Featured In: 3 Black Pioneers Who Made Ice Cream What It Is Today

A huge thank you to Maria C. Hunt for featuring me in her latest article, 3 Black Pioneers Who Made Ice Cream What It Is Today! Read a little of the article below…

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Today, February 2, marks the official 125-year anniversary of the ice cream scoop as we know it. And even though it’s freezing outside right now, we want to raise a waffle cone to the inventor, Alfred Cralle, and two other Black early ice cream pioneers: James Hemings and Augustus Jackson.

“Ice cream is one of those supercalifragilistic, whitewashed things where they wrote Black people out of the history,” says Tonya Hopkins, aka The Food Griot, a food historian in New York. “Before there were mechanical ice cream makers, Black people were literally the ice cream makers.”

The first of these pioneers may have a familiar last name. We’ve heard of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was the mother of several of Thomas Jefferson’s children. But her enslaved brother James Hemings, often recognized as the first French-trained American chef, was Jefferson’s personal cook. In the story of ice cream, he doesn’t get enough recognition. As Jefferson’s chef, Hemings was the first to popularize French dishes like frozen custard and creme brûlée here in the States.