in.
I think curing smallpox would be a bit bigger splash, and you only need to milk a cow.
WITCHCRAFT!!!
Can’t read that headline without being reminded of the Halo Top commercial/short dystopian horror film masterpiece.
Okay, so the author thinks the Medici thing is a myth (I think his contemporaries do not). But I presume the oddly nationalistic Britishness of the article is the reason why it completely skips over the fact that ice cream as we know it now is an Italian invention. Sure the Indians were doing Kulfi, and the Chinese were doing something with horse milk, but modern sorbets and ice cream were very clearly from Italy. [And they're still the best, after all these years.]
The Caterina de Medici thing is probably a bit exaggerated (depending on where you read about it, sometimes it seems like this princess brought civilization to a country inhabited by savages, while obviously France and Italy had already continuos contacts), but we do have records of ice-cream having been "invented" in Tuscany by either Ruggeri or Buontalenti in the 16th century.
Some sort of sorbets were however "imported" much earlier from the East, recipes being mentioned by Marco Polo, and even earlier there are records of sorbets recipes being brought in Italy by people returning from crusades (probably faloodeh, orginating from Persia/Iran).
It seems like Ruggeri "invented" more moderns sorbets, whilst Buontalenti was the first one to introduce the egg (and thus "proper" ice cream).
Both, directly or indirectly, worked at the Medici court in Florence, but while Ruggeri was actually a cook brought with her by Caterina de Medici in France, and his sorbets seem to have been served in occasion of the marriage, Buontalenti was an architect that worked all life in Tuscany and created the ice cream much later (the marriage of Caterina de' Medici took place in 1533 and, Buontalenti was born in 1531), Buontalenti probably invented ice cream around 1565.
It may not be a myth but no one has turned up any evidence that it is true. Ice cream in the modern sense--a frozen custard churned during freezing--is not known to have existed before that time. The first published recipes came out of France, though of course, the French cribbed many of their best ideas from others.
Before Nancy Johnson's machine, the churning was done laboriously by hand.