I learned from oral histories and sources, like this 1940 Caswell County North Carolina image from the library of Congress, that long ago, rural folks would purchase a block of ice and chip off what they needed with an ice pick to make homemade ice cream.
In writing my first food history book Hog and Hominy, I interviewed my father Fred Opie Jr. Out of that conversation came a story about an ice cream related job he had as a boy growing up in the Hudson Valley’s Village of North Tarrytown (later renamed Sleepy Hollow) in New York. My father’s description of the job he had helping the town’s ice man make deliveries reminds me of an ice cream production and preservation system unknown to his two grandchildren.