The Golden Age of British Ice Cream

M r Whippy and 99s are still there (although called flake now) having had them on a few of the recent hot days

I wasn't allowed the soft-serve stuff (Mr Whippy). My mum didn't trust the machines not to be little food poisoning incubators.

(And it looks like she was right: https://researchportal.ukhsa.gov.uk/en/publications/the-micr...)

You know, this is probably why I never got slushies, either.

A fantastic article. Ruby Tandoh's writing on food is always of high quality and gets an immediate bookmark from me.

Ruby first became known to me as a vegan contestant on the BBC Great British Bake Off. I think she is fab, however...

(I write this for the American reader.)

The essay didn't mention the lore regarding Margaret Thatcher in her food scientist years, allegedly being responsible for 'soft serve' ice cream in the UK.

Thatcher became known as the milk snatcher for cutting free school milk, however, by working out how to get more air in ice cream, she had arguably been a milk snatcher before entering politics.

Regarding Walls, their factory is on a prominent road in Gloucester, or it used to be, in the heyday.

The lore, in these pre-internet times, was that they cut the fat from the pigs in the bacon factory and that became the mystery 'animal fats' in the ice cream product. Allegedly they only moved to cheaper vegetable fats later, when they could get a better price for the excess 'bacon' fat.

Because the factory presented itself as being 50% bacon and 50% ice cream, this was an easy story to believe by many a child, so the myth perpetuated itself, because it made perfect sense as a conspiracy story. Everything was explained.

This was at a time when cows were no better. The countryside frequently had upturned cows on fire due to either foot and mouth or BSE. At the time there was no knowing if BSE led to CJD - death by prions.

As a consequence, you would be doomed whether those 'animal fats' on the label of your typical Walls ice cream came from milk or porcine sources. They could have said 'milk' instead of 'animal fats'.

Ruby also mentions clotted cheese. That came to Cornwall with the tin trade, three thousand years ago. The Phoenicians brought the recipe and it enabled year round tin mining, with the chalk highlands providing grassland for grazing (rather than fearsome swamps, forest and rocks, not suited for keeping cows). They got their copper from Afghanistan, to make bronze in the Levant.

The name (Great) Britain means 'land of tin'. Who knew.

All these odd history facts are explained in considerable depth in the applications for regionally protected foods, and any visitor to the UK is advised to look for such foods, for example, the Cornish Pastry has to have good ingredients in it, and be from Cornwall, so they are not 'processed food', even if bought from a motorway service station or convenience store.

It is the same with CORNISH clotted cream, it isn't going to be like an adulterated Walls product, full of mystery 'animal fat' or, nowadays, mystery 'vegetable fat'.

I also felt that Ruby is too young to tell the story. As a child, at the time, there were other aspects of the story such as the joke (or riddle) on the stick. This was standard at the start of the era, and an ice cream without a joke on a stick was like getting a Christmas cracker that doesn't go bang. However, by the time the adult products come along (Magnum), the joke on a stick tradition has been banished. Why?

Walls had a local rival that they never put out of business. Winstones made a better product and they had a factory shop in the middle of a common full of cows. Their model was the classic dozens of flavours, where you have n+1 scoops of whatever you want, made up for you in a cone, with the middle class, car owning customer expected to buy some 5 litre tubs of their favourite flavours.

Winstones customers could tell themselves the product used real milk. Typically they had those vast chest freezers at home, this being peak boomer consumer lifestyle. Winstones did have distribution in local supermarkets, and, although Walls dominated, for those in the know, there were the equivalents of Winstones, with a better product.

Ruby also forgot to mention 'Ice Magic'. This was the chocolate syrup that formed a hard shell on ice cream, as served from the tub. There must have been an issue with food safety and Ice Magic as they had to drop the product, to reintroduce it without it forming the hard shell.

