19-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Saturday, July 18, 1914: Nothing much doing. Went to an ice cream sale this evening. Didn’t get any there, but got some at another place.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
mmm. . . Eating ice cream with friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend a Saturday evening.
Grandma did have the ice cream with friends didn’t she? The diary entry doesn’t exactly say that, but I think that’s what she means. In my imagination a group of friends made homemade ice . . . laughing and chatting while they took turns turning the crank.
A Hundred Years Ago 
We are thinking alike tonight. I just posted about ice cream too 🙂 I have great memories of watching people hand crank ice cream.
Oh ice cream just makes me think of my late parents and how ice cream featured so strongly in their long lives ~ something both inherited from their parents. (My parents actually met over an ice-cream!)
Grandma is so cryptic sometimes. I mean what exactly is an iice cream sale and why would you go to it to just turn around and get ice cream elsewhere?
Oh, boy–ice cream! That sounds perfect for the hot weather they’ve been having!
We had a machine very much like that. It had the wooden tub and all. I love the marketing language. Some things don’t change much over the years.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream! 😉
Diana xo
I, too, wondered what an ice cream sale was….?
The hand-cranked ice-cream machine is a good demonstration that nineteenth century people understood physics pretty well. The ingredients were placed in a metal cylinder that rotated by gearing and a hand crank. Crushed ice was placed between the wooden outside of the device and the internal cylinder, and when salt was added to the ice, the effect was to lower the freezing point of the water at the surface of the ice. The reason for the drop in temperature was that, by melting, the system was absorbing the “latent heat of fusion”. That was the energy that was initially required to change the water from liquid to solid (ice). (Another way to look at this is that lowering the temperature of water to 32 degrees F is not in itself sufficient to turn it into ice. More energy must be removed to do that, and that’s what the “latent heat” is.)
My grandparents had one of these machines and I found it fascinating. Wikipedia tells us that the first U.S. patent for one was #3254 issued to Nancy Johnson on 9 September 1843.
Funny how we are so use to conveniences – imagine having the time to make ice cream. 🙂 I bet they really appreciated it if they made it and had to crank that ice cream machine!
Sounds like a lot of fun to go get some ice cream 🙂
We made ice cream almost every weekend when I was a kid. Rum and raisin, strawberry, lots of flavours. Jane
Early in our marriage in the 50s my husband gave me a gift of an ice cream maker much like this, if not the same. He liked ice cream
Old fashioned real ice cream. Yum.