The French call it glacé; the Spanish, helado; the Germans, eis; the Russians, marozhnye.
Americans consume it at a rate of 1.2 billion gallons a year and have called it everything from iced pudding and frozen ambrosia to hokey-pokey and winter in a spoon.
Nero and Alexander the Great were fond of it, and the Chinese reportedly were making it for thousands of years before Marco Polo asked them for the recipe.
Today, Pennsylvania produces more of it than any other state. And, believe it or not, just about every ice cream company in the world has a Penn State connection—someone on its staff who holds a Penn State degree or who has attended the oldest and, most authorities agree, best course of its kind anywhere—the two-week ice cream short course taught every January at University Park.
Dr. Philip G. Keeney ‘55g, course director and acting head of the new food science department, said, “Penn State is prominent in dairy manufacturing, and many of our graduates have gone into the business and made a success of themselves.”
These include Johnstown dairy owner Lou Galliker ’56, Sealtest vice president Fred Rasmussen ’42, Hershey Creamery vice president Harry Sauers ’34, Howard Johnson executives Robert Hamilton ’53g and Marlyn Kurtz ’53, and two executives with the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers and the Milk Industry Foundation, John Speer ’55, ’57g and Glenn Witte ’68, ’70g.
Many alumni work for Sani-Dairy in Johnstown and for Penn Dairies, maker of PenSupreme, in Lancaster.
Two dairy science graduates, Stan Roseberry ’22 and the late Gene Pearce ’26, were partners in the Pearce Milk Company in State College and pooled their names for its ice cream, PeRo, now manufactured by Penn Dairies.
Another State College dairy owner and ice cream entrepreneur is Don Meyer ’38.
As for the short course, more than 3,000 people have taken it in the nearly 80 years it has been offered. And some large companies, such as Borden, Sealtest, Howard Johnson, and the Latin American giant Kibon regularly send their people to it.
Lewis L. Bassett of Philadelphia, maker of what The New York Times called in 1972 “the nation’s best ice cream,” is a short-course “graduate.” So is Penn Dairies president John Garber. And so are Bassett’s daughters, Ann and Corinda, who attended in 1975 along with two other prominent women—Lillian Yan of Hong Kong, who wanted to learn how to make American ice cream since the Oriental product is nothing like it, and Jolyn Robichaux, president of the largest black-owned ice cream firm in the world, Baldwin of Chicago.
Other ice cream companies that have enrolled their employees are Schrafft, Brigham, Nafziger, Centrone, Weis, Lehigh, Abbott, Big Drum (maker of Drumsticks) and Thomas J. Lipton (maker of tea, soups and Good Humor Bars).
“Baskin-Robbins wanted to send two of their people this year,” Dr. Keeney said, “but they applied too late, so we’ll have to catch them next year.”
Enrollment is limited to 45 people annually, but nearly twice that many apply and, like Baskin-Robbins, have to “wait till next year.” One 1976 class member, dairy supply salesman Bruce Gutterman ’73 of Wilkes-Barre, said he had heard about the short course ever since he was a little boy and had tried to enroll last year. “But my application was too late,” he said.
Over the years, students, most of them middle-aged and working in some phase of the ice cream or confection business, have come from every state, from Canada and Central America, and from countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.
Why? What makes the course so popular?
A ’76 class member said, “I’ve taken ice cream courses at other universities, but this one is better.” Another called the course “a good refresher.” Another said it would help him answer questions on his travels. And another, a dairy owner from Florida, said, “We’re not getting enough money for our butterfat, so we’re going into the ice cream business and I figured this was the best place to learn how.”
Creamery superintendent William W. Coleman ’59, one of six faculty members who teach the course with Keeney, said, “It is more thorough than courses taught at other colleges. Our teaching staff is good, too, especially since we’ve all worked in industry. And our facilities are really nice—there aren’t too many creameries like this one anymore.”
During their two weeks on campus the students are kept constantly busy with classroom lectures, field trips, workshops, and, the most enjoyable part, sampling sessions. They learn how to calculate and make various mixes for ice cream, ice milk, sherbet and mellorine, a non-dairy “frozen dessert” that is widely produced in the western and south-central states.
They learn, too, about milk and how it’s processed, about stabilizers and emulsifiers, about new equipment and techniques. They have lessons in chemistry, bacteriology, sanitation, management, distribution. They visit the Weis Market ice cream plant in Sunbury and Hershey Creamery in Harrisburg. And they have quizzes and a final exam.
