Hannah Glasse wrote the first ice-cream recipe published in English, in The Art of Cookery in 1751.
Glasse’s recipe appeared in the first edition of her influential cookbook, which was published in London. It described freezing a flavored cream mixture in an ice-filled container, showing that elaborate frozen desserts were already part of elite European cookery by the mid-18th century.
The recipe was not the first ice cream ever made, nor was Glasse necessarily the inventor of the dessert. Earlier recipes and frozen preparations existed in Italian, French and English sources. Her importance is that her book helped make an ice-cream method available to English-speaking household cooks.
The Art of Cookery became one of the century’s best-known English cookbooks and went through many editions. Glasse is also remembered for her practical writing style and for the phrase “first catch your hare,” although that wording is often misquoted as an instruction to “catch the hare first.”