Here’s anoth­er thing you can cred­it Thomas Jef­fer­son with: being the first known Amer­i­can to record an ice cream recipe. It’s one of 10 sur­viv­ing recipes writ­ten by the found­ing father.

Accord­ing to Monticello.org, ice cream began appear­ing “in French cook­books start­ing in the late 17th cen­tu­ry, and in Eng­lish-lan­guage cook­books in the ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry.” And there “are accounts of ice cream being served in the Amer­i­can colonies as ear­ly as 1744.” Jef­fer­son like­ly tast­ed his fair share of the dessert while liv­ing in France (1784–1789), and it con­tin­ued to be served at Mon­ti­cel­lo upon his return to Vir­ginia. By the first decade of the 19th cen­tu­ry, ice cream became increas­ing­ly com­mon in cook­books pub­lished through­out the U.S.

You can see the entire recipe for Jef­fer­son­’s vanil­la ice cream here, and read a tran­script below.

2. bot­tles of good cream.
6. yolks of eggs.
1/2 lb. sug­ar

mix the yolks & sug­ar
put the cream on a fire in a casse­role, first putting in a stick of Vanil­la.
when near boil­ing take it off & pour it gen­tly into the mix­ture of eggs & sug­ar.
stir it well.
put it on the fire again stir­ring it thor­ough­ly with a spoon to pre­vent it’s stick­ing to the casse­role.
when near boil­ing take it off and strain it thro’ a tow­el.
put it in the Sabottiere[12]
then set it in ice an hour before it is to be served. put into the ice a hand­ful of salt.
put salt on the cov­er­lid of the Sabotiere & cov­er the whole with ice.
leave it still half a quar­ter of an hour.
then turn the Sabot­tiere in the ice 10 min­utes
open it to loosen with a spat­u­la the ice from the inner sides of the Sabotiere.
shut it & replace it in the ice
open it from time to time to detach the ice from the sides
when well tak­en (prise) stir it well with the Spat­u­la.
put it in moulds, justling it well down on the knee.
then put the mould into the same buck­et of ice.
leave it there to the moment of serv­ing it.
to with­draw it, immerse the mould in warm water, turn­ing it well till it will come out & turn it into a plate

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Amer­i­can Cook­book: Sam­ple Recipes from Amer­i­can Cook­ery (1796)

Leo Tolstoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe for Mac and Cheese

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Ham­burg­er Recipe

The Recipes of Icon­ic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Mar­quis de Sade & More

MoMA’s Artists’ Cook­book (1978) Reveals the Meals of Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Andy Warhol, Louise Bour­geois & More

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Sur­re­al­ist Video

How to Actu­al­ly Cook Sal­vador Dali’s Sur­re­al­ist Recipes: Cray­fish, Prawns, and Spit­ted Eggs

Espres­so is nei­ther bean nor roast.

It is a method of pres­sur­ized cof­fee brew­ing that ensures speedy deliv­ery, and it has birthed a whole cul­ture.

Amer­i­cans may be accus­tomed to camp­ing out in cafes with their lap­tops for hours, but Ital­ian cof­fee bars are fast-paced envi­ron­ments where cus­tomers buzz in for a quick pick-me-up, then head right back out, no seat required.

It’s the sort of effi­cien­cy the Father of the Mod­ern Adver­tis­ing Poster, Leonet­to Cap­piel­lo, allud­ed to in his famous 1922 image for the Vic­to­ria Arduino machine (below).

Let 21st-cen­tu­ry cof­fee afi­ciona­dos cul­ti­vate their Zen-like patience with slow pourovers. A hun­dred years ago, the goal was a qual­i­ty prod­uct that the suc­cess­ful busi­nessper­son could enjoy with­out break­ing stride.

As cof­fee expert James Hoff­mann, author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee points out in the above video, the Steam Age was on the way out, but Cappiello’s image is “absolute­ly lever­ag­ing the idea that steam equals speed.”

That had been the goal since 1884, when inven­tor Ange­lo Morion­do patent­ed the first espres­so machine (see below).

The bulk brew­er caused a stir at the Turin Gen­er­al Expo­si­tion. Speed wise, it was a great improve­ment over the old method, in which indi­vid­ual cups were brewed in the Turk­ish style, requir­ing five min­utes per order.

This “new steam machin­ery for the eco­nom­ic and instan­ta­neous con­fec­tion of cof­fee bev­er­age” fea­tured a gas or wood burn­er at the bot­tom of an upright boil­er, and two sight glass­es that the oper­a­tor could mon­i­tor to get a feel for when to open the var­i­ous taps, to yield a large quan­ti­ty of fil­tered cof­fee. It was fast, but demand­ed some skill on the part of its human oper­a­tor.

As Jim­my Stamp explains in a Smith­son­ian arti­cle on the his­to­ry of the espres­so machine, there were  also a few bugs to work out.

Ear­ly machines’ hand-oper­at­ed pres­sure valves posed a risk to work­ers, and the cof­fee itself had a burnt taste.

Milanese café own­er Achille Gag­gia cracked the code after WWII, with a small, steam­less lever-dri­ven machine that upped the pres­sure to pro­duce the con­cen­trat­ed brew that is what we now think of as espres­so.