A student of several years ago said, “I usually bring a deck of cards to things like this, but everybody’s studying at this one!”
One ’76 class member said he hadn’t learned as much as he thought he would, while another grumped, “You learn too much, too fast. And I don’t like having to take tests.”
Dr. Keeney agrees that a test, though helpful to most students, is unfair to others, especially those who have been away from school for 40 years. So, he sweetens the final-exam pill with prizes ranging from a wristwatch to U.S. Savings Bonds that are awarded to top scorers at the closing-night banquet.
This is a far cry from the early days when the course had no banquets, no prizes, no streamlined equipment—just some hand-cranked wooden freezers in a drafty chicken coop. In fact, ice cream was not part of the program when, in 1892, Penn State became first in the nation to offer a dairy manufacturing short course. That course, eight weeks in length, was devoted principally to butter and cheese. But ice cream was included in 1898 and became a separate two-week short course in 1924.
Those two eras—the 1890s and the 1920s—are significant, not only in the history of the ice cream short course, but also in the history of ice cream itself.
In the late 1890s, freezing methods were improved, the homogenizer was invented and ice cream parlors and drug store soda fountains sprang up everywhere—even outnumbering bars in New York City! Also near the turn of the century the ice cream sundae made its debut, a forced evolution from the ice cream soda.
The latter had been invented by accident in 1874 at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, where a concessionaire was selling a drink made of soda water, cream, and flavored syrup. One day, having run out of cream, he substituted ice cream and saw his profits soar from $6 to $600 a day!
Around 1900, however, soda water suddenly developed a shady reputation among people who felt that sipping through a straw had lascivious overtones. Enterprising druggists decided to skip the carbonation and serve just the ice cream and syrup (discreetly, in a bowl, with a spoon), naming the new concoction in honor of the day that most people frequented soda fountains. But this, too, met with disfavor, so to pacify those who thought it sacrilegious, the spelling was changed to sundae.
A revolution in food containers, the ice cream cone, portable and completely edible, was introduced in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, again by two clever concessionaires—an ice cream vendor and a waffle maker.
In the 1920s, three inventions—the continuous freezer, the Good Humor Bar and the Eskimo Pie—turned ice cream into really big business. The last even gave rise to a hit song, “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream.” And right in the midst of these developments came Penn State’s decision to offer the separate two-week short course in ice cream-making.
One might think that the influence Penn State has on the world’s tastebuds has something to do with its ice cream recipe. But Dr. Keeney says no. The standard Creamery mix—cane and corn sugars, cream, condensed milk, skim milk, and stabilizers—is 13 percent milk-fat, above the legal minimum (10 percent) but below the premium grade (16 to 18 percent).
“Milk-fat is the most important ingredient in ice cream,” Dr. Keeney says, “because it affects the creaminess, flavor and ‘mouth feel.’ Stabilizers make it smooth by keeping large ice crystals from forming, as sometimes happens with homemade varieties.”
Ice cream is generally made at the Creamery only once a week, on Wednesdays, and then in small amounts—300 gallons per hour as opposed to a large company’s production that might reach 3,000 gallons per hour. But Creamery capacity seems to be sufficient for the needs of campus dining halls, vending machines, the HUB, Nittany Lion Inn and the Creamery sales room in Borland Laboratory where 100,000 gallons are sold annually, most of it by the coneful.
Coleman says the sales room averages 1,500 to 2,000 cones daily, although football weekends and beautiful spring days can up the average to 5,000.
There are hundreds of flavors of ice cream—a dealer in Philadelphia claims to have a machine that can concoct 10,000—but worldwide, vanilla is still the most popular, accounting for 50 percent of all flavors sold. In second place, at 13 percent, is chocolate.
Coleman says that next to vanilla the most popular flavor at the sales room is Mounds, followed by bittersweet mint. Mounts—coconut ice cream with chocolate bits—is made from a paste provided by the Peter Paul Company, and those who have tried it say it tastes like a Mounds candy bar. It is sold only at Penn State and through the Lehigh Valley Co-op in Allentown.
“We just can’t keep it in stock,” Coleman said. “As soon as we make it, we sell out.”
If it’s not the ice cream recipe, then what is it that makes Penn State a standout in dairy manufacturing?
Dr. Keeney says, “No, there’s no secret to making ice cream. There are many formulas available, the technology is already worked out, and any company can decide what kind of ice cream to make. The difference lies in management and in the selection of quality ingredients and flavorings.”
If that’s all there is to it, let’s make some frozen ambrosia. But remember—the one who turns the crank gets to lick the dasher!
