The empress of ice cream

Historical Note

It is a heresy according to a true lover’s creed ever to forgive an infidelity. But where mere nature is the motive, it is possible for a man to think tighter than the common opinion, and to argue that a rival taketh away nothing but the heart, and leaveth all the rest.

Geor^fe Savile, Marquess of Halifax, on Charles II

At the time of Charles IPs death in 1685 Louise de Keroualle was thirty-four. She returned to France a wealthy woman, retiring to her ducal fief of Aubigny and living there quietly until her death at the age of eighty-five. Voltaire met her when she was seventy and described her ‘with a face still noble and pleasing, that the years had never withered.’ She never married, devoting herself instead to good works and high-stakes gambling in equal measure.

‘Pretty, witty Nell,’ as Pepys called her, died in 1687, at the age of thirty-seven. By the time of her death she had amassed considerable debts.

Charles’s throne was inherited by his brother James, but the English Parliament rebelled, arguing that he had abdicated by virtue of his choice of religion. The army refused to give him their support and he had no choice but to flee the country. Parhament then invited the Protestant William of Orange to be their ruler. It was the first time in Europe that an elected body had effectively appointed their own king, an almost-bloodless coup that became known as The Glorious Revolution. One of the first acts of the new Parliament was to pass a law forbidding the English monarch from being, or marrying, a Cathohc - a law that is still on the statute books today.

The Persian technique of making sorbets and water ices was known in Florence by the 1660s, although the exact process was a well-guarded secret. A visiting Frenchman, one L. Audiger, then somehow took it to Paris in about 1665. Fie became limonndier to Louis XTV, having presented the king with some out-of-season peas by way of an introduction. How the technology came to England, and how it developed into ‘ice cream’ by the time of Charles IPs great feast for the Order of the Garter in 1671, is not known, nor is the name of the confectioner who, according to the written menu, served ‘One plate of white strawberries and one plate of ice cream’ to the king’s table alone. However, the name Demirco has long been anecdotally ascribed to the man who decided not to allow ice creams to remain a royal privilege. Some accounts have him working for Charles 1, but as there are no records of him in the royal household at that time, and since ice cream had not been invented by then, it seems likely that over the centuries the two Charleses simply got mixed up.

In the decades following Charles IPs death the knowledge of how to make ice cream slowly spread across Europe. One of the first books of recipes was an anonymous eighty-four-page manuscript entided The Art of Making Ices which, through watermarks in the paper, has been dated to the period shordy before 1700. It includes recipes for violet, rose, chocolate, and caramel ice creams — flavours that would have seemed as extraordinary at the dme as anything devised by molecular gastronomists today. In 1718 a woman called Mary Bales, who claimed to have been a confectioner at the English court, published a recipe ‘for icing cream . . . either plain or sweetened, or with fruit in it’. There is also an ice cream recipe in The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy by the Englishwoman Hannah Glasse in 1751, which is admirably simple: ‘To make Ice Cream ... set it into the larger Bason. Fill it with Ice, and a Handful of Salt.’

In the meandme, Quakers and other non-conformists had taken ice cream making to America. The earliest record in that

country comes from Pennsylvania in 1744: ‘Among the rarities . . . was some fine ice cream, which, with the strawberries and milk, eat most deficiously.’ Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were known to have served it at state functions.

Madame Henrietta d’Angleterre, sister of Charles II, did indeed die after drinking a glass of iced chicory water. Although poison was suspected at the time, it is now thought her death was the result of peritonitis caused by a perforated ulcer. The secret Treaty of Dover which she had worked so hard for, and which was signed two weeks before her death, was known to no more than a dozen people in England, including Louise de Keroualle. It included the clause, ‘The King of England will make a pubhc profession of the Catholic faith, and will receive the sum of two million crowns to aid him in this project from the Most Christian King, in the course of the next six months. The date of this declaration is left absolutely to his own pleasure.’ It is perhaps not surprising that Charles flatly denied the existence of this treaty to Parliament, when he was questioned about it in 1675: ‘There is no other treaty with France, either before or since, not already printed, which shall not be made known.’ A copy of the treaty was finally found and published in 1830.

Records kept by the French ambassador in London show that the French spent many millions of crowns bribing English pohticians and ministers during this time. It seems Hkely, although it has never been proved, that France’s ultimate aim was to swallow up the Netherlands and then invade England, possibly using the pretext of rescuing a Catholic Charles II from his own Parliament. This would have left Germany isolated as the last remaining major Protestant country in Europe.

The Royal Society, otherwise known as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, was established by Charles II in 1660. It numbered among its early members and guests Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, John Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz, Nicholas

Mercator, John Locke and Edmond Halley, to name just a few. Boyle was particularly interested in freezing, and his essay ‘Observations touching Cold’ was one of the first texts to investigate artificial freezing methods scientifically. He may have been influenced by the fact that, at the time, Europe was undergoing ‘the litde ice age’, which led to frost fairs being held on the River Thames. Other members’ interests ranged from how to make champagne bottles to the laws of light and motion. They are generally credited with being the first thinkers of the Enlightenment.