The History of Ice Cream in India: Kulfi to Modern Scoops

The history of ice cream in India is older, and stranger, than most people assume. Long before electric freezers, cooks in Mughal kitchens were spinning sweetened milk into a frozen dessert using nothing but ice, salt and patience. This is the real timeline, from 16th-century kulfi through colonial ice ships to the scoop parlours we know today, told with named dynasties and dishes rather than tidy myths.

Before the freezer: how anyone froze anything

To understand frozen dessert in a hot country, start with the harder problem: making cold on demand. India's answer was elegant and very old. In the north, ice was quarried from the Himalayas and carried south by runners, horses, bullock carts and river boats, wrapped in cotton and jute to slow the melt. There was also a home-grown method for manufacturing ice on clear winter nights, using shallow porous pans and radiative cooling, a craft that gave towns in the Gangetic plains a genuine ice-making reputation.

The chemistry that matters most for dessert, though, is the ice-and-salt slurry. Mixing salt, or saltpetre, into ice drops the temperature of the bath well below the freezing point of plain water. Submerge a sealed metal vessel of sweetened milk in that slurry, keep it turning, and the mixture freezes from the outside in. That single principle is the ancestor of every hand-cranked churn that followed. Abu'l Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari, the detailed record of Emperor Akbar's administration, documents the use of saltpetre for chilling and the organised transport of Himalayan ice, evidence that cold was a managed resource at the Mughal court, not an occasional treat.

Kulfi and the Mughal kitchens (16th century)

Kulfi is where frozen dairy in India truly takes shape. Milk was slow-cooked and reduced until it thickened and caramelised faintly, then flavoured with pistachio, saffron or cardamom, poured into conical metal moulds, and set in that ice-and-salt slurry. Because it is not churned in the Western sense, kulfi freezes dense and slow-melting rather than light and airy, which is exactly why a well-made kulfi holds its shape on a hot afternoon.

Food historians are careful about the word "invented" here. The reduced-milk sweets of the subcontinent already existed; what the Mughal kitchens did was marry that dairy tradition to organised ice supply and the freezing slurry. The technique itself likely travelled with the dynasty's Persian and Central Asian roots, and the Australian food historian Charmaine O'Brien has suggested the concept may have evolved in the cooler climes of Persia or Samarkand before being elaborated in India. So kulfi is best read as a meeting point of cultures rather than a single eureka moment, which is the more honest and more interesting story.

The colonial ice trade and European-style ice cream (19th century)

For centuries, frozen dessert in India depended on locally sourced ice, which meant it was seasonal, regional and expensive. That changed with one of the odder chapters in food history: the trans-Atlantic ice trade.

On 12 May 1833, the brig Tuscany left Boston bound for Calcutta with a hold packed full of ice cut from New England ponds. When it reached the Ganges that September, much of the cargo had survived the roughly four-month voyage, and the ice was landed and stored in a purpose-built ice house. The Boston merchant behind the venture, Frederic Tudor, went on to make Calcutta one of his most profitable markets, with ice houses following in Madras and Bombay. Reliable, storable ice changed what was possible: chilled drinks, and eventually European-style, churned ice cream, moved from novelty toward routine among colonial society.

Two broad strands now ran side by side:

• The indigenous strand: kulfi, and regional frozen sweets, sold by kulfiwallahs from earthen pots and salt-packed drums.
• The imported strand: hand-churned, egg-and-cream ice cream in the British and Continental style, first in elite homes and clubs, then in the earliest parlours and soda fountains of the big cities.

For a long stretch, ice cream in India was a luxury of the few. Mechanical refrigeration and, later, mains electricity are what eventually pulled it toward the many.

From soda fountains to homegrown brands (20th century)

The modern Indian ice cream business grew out of small, entrepreneurial shopfronts rather than any grand plan. In 1907, Vadilal Gandhi ran a soda-fountain operation in Ahmedabad that steadily grew into an ice cream business, making Vadilal one of the country's oldest names in the category. Around the 1940s, Kwality helped define the branded, parlour-and-tub era. From the 1950s onward, the cooperative dairy movement pushed frozen dessert toward genuinely national scale, with Amul becoming a household name.

A few threads are worth pulling out of that century:

Shift	What changed	Why it mattered
Refrigeration	Ice houses gave way to compressors and freezers	Ice cream stopped being seasonal
Cold chain	Insulated transport and freezer cabinets spread	A brand in one city could sell in another
Cooperatives	Dairy networks pooled milk at scale	Lower prices, wider reach, everyday affordability
The parlour	Sit-down scoop shops multiplied	Ice cream became an outing, not just a dessert

One technical footnote shaped local taste, too. A share of mass-market Indian "frozen dessert" is made with vegetable fat rather than pure dairy fat, partly for cost and stability in a hot climate. That is why, on many packs, you will see the honest distinction between ice cream (dairy-fat) and frozen dessert (vegetable-fat). It is a small label, but it tells you a lot about how the category adapted to Indian conditions.

Where a Surat scoop fits the story

Regional ice cream cultures matured all across the country through the 20th century, each with its own signatures, from Mumbai's kulfi-falooda to Mangalore's fruit-forward parlours to Gujarat's deep tub tradition. It is inside that longer national story, not in front of it, that Donzel belongs.

Donzel began in Surat in 1984, originally as Dairy Don, part of the generation of regional makers building on decades of Indian frozen-dessert know-how rather than importing it. No claim to a first, no rewriting of the timeline above; just a local scoop shop that grew a following and, four decades on, a menu of hundreds of creations. If you want that particular chapter, it is told in full in the Donzel story. You can browse the current line-up on the full menu, find a counter near you at our outlets, or take a piece of the tradition home with COCO Batch Mix, our whisk-at-home cold-coco premix.

FAQ

Who invented ice cream in India?

There is no single inventor. The frozen-milk dessert kulfi took shape in 16th-century Mughal kitchens, drawing on existing Indian dairy sweets, an ice-and-salt freezing technique, and Persian and Central Asian influence. European-style churned ice cream arrived separately during the colonial era.

How is kulfi different from ice cream?

Kulfi is made from slow-reduced, thickened milk that is set in moulds without churning, so it is denser and melts more slowly. Western ice cream is churned as it freezes to whip in air, giving a lighter, softer texture.

How did they freeze ice cream before refrigerators?

By using an ice-and-salt slurry. Adding salt or saltpetre to ice drops the bath temperature below plain water's freezing point, so a sealed vessel of sweetened milk set in the slurry freezes from the outside in. The Mughal court also transported Himalayan ice and used saltpetre for chilling, as recorded in the Ain-i-Akbari.

When did modern ice cream brands start in India?

The commercial story builds through the 20th century: Vadilal grew from a 1907 Ahmedabad soda fountain, Kwality helped shape the branded parlour era around the 1940s, and cooperative dairies such as Amul carried ice cream to national scale from the 1950s onward.

A long tradition, one more scoop

The history of ice cream in India runs from a saffron-scented kulfi cone in a Mughal kitchen to a New England ice ship on the Ganges to a freezer cabinet in your neighbourhood. Every scoop today sits on top of that four-hundred-year climb. Donzel is one small, Surat-shaped chapter of it, still whisking happiness, one scoop at a time. Next time you order, you will know exactly how far that cold has travelled to reach you.