The History of Ice Cream

drinks, these icy treats nonetheless enjoyed tremendous popularity. The ancient Romans were also familiar with ices. While the philosopher Seneca criticised the emperor Nero in the 1st century AD for the extravagance of having ice and snow brought from the mountains to cool his swimming pool, he seemed to have seen nothing wrong with the emperor's fondness for chilled drinks and snow flavoured with honey. But at that time, unless Romans wanted to eat their ices only in winter or high in the mountains, they needed not only to bring snow or ice to where they consumed it, but also to find some way of storing it in warm weather. This required a special sort of building now known as an ice house. Usually constructed of stone, underground and insulated with straw, these were sufficiently cold to preserve ice cut from frozen lakes and rivers in winter, or snow carried down from the mountains.