Dr. Garritt Van Dyk: A Brief History Of Ice Cream - January 6, 2026
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The last show with David Cooper. Procrastinate your life away with us. The other day I was walking in the cold and I saw someone who I thought was a schmuck eating ice cream in minus a million weather. But then I realized maybe there's a rich history behind ice cream. Maybe ice cream isn't this new food and perhaps something with over a 2000 year old history. Well, once I looked it up, I found out I was correct. And we're here to talk ice cream with Dr. Garrett Van Dyke, who's a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, who knows a thing or two about the delicious snack chip. Welcome to the program.
Thanks, David. Thanks for having me.
What surprising history does ice cream have?
So do you think the average person would be surprised to find out that ice cream has a rich tradition? I would have just assumed it's one of those foods that like, I don't know, came with the refrigerator and not something with a rich history.
Yeah, I think a lot of people take it for granted. I don't think people necessarily realize that this goes all the way back to ancient Persia. So for me, it's fascinating to look at things that are deeply embedded in our daily lives and stop and think, well, how do we get here? How did this happen? And then I sort of pull on that thread of the sweater and it unravels and unravels and unravels. And then suddenly it's, you know, 550 BC and I'm looking at a huge dome-shaped structure in ancient Persia that was used to make ice cubes.
Okay, so it wasn't like there was bodegas in ancient Persia with bodega cats and I went in and I opened the freezer and got a drumstick, or as my mother calls it, a nutty cone. It's a much more complicated process getting ice back then, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. Your Korean grocer doesn't necessarily have it. So the ancient Persians figured out that in the desert, you could use evaporative cooling at night in the winter to create ice. And then they would store it in these huge sort of beehive-shaped structures, which had like a solar chimney at the top to pull out hot air. and a place at the bottom to bring in cool air. And that allows them to store ice year-round. So rather than having to go to your nearest mountaintop and carve out a block of ice, they were able to make it in the middle of the desert, which I think is a pretty cool way to start.
It is. And for people who don't realize evaporative cooling is amazing. I grew up in a climate with relatively, you know, moderate humidity. So I never knew this until I was in a desert and I put a wet cloth on me and like, I don't know, 100 degree weather. And all of a sudden, as the water evaporated off the cloth, that thing dropped like 20, 30 degrees Fahrenheit. It's an amazing effect. And I guess the ancient Persians figured out how to take advantage of it.
Yeah, so it's fascinating that they figured this out and they exploited it. And then that technology spreads as we get the Arabs coming in and conquering Persia in, let's say, like 650 AD. And when that happens, they bring in their own bit to the equation, which is they go from using, let's say, rose water and honey to make sort of a shaved ice type of deal in Persia. ancient Persia, they bring in milk and sugar that they've got from their trade routes. And when they do that, we start to get the very first rudimentary forms of ice cream. And they're thickened with things like salep, which is an orchid root, or with mastic, which is like this gum that comes from an evergreen. And so suddenly you have this really weird, stretchy, kind of stringy almost ice cream, which you can still find on the streets in Turkey.
But yeah, so that's sort of the really earliest ice cream we get is during that period.
And that's really living for ancient peoples. You'd think they would use this amazing technology for storing like crops and meat, and I'm sure they did. But once you've got the farming infrastructure, once you've got the cold storage infrastructure, that's when humanity really can start enjoying delicious treats, which is obviously what we did.
And this is really important because dessert is the most important of any meal and you should definitely eat it first because life is short, right?
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