Those who doubt Escoffier need only to look at the menus of ice-cream parlours and restaurants. The motto today seems to be: “If you can infuse it, you can use it.” Herbs and spices are now joining more traditional flavourings such as fruit, chocolate and cheeses. Australia’s restaurants and ice-cream parlours offer everything from chocolate-chilli and lemon delicious to basil and blue-cheese flavours, alongside the traditional chocolate, vanilla and lemon sorbet. We’ve still got a long way to go, however, to match the invention of Manuel da Silva Oliveira, whose ice-cream parlour in Merida, Venezuela, had more than 830 varieties, including squid, fried pork rind, trout and tuna ice-creams.

The Chinese are credited with being the first to add salt and saltpetre to snow or pounded ice to lower its freezing temperature through evaporation in order to make a frozen dairy dish. Some experts claim the process may have started as early as the Han Dynasty (206BC to AD220) but Robin Weir and Caroline Liddell only present hard evidence from the Tang period (AD618–907) in their hyperbolically but deservedly named Ices: The Definitive Guide. The love of iced desserts and drinks dates back much further; the earliest ice-house (2250BC) was unearthed in Iraq in the Sumerian city of Ur. Nero loved his “slushees” of snow flavoured with honey, fruit and wine. The Arab world had their charabs, the Turks their chorbets and, after his conquest of Egypt in 332BC, Alexander the Great had 15 trenches dug and filled with snow for his cooled “punches”.

While that old fraud Marco Polo might have claimed that it was he who introduced iced creams to Europe from China, it seems much more likely that their popularity had spread west earlier. There are reports of the endothermic effect of salt on ice in Indian writings from the fourth century and Arab texts of the 12th century, while according to Weir, the Mogul Court of North India was enjoying kulfi as early as the 1400s.