The American ice cream trade is dominated by white men. Ben and Jerry. Baskin and Robbin. Häagen and, um… Dazs. OK, the last two are just nonsense words the founder (and white man) Reuben Mattus thought sounded vaguely Danish. But the fact remains that the industry is considerably less diverse than its customers (US consumers put away more per capita than any other country bar New Zealand), which is why a passing mention of Augustus Jackson as “the father of ice cream” at a recent British Library talk caught my attention.
Jackson was born in Philadelphia in 1808, the same year that the US officially abolished the transatlantic slave trade. He worked in the White House kitchens before establishing his own confectionery business in his home city, where he is listed as one of five black confectioners in an 1838 trade directory. A paper presented to the American Historical Society in 1913 explains that Jackson “invented ice cream” and for a long time “enjoyed the monopoly of the sale of this delectable dessert”, selling it at one dollar a quart.
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