FOOD NEWS
What Was The World's First Ice Cream Flavor?
By Kimberley Laws
Gone are the days of only choosing between the two traditional options of chocolate or vanilla ice cream, as buyers now have flavor choices like Peanut Butter Half Baked and Divine Coffee Cookie Swirl. However, the first recorded flavor of ice cream was neither chocolate nor vanilla.
The Greek Alexander the Great was fond of a dessert made with snow and laced with nectar and honey, making it the first official flavor of ice cream. In a more concrete example, Sarah Wassberg Johnson stated that “Around 200 B.C.E., there's a reference to people in China eating [a combination of] milk and rice that was frozen in the snow.”
One of the earliest iterations of what would become modern ice cream was sharabt, an icy beverage enjoyed by Arabs and Persians in the 11th century. An Italian bureaucrat named Antonio Latini made the first official version of ice cream in the 17th century when he concocted the first sorbet recipe.