Chocolate Vs Vanilla Ice Cream: Which Classic Flavor Came First?

Unfortunately, the chicken or egg debate may truly never be solved, but we're here to bring some closure to the "birth" order of another iconic duo: chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Some historians believe ice cream has been around since the second century, and while it's hard to imagine chocolate ice cream without vanilla and vice versa, the fact remains one did come before the other. While there are people out there who like to firmly plant themselves in one flavor camp over another (We're in the "Why choose when you can have both?" camp), there's no denying the winner of which came first: chocolate.

Antonio Latini's two-part work, "Lo scalco alla moderna," translates to "The Modern Stewart." It was released in 1692 and 1694, and he is credited with being the first person to capture an "official ice cream" recipe on paper. While it's undeniable that chocolate ice cream was created before vanilla, the version first written about in Antonio Latini's book is slightly different from the version we know and lap up today. For starters, Martini wrote of two ways to make "ices" as they were called then; one was freezing chocolate and sugar into blocks, in a sort of no-churn ice cream technique. The other required making a chocolate mousse, freezing and stirring it constantly, then serving the concoction as soon as it was frozen.

For the choco-heads looking to gain even more good information to lord over their vanilla rivals, in the late 1700s, some believed that chocolate ice cream had medicinal properties. Italian doctor, Filippo Baldini, even claimed the tasty treat could cure gout and scurvy. Around the same time, in 1790, the first ice cream parlor opened up in New York City — the popular treat is said to have arrived in the States from European settlers earlier that century. 

George Washington allegedly loved ice cream as proven by not only having a "cream machine for ice" at the Washington Estate, but also making room to build an icehouse to keep all of the confectionary coolness cold. If you were hoping our first president was on #teamchocolate, however, you're not in luck. At the time, the most popular flavors were reportedly berry, like strawberry or raspberry, and dun dun dunnnn...vanilla. Early iterations of chocolate ice cream flavors were said to be a little spicy, due to cayenne additives, but probably still more popular than the oyster ice cream flavor floating around at the time