The moral panic of the time was food additives and no food was more brightly coloured than ice cream. In one ice cream a child could be exposed to every food colouring that has subsequently been banned, which never harmed anyone, however, today's product just lacks the full spectrum of very bright colours that were possible during the good old days.

Packaging was also a key area of innovation, which was solved by Walls with the Cornetto coming in a new form factor, with ritual involved in opening it. Mylar film was not available at the time, again, Walls innovated with this for Magnum. Beforehand it was always 'waxed' paper that might need to be blown into, to separate it from the ice cream.

In period, Walls was for common people in housing estates whereas middle class people had either posh Winstones (or equivalent) or huge tubs of supermarket ice cream, in the chest freezer. The ice cream van was for the housing estate, not the village in the shire, so there was this aspect of class going on. Cornetto was an affordable treat to all, far from gentrified.

People in housing estates were not two-car families, whereas, in the middle class shires, they were. The middle class people, buying in bulk, with the car and the big chest freezer, paid a fraction of the price 'per serving' of the kid in the council estate, who would be handing over coins on a daily basis.

Nowadays everyone is eating posh ice cream with 'luxury' titles. Vanilla is no longer vanilla, it has to be 'organic Madagascar vanilla drenched with slow pulled Etruscan caramel with Pink Tibetan Monkey Salt flavoured ice cream'.

OG vanilla is a low-status product, no longer considered edible. We need the fancy labels because it is all about conspicuous consumption rather than basic pleasure. We need fancy labels, high prices and faux myths ('Italian') to tell us something is delicious, and that we are not eating kid's stuff.

Final snippet of lore, the Walls catch phrase was 'Stop me and buy one!', and, although they stopped using this on their vans, the phrase lived on in the toilets of public houses in the form of 'Buy me and stop one!', common graffiti on the condom machines that were quite common in pub toilets, in those days, when people didn't nonchalantly put boxes of condoms in their regular shopping 'with no cringe factor'.

It is the story of ice cream popular in Britain.

  a cornet of compactly aerated vegetable-fat emulsion threaded with sauce

You've got to hand it to the British, no-one can do food the way they do. Gelato? Meh. Glacé? Meh. Sorbet? Meh. Compactly aerated vegetable-fat emulsion? Brilliant, I'll have it right after I finish my soggy fish and chips with vinegar.

A magnum is basically a choc ice on a stick. Choc ices go back to the 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choc_ice

According to your statement, the vast majority of parents also do not care about the health of their own children. The reality is probably a bit different. Its not about caring, it is plain lack of information/stupidity. I know what I am talking about, grew up in a working class family. Looking back, there are soooo many things which happened while I was still in my parents house... From undiagnosed mental health issues of my mother to being fed sugar and milk to a point where I vomitted every other week. Turned out I am mildly lactose intollerant. Nobody helps these kids. The state cant help either, because it is notoriously bad at caring for basically anonymous kids. Its a dilemma. Nobody talks about the dangers of stupid parents, because, you know, its kind of a taboo.

There's been a real rennaisance of quality produce in the UK, including ice cream. There's some really good stuff to be bought, even in mainstream supermarkets.

However natural ice cream can be, it's still a buttload of fats and sugars. Fine in moderation but could be bad. Still, I highly doubt ice cream alone is the reason for high obesity.

Either teach your children moderation or else be disappointed when they become teenagers with their own money to spend. Helicopter don't fly forever.

The UK's "sugar tax" too have ruined most drinks. Most have been replaced with aspartame or sucrose. It doesn't even come near to how it used to taste. That and palm oil.

I miss the old Irn Bru which was something like 89% sugar.

I was curious about this so looked into it (chatted to Claude). It seems like the issue is around high volume production of an ice-cream on a stick coated in thick chocolate like stuff. That's where the invention comes into it.

Every word in that last sentence is true. Especially the word "was". Shrinkflation has taken a particular toll on the thick mantle, and Magnums now are basically the choc ices they once beat out. Though with optional nuts and berries.