Margaret Thatcher was once a chemist investigating the air in ice cream

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-perspec0719thingsjul19,0,6568879.story

10 things you might not know about ice cream

By Mark Jacob
July 19, 2009

It's National Ice Cream Day, as celebrated on the third Sunday of every July by order of President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Here are 10 scoops of high-calorie facts:

SOURCES: International Dairy Foods Association; Tribune reporter Hugh Dellios; "The Great Clowns of American Television" by Karin Adir, "Slavery in the United States" by Jenny B. Wahl of Carleton College, on eh.net; "Ice: Great Moments in the History of Hard, Cold Water" by Karal Ann Marling; "Famous Wisconsin Inventors & Entrepreneurs" by Marv Balousek; "The Scoop" by Lori Longbotham; "Chocolate, Strawberry and Vanilla" by Anne Cooper Funderburg; "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama; evinrude.com; San Francisco Chronicle; Tribune news services.

Häagen-Dazs is not an exotic Scandinavian recipe. It's a brand name created by a Polish immigrant and his wife in the Bronx. Reuben Mattus' family sold ice cream for decades, but the product didn't really take off until the early '60s, when Mattus and his wife, Rose (right) came up with the Häagen-Dazs name out of thin air and put a map of Denmark on the carton. They used an umlaut (two dots) over the first letter "a" in Häagen even though there's no such usage in Danish.

The Evinrude outboard motor was invented because of ice cream. A young man named Ole Evinrude was picnicking with his fiance on a Wisconsin lake island in 1906 when she expressed interest in a dish of ice cream. Evinrude rowed to shore to satisfy her desire, and en route realized that if he had a motor, the errand would be a lot easier -- and the ice cream would be less likely to melt. So inspired, he designed an outboard motor that made him famous. snip

In the ice cream industry, "overrun" is a term for the amount of air that's inserted into ice cream as it's produced. Without some aeration, ice cream would be a solid mass, difficult to scoop and serve. So overrun is a good thing, within limits: Cheaper ice cream has more overrun. Long before Margaret Thatcher (right) became Britain's prime minister, she was a chemist investigating the air in ice cream. As the Times of London put it, she studied "methods for preserving the foamy quality of ice cream by injecting it with air."

[ezgoingrl]

1. Then, that should have made her

uniquely qualified to study the air in Ronald Regan's head.