The Golden Age of British Ice Cream

It's fictionalised from very real British experiences with ice cream and fish and chips, working class communities, Italian family business, crime. And of course deep fried ice cream. I worked in an Italian migrants coffee bar/greasy spoon as a dish pig in 1970s edinburgh, the local chip shop and ice cream scene was almost entirely Italian, in some parts of Scotland going back to the end of the 19th century.

For some people the "99" from a van with a squirt of raspberry sauce is a key childhood memory, a lift from the darkness of intergenerational mass unemployment, and rainy day holidays on stoney beaches.

Gelato is posh. Mr Whippy is what poor people ate.

I'll take any excuse to recommend Ruby's essay on British Cheese, "How a cheese goes extinct: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-a...

> When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history. [...]

Ingredients are terrible for all the brands mentioned. And British children have high obesity rates and dental issues.

The golden age was pre-big food when ice cream was made naturally.

The celebration of targeted product design, branding and advertising is something we should move away from. The companies don’t care about its customer’s health, just its profits.

In 2015, this requirement was abolished, and now you can sell anything sweet and frozen as "ice cream" even if it contains no dairy at all.

I don’t want to deny Walls the credit for taking it global though: In the early 2000’s I met a very interesting and clever chap, with a PhD in material sciences who worked for Walls in Bangkok, whose job it was to ensure the Magnum didn’t melt too quickly in the south east Asian heat.

Few stories I remember him telling me... part of his job was that he went out on the road giving freezers away to shops so that they could stock Walls ice creams (and only Walls ice creams). He said they had particular difficulty with this in Ireland where shopkeepers would accept the freezer for the shop but put a cheaper competitor's product in.

There's always a struggle between companies choosing profits (by adopting cheaper, more processed ingredients) and consumers wanting tasty but healthy foods. In UK things are improving because of regulations, but everywhere else things are not that good, and it's not just ice creams.