Everybody enjoys ice cream. When spring arrives, sunshine fills a city’s streets. As temperatures rise, summer is in sight. This blog post offers a historical perspective on ice cream. It reflects on an account that observes conditions of living and practices of food consumption in the Hanseatic middle class—while talking about ice cream. In 1801, the medical practitioner Johann Jakob Rambach published the book Versuch einer physisch-medizinischen Beschreibung von Hamburg (trans. Essay on the Physical-medical Description of Hamburg), writing about ice cream consumption as a rather new gastronomical fashion that affluent bourgeois people celebrated:
“Ice cream has become an essential part of our feasts, and during summer nearly all pastry confectioners offer different flavors to crowds of consumers who come to their shops to order a portion and sit comfortably or stand outdoors next to tables by the pavement.”
In this blog entry, I use Rambach’s account of the alimentary, physical and socio-topographical urban landscape of the city of Hamburg around 1800 to offer a a gastro-historical perspective on ice cream and its consumption, linking this history to sensory studies, urban space and food hygiene. Rambach’s book traverses the existing boundaries of medical knowledge as well as moral and sensory disciplines. He warns readers that intemperate enjoyment of such frozen delights as ice cream may lead to many adverse consequences such as gastric spasm, dysentery, gall bladder anomalies or persistent skin rash. By doing so, Rambach underlines alimentary and ecological relations and marks multiple spatial conditions of social geography within the city’s walls.
Rambach’s book is still a valiant account of multiple forms of exposure, and of doing science through ways of observation and embeddedness. The medical expert draws a map of social practices and gustatory customs that merges with what we might nowadays call topographies of consumption, bodily endangerment and food hygiene. My analysis relates the making, selling and eating of ice cream to gastronomical practices, hygienic discourses of prevention and applied medical knowledge. I understand senses as historically made and stratified means of exploring and evaluating urban social environments.
“Although Hamburg rarely needs cooling according to its usual thermometer readings, (ice cream) is as popular with the wealthy classes as if the city lay below the equator,” Rambach asserts. The fondness to eat and taste frozen sweets “goes so far that ten years ago after an extremely mild winter,” a consortium of local merchants “had a cargo of ice brought from Greenland to remedy this oppressive shortage and made quite a profit.”
Shipping icebergs by sea to a Hanseatic port required preparation, effort, planning and insulation materials in order to transport as much of the refrigerated goods as possible to both cities. With an eye for ethnographic detail and solid experience in describing people’s bodily shape, patterns of consumption and environments, Rambach declares that “since quite some years” eating ice cream had become a spare time alimentary desire, and that this was bound to “increasing luxury needs” and extra money on the one hand, and to the number of foreigners who migrated to Hamburg from other regions in Europe on the other.
In his text, the medical practioner links gastro-cultural influences imported from abroad by foreign nationals and émigrés to the body politics of consuming cold drinks and frozen treats. Rambach states that “a glass of cold water or lemonade is much more noxious to a heated body than ice cream could ever be.” At first glance, his argument may seem surprising. When water is poured down the throat at one go, cold fluid connects to the stomach rather abruptly and fully. No adjustment is possible within such a short pathway, and as Rambach puts it, the regular temperature of the body sinks skittishly and generates harmful effects inside a belly. In contrast to cold water, “ice cream is consumed with very small spoons and the ice melts on the tongue. It reaches the stomach much slower and is warmed up on the way to a body’s regular temperature.” Cold water sets a heated body under stress. Ice cream does not induce the same effects, because it is consumed slowly and gradually. Eating with spoons provides the tongue, the palate, the gullet and the stomach with enough time to adapt to these changes of temperature. At least, this was Rambach’s conviction.
From such a perspective, sensory experience merges and melts with material objects, and gastronomical practices fuse with gustatory knowledge. As many of the flavours available at Hamburg’s pastry confectioner’s shops were prepared with all sorts of spices and herbs, these congealed portions were able to stimulate bodily reactions and enrich self-healing potentials. Rambach indicates that ice cream made from fruits, syrups, jams or jellies can activate positive effects. The medical practitioner was convinced of the communication between fluids and human organs, and that information was exchanged and disseminated through organisms as a whole.
Due to the global and interregional links of Hamburg’s commercial and merchant elite, Hanseatic gastronomy was a fusion of dishes and condensed multifarious influences from every direction. Like an ethnographer of food culture, Rambach observed practices of gourmandise, preferences of taste and alimentary enjoyment. In the book, he dives deep into daily meals and feasts, and in doing so, canonizes ice cream consumption with gastronomical habits and gustatory knowledge present in Hamburg during the last decade of the 18th century. Rambach traces various gastro-social customs that were present within the local taste and gastronomical culture and connects them to several temporal and spatial layers of migration present in the last quarter of 18th century.
Migrants fled France before and after the French Revolution began in 1789, or emigrated to Hamburg during the Wars of Coalition in the 1790s from the Swiss cantons, Italy, Flanders or Holland. “The allegation of gourmandizing and gluttony” repeatedly made by Hamburg-based quakers, puritans, Huguenots and other protestant communities of believers, Rambach insists, “is unduly, and everybody will admit this when [they] observe the regular living conditions, nurturing practices and domestic capacities” of affluent upper- and middle-class families in Hamburg who invite them for lunches or dinners. “Even the rich Hanseatic merchant family’s content themselves […] to a very frugal table,” and are abstentious in terms of fancy dishes. Hamburg tradesmen invested broadly in shipping goods but showed sizeable close-fistedness in terms of fine dining. But when the municipality, the guilds or the chamber of commerce announce banquets and joint relishing is on the social agenda, Hamburg’s trading class partied hard and enjoyed life and many courses of delicious food on such occasions. As Rambach satirizes, “this host of dishes is followed by an almost equally long tail of cakes, confectionery, creams, jellies, snow and ice cream […].”
Time, sequence and order were core variables in this calculation and according to Rambach, bodies react to intakes and atmospheres. In my opinion, it seems apparent that matter communicates with human cravings and pleasures. Such phenomena, in turn, harbor dangers that, according to his knowledge and opinions, had not yet been clearly established by natural science. When substances interact, temperature differences and different temporalities, as I have understood Rambach’s claim, exert various effects on bodies and on health. As a researcher in medical art, Rambach aimed to explore the histology of things and looked to the roots of what produces the phenomena he encountered in everyday life.
In Versuch einer physisch-medizinischen Beschreibung von Hamburg, Rambach incidentally invents a science of taste. His approach connects social communication and practices of food consumption to spatial conditions, temperature, media and homeopathic thinking, and all that well ahead of the curve. Liquid remedies carried the processions of gustatory pleasure. And the next day, hangovers and upset stomachs were a safe bet. The enjoyment of food and dessert is, and always has ben, a discipline of the belly.
