When a middle-aged Englishwoman, Sarah Mytton Maury, reminisced about her 1840s visit to the United States to visit her sister, she wrote, “Of all the luxuries in America I most enjoyed the ice—its use was then rare and expensive in England.” Jugs of ice water cooled her bedroom on hot nights, friends received her with a glass of iced lemonade or a sherry cobbler with “huge crystals floating about,” and dinner parties on sweaty August evenings always culminated in ice cream.
