It's that time of year again, or so it should be, when Simon sunshine makes a long overdue appearance and yours truly, grumpily, traipses down to the local supermarket to stock up on what is, to me, a year-round staple: ice cream.

Now call me petty or incandescent with rage, as many do, but little irks me more when, having bought Mars ice cream, Ben and Jerrys and other frozen niceties throughout the winter months, than popping into said retail outlet to see the johnny come-lately, fair weather cold snack fans having decided now is their time to strike and clear the freezers of mainstays of my diet.

Yes, sugary ice creams are bad for one’s health, as my pot-bellied appearance will testify, yet they keep the local diabetes clinic and dentist in fine fettle so every cloud and all that. Ice cream, and its origins (sounds like an idea for a new Marvel franchise?) are hotly disputed yet is now a truly global product success story. Widely thought to have been borne circa 4000bc, ice creams, loosely disguised as ‘snow’, were sold to cool down the Athenian locals.

The Turkish and Indians also muster up a claim with the Turks inventing ‘Faloodeh,’ noodles in chilled syrup which sounds rancid, whereas the Indian brothers enjoyed ‘Kulfi,’ an ice cream made from condensed milk.

But then along came the Italians in the early 1600s to claim the mantle as the originators of ice cream as we know it. Even today, in lieu of a bog-standard coastal town ice cream ‘parlour,’ we have ‘gelataria’ which is basically nice ice cream, albeit with a premium price. The real boon to the industry however came, peculiarly, thanks to prohibition in the U S of A. The Volstead act in 1920 ensured the annihilation of the alcohol industry meaning that distilleries had to change tack, which many did with aplomb, ensuring a 40 per cent increase in ice cream consumption in the states from 1920 to 1929. Like all ‘drugs,’ the sugary goodness was here to stay, and its popularity soon spread worldwide.

With different subsets of the market, you can tell, like the shoes people wear, a lot about an individual by the ice cream they eat. The own brand ice lollies sold by Morrisons for example frequent the poor end of the market (bubble gum ice is a go to of mine), through the Calippo, choc ices and Magnums up to the crème de la creme of the Ben and Jerrys and Haagen Dazs of this world.

Where I have real truck however is the popularity of flavours: In the UK, the favourite by far is the bland vanilla, followed by chocolate, strawberry, mint chop chip and salted caramel (my favourite). On average, UK residents eat nine litres of ice cream each annually (amateurs) with the Americans, unsurprisingly considering their ongoing obesity epidemic, devouring over 20 litres for each man woman and child on a yearly basis.

As a connoisseur, and with my opening gambit in mind regarding the fair-weather fans, all that I can do is spend 15 grand on a new Howdens kitchen so I can purchase a freezer worthy of my ice cream fetish.

I plan to stock up during the winter months with spotty dotties, Mars, Magnums, and cookie dough concoctions to ensure I never run out, which leaves but one item on my ice cream wish list: The gelato flake. Produced by Maestro Gelatiere, the handmade wafer cone is dipped in organic Madagascan chocolate and covered in gold pearls and, at the princely sum of £99 per cone, is currently the most expensive ice cream available in Blighty. According to the promotional bumph it takes four-and-a-half hours to construct a single ice cream although I’m not sure about meltage, so I might get my order in at 10am come the next heatwave so I can enjoy the goodness and hope that the local seagulls don’t take a fancy to the Persian sea salt infused work of art…

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher