Today is National Ice Cream Day, so we’re talking about a woman who helped make this frozen treat the icon that it is today: Agnes B. Marshall, the “Queen of Ices.”
We don’t know much about her early years, other than that she was born in 1855 and reportedly studied to be a chef.
By 1883 she had moved to London and started offering cooking classes, trying to show middle class people that they could cook and entertain the way well-off people did, with elaborate, innovative recipes.
Her ice cream recipes were eye-openers: at a time when ice cream wasn’t just a sweet dessert, she was offering savory recipes like cucumber and pumpernickel.
She even made an ice cream with a souffle!
But what really made Marshall a food celebrity was that she toured England giving demonstrations of her creations.
She would have been huge on YouTube and Instagram if those had been around.
She wrote cookbooks, created an affordable home ice cream maker when most people didn’t have easy access to freezers, and invented an early form of ice cream cone years before the one we know today came along, though she expected people would still eat what she called “cornets with cream” with utensils.
She isn’t as well known today as she was in her time, but Agnes B. Marshall isn’t forgotten.
As The Hustle noted, a shop in St. Louis paid tribute to her with a name that recalls one of her cookbooks: “Ices Plain & Fancy.”
It was on this day in 1975 that ground control played the song “Hello Darlin” by country star Conway Twitty to astronauts in Earth orbit.
Only this version of the song was a little different.
Since there were Americans AND Soviets taking part in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, Twitty recorded his song in Russian, as a goodwill gesture.
So it became “Privet Radost.”
The 19th-century entrepreneur who pioneered modern ice cream (The Hustle)
Do You Remember When Conway Twitty Sang ‘Hello Darlin’ in Russian? (Wide Open Country)
