The Shape of Desert

When most Americans think of ice cream today, we think of scoops, or maybe twisted towers of soft serve. But for the first half of American history, ice cream was served in a fanciful mold. Much like the molded jellies, puddings, and gelatinous desserts popular throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, ice cream was special enough to deserve the fashionable treatment.

The Everyday Cook and Recipe Book. 1891. Wikimedia Commons

Serving ice cream in a shape dates back to the 17th century, when some of the first confectioners of ices, sorbets, and early ice creams served their creations in pyramidal towers. These quickly refined into the art of ice cream subtleties – shaped frozen desserts served between courses or at the end of the meal, often designed to look like something they weren’t – fruits, vegetables, animals – and tinted with natural dyes such as spinach juice or cochineal. In her excellent book, Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, Jeri Quinzio relates an 18th century incident in which guests arriving after a meal to see a groaning board of cold meats, vegetables, fruits, and other dishes laid out. Confused by the abundance, they took their seats, only to have their hosts reveal that every item on the table was made of ice cream.

This concept can be see in a beautiful ice cream mold imitating fruit in a basket that is found at Colonial Williamsburg. This desert would certainly have graced the table at the Governor’s Palace. Here’s a link that contains extensive information about 18th century molds with many images demonstrating the production of ice cream in early America, including mention of “oyster ice cream!”

https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Spring10/icecream.cfm

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

With advances in tin and pewter production as well as the proliferation of commercial ice harvesting, the use of ice cream molds exploded in the 19th century. Many early varieties were simple – the fluted bombe was very popular, as it could be filled with another flavor of ice cream, which looked decorative when cut in half, or with another filling altogether, such as pudding or whipped cream. Other designs included everything from simple rings and tall pudding molds to incredibly complex designs such as a popular fruit basket, which could be tinted after the fact to make the various fruits look more realistic. A mold for a fluted bombe can be seen in this image from the 1908 edition of The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics.

Wikimedia Commons

The 1897 cookbook Breakfast, Supper, and Dinner by Maud C. Cooke has an extensive section on ices, ice creams, and sorbets and describes how to fill an ice cream mold:

“Moulding Ice Cream. – If you wish to mould ice cream or serve it in forms, have your mould ready at the time you remove the dasher from the can [ice cream freezer], and also have ready a tub or bucket containing a mixture of coarse ice and salt. Moisten the mould with cold water, then fill it quickly with ice cream, pressing it down with a spoon to fill every part of the mould. Lay a piece of wax paper over the cream large enough to project beyond the edges when the lid is on; put on the lid and imbed the mould in the tub of ice and salt; cover with a piece of carpet and stand aside for 1 or 2 hours. When ready to use, lift the mould from the ice, wipe it carefully, plunge it into a pan of warm water, remove the lid and paper, and turn the mould out carefully on a napkin placed on a pretty dish. If it should stick to the mould, wait for a moment, as the heat of the room will, as a rule, loosen it. Serve it in slices, unless it has been previously moulded into individual moulds.”

Because the ice creams and ices were refrozen, the end result was not the creamy, soft confection we have come to know and love. Many molded ice creams were hard and could even be icy, if poorly prepared. Specialized ice cream forks (early sporks, really) were developed to neatly break off pieces of the molded ice cream while still maintaining a bowl to catch the more liquid bits. As referenced above, many fancy ice cream molds were sliced, either crosswise or like a cake. Early commercially produced ice cream sold in brick-shaped cartons got similar treatment. Instead of being scooped, the bricks were simply sliced and served on a plate with ice cream forks.

Ice cream fork, Shreve & Company, Iris service, silver, 1903-1917, De Young Museum

By the 1920s, the molds were being mass-produced, but were largely reserved for special events and holidays. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has a large collection of ice cream molds, donated in the 1970s by a wholesale distributing company. In particular, 14 highly figurative molds were produced by Eppelsheimer & Co. of New York, one of the largest ice cream mold manufacturers in the country. Manufactured sometime between 1920 and 1930, the pewter molds (with a troublingly high lead content) were designed to be packed with softened ice cream and refrozen. The ice cream could be pre-tinted or the molds could be packed with different flavors.

Here are a series of ice-cream molds from Foremost-McKesson, Inc., of San Francisco, California that are in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum. Pictured from left to right are: a dolphin-shaped mold, an American eagle, a tugboat, and a witch-shaped mold for Halloween.

By the 1950s the popularity of ice cream molds began to wane. Commercial production of ice cream was quickly overtaking homemade, and Americans got used to the soda fountain style of serving ice cream in scooped balls. Although fanciful figures continued on in frozen confections on a stick, they were no longer a hallmark of fancy dinner parties and high end restaurants. Gelatin molds and bundt cakes took over the American desire for architectural desserts and molded ice cream faded into obscurity, much to our dismay!

— Sarah Wassberg Johnson. The Food Historian.