Stamp describes how Gaggia’s machine also stan­dard­ized the size of the espres­so, giv­ing rise to some now-famil­iar cof­fee­house vocab­u­lary:

The cylin­der on lever groups could only hold an ounce of water, lim­it­ing the vol­ume that could be used to pre­pare an espres­so. With the lever machines also came some new jar­gon: baris­tas oper­at­ing Gaggia’s spring-loaded levers coined the term “pulling a shot” of espres­so. But per­haps most impor­tant­ly, with the inven­tion of the high-pres­sure lever machine came the dis­cov­ery of cre­ma – the foam float­ing over the cof­fee liq­uid that is the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of a qual­i­ty espres­so. A his­tor­i­cal anec­dote claims that ear­ly con­sumers were dubi­ous of this “scum” float­ing over their cof­fee until Gag­gia began refer­ring to it as “caffe creme,“ sug­gest­ing that the cof­fee was of such qual­i­ty that it pro­duced its own creme.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cof­fee Entre­pre­neur Rena­to Bialet­ti Gets Buried in the Espres­so Mak­er He Made Famous

The Life & Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

The Bialet­ti Moka Express: The His­to­ry of Italy’s Icon­ic Cof­fee Mak­er, and How to Use It the Right Way

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know about the Bialet­ti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Pop­u­lar Cof­fee Mak­er

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in NYC.

One can hard­ly con­sid­er the Christ­mas sea­son for long, at least in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, with­out the work of Charles Dick­ens com­ing to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christ­mas Car­ol, the novel­la that revived the pub­lic cul­ture of a hol­i­day that had been falling into desue­tude by the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. What­ev­er its lit­er­ary short­com­ings, the book offers a host of mem­o­rable images, not least culi­nary ones: Mrs. Cratchit’s pud­ding, for instance, which Dick­ens likens to “a speck­led can­non-ball, so hard and firm, blaz­ing in half or half-a-quar­tern of ignit­ed brandy, and bedight with Christ­mas hol­ly stuck into the top.”

In the Tast­ing His­to­ry video at the top of the post, host Max Miller teach­es you how to make just such a hol­i­day pud­ding — and indeed a fig­gy one, a con­fec­tion whose name we all rec­og­nize from no less a stan­dard car­ol than “We Wish You a Mer­ry Christ­mas,” even if we don’t know that pud­ding, in the Vic­to­ri­an sense, refers to a kind of cake.

The fig­gy pud­ding Miller makes from an orig­i­nal 1845 recipe looks, and seems to taste, more like an alco­hol-soaked ver­sion of the fruit­cakes many of us still receive come Christ­mas­time. Despite its rep­u­ta­tion for lead­en unde­sir­abil­i­ty, rein­forced by decade after decade of John­ny Car­son gags, the fruit­cake has a rich his­to­ry, which Miller reveals in the video just above, and culi­nary strengths beyond its extreme shelf life.

This playlist of 20 Christ­mas-themed videos offers many more such delights: Turk­ish delight, for instance, as well as Vic­to­ri­an sug­ar plums, medieval gin­ger­bread, and his­tor­i­cal ver­sions of such still-com­mon com­forts and joys as eggnog and pump­kin pie. And if you’ve ever won­dered to what was­sail — as a noun or a verb — actu­al­ly refers, have a look at the video above, in which Miller explains it all while mak­ing a pot of the stuff, which turns out to be a kind of apple­sauce-enriched ale. Was­sail, too, is a favorite Dick­ens ref­er­ence, and not just in A Christ­mas Car­ol. His first nov­el The Pick­wick Papers includes a Christ­mas feast with “a mighty bowl of was­sail, some­thing small­er than an ordi­nary wash-house cop­per, in which the hot apples were hiss­ing and bub­bling with a rich look, and a jol­ly sound, that were per­fect­ly irre­sistible”: the kind of image that, near­ly two cen­turies lat­er, still makes read­ers want to go a‑wassailing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Eudo­ra Welty’s Hand­writ­ten Eggnog Recipe, and Charles Dick­ens’ Recipe for Hol­i­day Punch

Try George Orwell’s Recipe for Christ­mas Pud­ding, from His Essay “British Cook­ery” (1945)

Charles Min­gus’ “Top Secret” Eggnog Recipe Con­tains “Enough Alco­hol to Put Down an Ele­phant”

How Eat­ing Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en Became a Christ­mas Tra­di­tion in Japan

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanks­giv­ing din­ner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it rel­a­tive­ly easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find Mal­lard duck and Rud­dy duck. But also Red-head duck, Long Island duck­ling, Teal duck and Can­vas-back duck, too. A duck in NYC was not a good place to be.

And, oh, those prices!  Not one item above a few dol­lars. But let’s account for infla­tion, shall we? In 2021, one Red­di­tor not­ed: “I found a cal­cu­la­tor and it turns out that $.30 in 1899 equals $10.00 now. The Fried oys­ter crabs would be $24.99 now and a Philadel­phia chick­en would be $66.65. So, the cheap­est thing on the menu is Sweet but­ter­milk for $.10, but today would be $3.33.”

For our U.S. read­ers, enjoy your hol­i­day tomor­row…

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Relax­ing, ASMR Re-Cre­ation of Peo­ple Cook­ing Thanks­giv­ing Din­ner in the 1820s

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Hand­writ­ten Turkey-and-Stuff­ing Recipe

Read 900+ Thanks­giv­ing Books Free at the Inter­net Archive

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 13 Tips for What to Do with Your Left­over Thanks­giv­ing Turkey

Bob Dylan’s Thanks­giv­ing Radio Show: A Playlist of 18 Delec­table Songs