Thomas Jefferson was not the first to bring ice cream to America, but his kitchen was doing fascinating things with it. Samuel Leatham Mitchell, after dinner at the White House in 1803, wrote, Among other things, ice creams were produced in the form of balls of frozen material, enclosed in covers of warm pastry, exhibiting a curious contrast, as if the ice had just been taken from the oven.’ And this happened some sixty-four years before Seward’s Fo
