GoKawiilGood morning and welcome to Vittles. Today’s essay by Ruby Tandoh is about the most influential decade-and-a-half in British ice cream culture — a fertile period from 1976 to 1991 during which most of the ice creams you’ll find in a British freezer today were invented. This essay is adapted from Ruby’s book All Consuming, which was released in paperback last month. To buy it, please click here. Today’s article is also part of our online-only series of essays on influence linked to our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’ which officially came out last week. Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far! You can order your copy here, and, while you’re there, you may as well throw in a copy of Ruby’s ice cream guide too. Buy Issue 3
The golden age of British ice cream started with a simple enough gambit: that there had to be a way of packaging the iconic ice cream cone. What if, instead of having to queue up outside a seaside ice cream hut, or a transient ice cream van, you could go into a shop – any shop – and find a cornet waiting for you, pre-made? What if it was fixed so that it was perfect every time – so that a smooth, dense volume of ice cream went all the way down into the cone, so that sauce ran through the ruffles and never fully froze and never dripped? What if you could make it so that it was physically impossible for the ice cream to fall off the cone?
An Italian manufacturer called Spica had already got the formula down in 1959. The success was partly down to the cone Spica designed: a bias-cut, crisp wafer construction that had been sprayed on the inside with a mixture of chocolate and coconut oil, forming a damp-proof barrier between the wafer and the ice cream. But the ice cream was important too. Full-dairy ice cream doesn’t hold up well when you try to pipe it or store it like this. The new ice cream was different. It felt colder on the tongue. It melted quickly but smoothly, with the precision of a racer taking a clean, sharp bend. What you ended up with was a cornet of compactly aerated vegetable-fat emulsion threaded with sauce, serving mainly as a pretext for the chocolate plug.
The ice cream did well in the homeland of gelato, but in Britain, the idea didn’t immediately translate. There’s only so long that wet ice cream can last in a crisp sugar cone before things start to break down, and the turnover of ice cream in a corner shop in Bolton wasn’t like that in a store in Rimini. So, when Wall’s – the biggest name in British ice cream – tried to launch it in the UK in the mid-sixties, it crashed out. It took ten more years of chemical tweaking to hit the impossible sweet spot: an ice cream with the physical qualities of Teflon that could withstand getting knocked around in a freezer cabinet but that also melted in the mouth. Eventually they nailed it, and Wall’s parent company Unilever bought the recipe. In the summer of 1976, the Cornetto entered the British corner shop.
Nearly 7 million Cornettos were sold that summer. You couldn’t have chosen a better time to release an ice cream. It was one of the hottest summers on record, with ice cream season extending long into autumn, and that same year, semi-luxury ice cream chains Baskin-Robbins and Dayvilles both entered the UK market and got people used to the idea that you might pay as much as 25p for an ice cream cone. Walls marketed hard, coming up with a proto-viral campaign - the ‘Just One Cornetto’ song. Within a decade, Cornetto had variants in strawberry, mint, and rum and raisin flavours, and was selling 70 million units a year. It was by far the most popular ice cream Britain had ever produced.
In the world of British ice cream, 1976 was the beginning of an influential fifteen-year purple patch that spawned pretty much every one of the ice creams you find in the freezers today. Go to a shop or browse the menu on the side of an ice cream van. You see the Mini Milks? 1976. Funny Feet – the ancestor of skinless, sculptural ice creams in the shape of Minions and Peppa Pig – debuted in 1980. The Twister, the coiled ice cream and sorbet hybrid? The format was invented in 1982 in Ireland as a strawberry, vanilla and chocolate ice cream, with the flavours it has today – the lime, pineapple and strawberry trifecta – allegedly, incomprehensibly, the result of a schoolgirl’s trip to the Gloucester Wall’s factory in 1987 courtesy of Jim’ll Fix It. Viennetta was invented in 1982. Calippo came to the UK in 1982, although the orange Calippo wasn’t launched until 1988. Feast – a horrible ice cream that seems unkillable in a hard-shelled, cockroach kind of way – was 1983. In 1988, we got Mars ice cream bars. In 1990, Carte d’Or. Bookending the period, was another titan launched in 1990 that surpassed even the Cornetto: the Magnum – the most popular ice cream in the world today.
This sudden leap forward in ice cream culture may seem mysterious, but it is often how things work once food gets to an industrial scale. Change happens quickly, and innovation comes in waves – amplified by economic changes, mergers, acquisitions and low-stakes corporate arms races. In the 1930s it happened with chocolate, with the release of Mars bars, Snickers, Milky Bar, Maltesers, Aero, Ritter Sport, Rolos and KitKats – a chocolate-bar formal repertoire we haven’t meaningfully improved upon almost a century later. Something similar has happened in the last few years: an era of unprecedented creativity in crisp flavourings. The golden age of ice cream was just fifteen years, roughly overlaying the late seventies and eighties, but it saw the biggest explosion of industrial British food culture in the last half century.
When ice cream was popularised in the UK in the late 1800s, it would have been hard to imagine that things would go this far. Italian migrants sold penny lick milk ices on the streets, sellers convening on the canals in the early morning to buy blocks of ice, then dispersing across the city. Milk was frozen with sugar and, maybe, egg; serving glasses were wiped out with an old rag and then refilled to order. Over time, the ice creams became more complex; during the thirties, the catering and cafe empire Lyons made ice cream cakes – campy things like Trocadero Wonder Gateau and Glace Pompadour, with ice cream moulded like a ball-gown skirt.
By the start of the World War 2, there were armadas of men on tricycles selling ice creams under the branding of Wall’s – a sausage manufacturer that had realised, astutely enough, that people weren’t really buying pork pies in summertime and so it probably needed a second income stream – which had been acquired by the progenitor of Unilever in 1922. Ice cream, however, was extraneous to the war effort and restrictions were put on how much dairy and sugar the industry could use. By the fifties, ice cream was more basic than ever; most Lyons ice cream – eventually brought under the banner of Lyons Maid – was rigorously functional: bricks, bricklets, cups, poles and rectangular choc ices.
A Lyon’s Maid advert from 1977, the year after Cornetto debuted
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