*The drawing
is from an ad for White Mountain Freezers, which appeared in the Home
Furnishings Review, a trade paper that began publishing in Philadelphia in 1892. The ad was reproduced in The Housewares Story: A History of
the American Housewares Industry, by Earl Lifshey (The National Housewares
Manufacturers Association, 1973).
Ice cream freezers soared in popularity after World War I,
he says. When electrically operated |
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freezers came onto the market,
the hand-turned model continued to sell well right up into the 1970s,
according to the Richmond Cedar Works Manufacturing Corporation, which started making
hand-operated, wooden-tub ice cream freezers about 1900. |
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Baltimore:
Birthplace of
Commercial Ice Cream
Production
Commercial ice cream production began in Baltimore in
1851, but it wasn't until 13 years later that a home ice cream freezer was invented.
In 1864, Nancy Johnson, about whom nothing else is known, devised the first home
ice cream freezer.
Her freezer consisted of a cooking pot, in which she
beat her recipe mixture, and which she had surrounded with packed snow, ice, and rock
salt.
At left: A little girl feeds her doll ice cream
from "The Gem Freezer, The Best in the World," in a color ad from the Bettmann
Archives, reproduced in Lifshey's book.
-- Susan M. Rogers
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