If you're looking for the perfect gift book to give to a friend or relative who enjoys cooking or as a gift for the owner or chef of your favorite Sacramento eatery, check out this wonderful book called Ice Cream: A Global History. The publisher is Reaktion Books - Edible And the book also is available at Amazon.com. If you're looking to buy ice cream in Sacramento, including some places where you can see the dessert being made on the premises, try Top Picks: Sacramento Ice Creameries.
In the book, Ice Cream: A Global History you'll read how ice cream first began in China, a land where you'd think nobody would eat dairy products in ancient times when frozen dessert was so simple to make from mashing tofu with fruit and freezing it with mountain snow or crushing ice and covering it with citrus tree juices. But China is from where ice cream originally came. According to folkloric history, ice cream was brought back in memory and description by Marco Polo, who probably did enjoy Italian lemon ice shavings after lemon trees were brought along the Silk Road from China to Sicily in historic times.
The book on the history of ice cream is packed with photos and artwork and has a variety of anecdotes and personal experiences of how people (and animals) used, ate, or prepared ice cream, even when it applies to animals and ice cream, an anecdote of how a Hollywood director coaxed mules with ice cream cones. There are recipes and stories about ice cream in various countries. Everyone has a personal memory connected to ice cream, even if someone is allergic to dairy products. Also if you're looking for the taste as close to ice cream as you can find, you can find or create non-dairy frozen desserts that taste a lot like ice cream in the natural food coolers of many Sacramento food markets.
Corn meal ice cream is popular south of the border. And you might be interested in taking plain vanilla ice cream and flavoring yourself with edible lavender, cinnamon, cloves, walnuts, almond extract, chopped nuts, rose petal water extract, orange blossom water extract, mint extract, edible flower petals, coffee liqueur, or melted unsweetened baker's chocolate. Remember that during the garlic festival each year in Gilroy, CA, there's always garlic ice cream.
If you're looking for instructions on how to make garlic ice cream, see these recipes
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