By Don Sanders
Associate Professor (retired), The Ohio State University
This story is important to tell because it is so deeply ingrained, or frozen, in the American diet. Almost everyone loves ice cream – even those who are lactose intolerant have lactose-free options available. Ice cream has been around for centuries.
When Prohibition was enacted with the 18th amendment to eliminate white lightning, beer, and alcohol in the 1920’s, ice cream by default became the substitute delight for hooch—in an effort to survive Prohibition and continue making alcoholic beverages, Anheuser-Busch and Yuengling switched to making ice cream and soda. They worked together on processes such as bottling and new flavors because it was no longer possible for consumers to drown their sorrows with alcoholic beverages.
Even though it appeared the breweries struggled economically, they did survive through innovative alternatives. All they needed to do was look back in history. Ice cream desserts have been around for thousands of years. The Romans, the Greeks, and the Mongols sent expeditions to frozen mountain lakes to harvest snow and ice. They mixed ice or snow with honey, spices, and various types of flowers to make sorbet. If you are like me, you would have wanted to know precisely how to churn those ingredients.
They didn’t have ice cream churns like we have today for making home-made ice cream at church socials or community events. How did they churn the ingredients to make ice cream? There is no doubt they were very creative.
From 1190 AD. extending into the 1800’s, they had to wait for winter to harvest ice and snow from mountains, rivers, and lakes. They improvised a solution for storing ice. Ice was stored in underground pits insulated with layers of straw, furry animal hides, or, later, sawdust. If it were snow, it had to be incorporated immediately into the blend.
How did they “churn” the ingredients to make ice cream? Improvisation again was the key. I have spent time in Mongolia and learned how they make the ice cream. (It was -24 F. below zero when I consulted there.) The early Mongols froze their ice cream mix while stirring it, or should I really say sloshing it around?
Dried animal stomachs (rumen) from buffalo, Bos taurus cows, and other ruminant animals, such as deer, were the improvised containers. The Mongols didn’t have crushed ice-encased bucket freezers similar to our hand or electric-powered ice cream freezers. Their method for mixing while freezing was to have the ingredients sloshing around as they were rapidly cooled. The ingredients with the ice or snow were placed in entrails (cleaned guts) strapped to the saddles of their steeds. This blend sloshed in the entrails hanging from their saddle horns while the Mongol warriors raced across the tundra (OCJ, Nov. 2022) towards the next village to be raided. I thought it was pretty cool (no pun intended) to have ice cream available while Genghis Khan got his Mongol horde ready to attack the next village.
In June–July 2025, the FDA issued a recall for ice cream distributed in 23 states. The ice cream was contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. I can promise you that the Mongol warriors never checked their ice cream for Listeria.
For what it is worth, I have attended Christian church services in Mongolia. One Sunday in a yurt (thick-walled, insulated, tarp-structure tent with a woodburning stove) and the next Sunday service in a large public conference room. The sermon and choral singing were all in Mongolian. After church, my American colleagues, who are veterinary missionaries residing in Mongolia, invited me to stay for hors d’oeuvres. My new friends warned that the hors d’oeurves were unique to Mongolian history. I enquired if it included ice cream without letting on what I knew about ice cream in Mongolia. I voted we stay, after all. I was seeking the Mongolian experience. There wasn’t any ice cream served that day. The after-church snack consisted of a small paper cup of fermented mare’s milk. They had a whole barrel of mare’s milk, so there wasn’t any danger of not having some for everyone in the congregation. I describe the taste as drinking old vinegar with “stuff” floating in it.
Hors d’oeurves included a combination of cooked kidney, liver, and spleen wrapped in two-inch sections of horse guts and held together by a toothpick. Now, the organ meat I could handle, but the boiled horse guts were dang chewy! After chewing on it for a couple of minutes, I concluded it wasn’t going to get any smaller. It was like chewing a large rubber band. As we stood around in social groups at the back of the sanctuary, there wasn’t a convenient waste basket to discreetly spit out my wad of horse guts, so the only other option was to either put it in my pocket or swallow it, which I did with a gulp. We then went to lunch and had a sirloin steak with a donkey. Needless to say, I wasn’t very hungry.
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