NERO, MARCO POLO AND THE 25 FLAVOURS
“I'll take vanilla”, is a common expression wherever ice cream appears on a menu, but if you lounged around a Roman banquet table in Nero's time, you couldn't order vanilla. Frozen desserts were an innovation in his day, and you got them the hard way.
According to the stories told, in these pre-refrigerator days, gladiators hurried up the mountains to gather snow and ice and then rushed it back to the kitchens just in time for the dessert course. A little honey or citrus fruit juices were poured over it, and presto, a dish fit for an emperor!
Things went on in this rather simple way until that inveterate globe-trotter Marco Polo returned with his wondrous tales of the East, and a new twist to the frozen dessert business. Goats milk, which churned itself into a frothy mixture when carted over rough roads and then froze at high altitudes, gave him the idea of adding milk to the iced desserts.
It took the French to discover that ice cream tasted more like an exquisite dessert if flavoured with the tender pods of the vanilla orchid. From then on experimenters have had a hey-day concocting the endless variety of ice cream flavours
Travellers on next winter's Caronia Great World Cruise will ponder over a choice of twenty-five exotic ice creams at meal time in the sumptuous restaurants on board and will also visit many of the areas where these flavours are cultivated. In early March when they reach the Seychelles Islands they will visit the Gardens where vanilla is raised for the world market. Scientists will show the orchids whose dainty-smelling pods furnish the delectable savour.
Still later when the Caronia reaches Acapulco in Mexico they will find themselves in the very land where vanilla was first discovered by the European.
[Produced for the Great World Cruise departing New York 28 Jan 1964]