THE BIG CHILL -- a history lesson

Americans like their ice cream 12 months a year; in fact, they each manage to gulp down (risking brain-freeze) about 15 quarts in those 365 days. But July -- their official National Ice Cream Month -- is special. Sales figures soar along with summer temperatures as Americans drop ice cream balls atop cones, drown them with syrup for sundaes or douse them with soda pop for an ice cream float. July's sultry weather is only one reason behind its logical choice as National Ice Cream Month. And this year's record temperatures across North America have sent ice cream consumption through the roof!

Now a summertime staple, ice cream was once unknown.

Although chilled beverages must date back to the Ice Age, the first recorded "ice cream" recipes we use today come from the Roman emperors. Feasts, including fruit juices frozen with ice and snow, were planned at least a month in advance so relays of slave runners could race from the Alps through the heat to Rome. Nero, known for his fierce cruelties, was no less passionate when it came to ice cream. If runners arrived with only melted snow, he executed the commanding general on the spot!

Centuries later, Marco Polo returned from his travels with tales of cushion-seated men refreshing their pagan palates with frozen concoctions after feasts of meat. Even better, he also brought back the recipes that started the European practice of eating sherbet as a palate-cleanser between courses of a sumptuous meal.

Once Italians realized the beauty of adding cream to the mix, their addiction to gelato was born.

When Catherine de Medici married Henry II of France in 1533, she brought her master ice cream makers as a wedding gift. News of this amazing delicacy spread to the French people, but recipes were carefully guarded for another hundred years.

The same secrecy kept ice cream in the deep freeze across the English Channel. When his chef prepared a frozen dessert similar to a modern ice cream, England's King Charles I was so pleased that he paid him an annual pension of 500 pounds a year to guard the recipe as an exclusive royal privilege. The year was 1640. The winds of change were blowing and the fortunes of nobility everywhere grew precarious as the common people became increasingly vexed by having no ice cream for dessert. Charles I lost his access to ice cream when he was beheaded only nine years later. The first ice cream shop opened in Paris in 1660 but, as history shows, it was too late to save the French aristocracy.

In Colonial America, only the wealthy could afford the extravagance of buying ice for freezing cream. Records show, for example, that George Washington spent $200 for ice cream in the summer of 1790 alone. Mindful that revolutions were fought to right just such inequalities, that country's elite doubtlessly breathed sighs of relief when the first patent on a refrigerator was issued in 1803. The democratization of ice cream moved apace when an American housewife, Nancy Johnson, invented the hand-crank freezer in 1846. Five years later, Jacob Fussell opened the first ice cream plant and mass production of America's favourite dessert has continued to climb to its current rate of 931.4 million gallons a year.

Ice cream was introduced into the United States from Europe and probably evolved from iced beverages and water ices that were popular in earlier periods. The Chinese are often credited with inventing the earliest predecessor of modern ice cream, but frozen desserts were enjoyed in ancient times by other civilizations as well. For instance, wines and fruit juices cooled with ice and snow brought from the mountains by runners were reportedly consumed at the Court of Nero, Emperor of Rome, in the first century BC. Due to the lack of refrigeration and difficulty in production, these archaic frozen treats were reserved for special occasions and even then were often only available to an elite few. By the late 1600s, however, ices and sherbets were popular items at outdoor Paris cafés and the owner of one of these establishments in the subsequent century, Tortoni, is commonly credited with developing the first cream ices. Some of the first inhabitants of the United States to serve ice cream were such notable figures as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but it was not until the invention of mechanical refrigeration that widespread distribution of the treat became feasible, thus the first wholesale ice cream industry in the country was not established until 1851, when it was founded in Baltimore, Maryland by Jacob Fussell. Early plants were also established in St. Louis, New York, Washington, Chicago, and Cincinnati.

Though delicious alone, many innovative minds have developed a number of other ways to enjoy ice cream. One of the earliest was the ice-cream soda, which was invented in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1874. Extremely popular, when some Midwestern towns outlawed the sell of soda water on Sundays, proprietors of soda fountains reportedly began selling the treats without the soda, leaving behind only the ice cream and the syrup, resulting in the ever-popular sundae. About this same time, early versions of edible ice-cream cones began to circulate, but these crunchy and convenient items did not really become widely familiar in the United States until they appeared at the 1904 World's Fair held in St. Louis, Missouri. The first Good Humor ice cream treats, which became well known when they later began being sold by a fleet of ice cream trucks manned by uniformed drivers, was produced in 1920 by Harry Burt, who was given the idea of using lollipop sticks as handles for his chocolate-coated bars by his young son. Another chocolate covered ice cream bar, the Eskimo Pie, was the brainchild of an Iowa ice cream parlour owner, Chris Nelson, whose idea for the treat purportedly was the result of watching an indecisive customer wavering between the purchase of a chocolate bar and an ice cream sandwich.

Today, the technology of making and distributing ice cream isn't a problem, at least not compared to the difficulty of developing a product to catch the fancy of a been-there, done-that public. Although the most important ingredient of any flavour's success is the recipe that comes from careful testing in the company's laboratories, inspiration can come from anywhere: Baskin-Robbins' best-selling Pralines 'n Cream was developed after company founder Irv Robbins snacked on some toffee-coated nuts during a New Orleans vacation. One of Ben & Jerry's top-sellers, Cherry Garcia, was inspired by a letter from a faithful customer who was also a Grateful Dead fan. The '80s, the Yuppie Decade, produced such upbeat, upscale flavours as Haagen-Dazs' Sorbets and Cream, Cappuccino and Macadamia Brittle as well as the Dove Bar revolution. And in the '90s, Ben & Jerry introduced ecological concerns to the freezer; their Rain Forest Crunch uses Brazil nuts, a cash crop that encourages the preservation of the tropical forests. And, even the ice cream world is addressing the other contemporary concerns -- health and heart. As frozen yoghurt gobbles an increasing share of the market, major manufacturers are scrambling to introduce their own versions as well as ice cream with reduced fat and cholesterol. So, for all we know, Charles I might have thought it worth losing his head over as well.