(North Bergen, NJ—June 3, 2015) High Tech instructor Ronald Kliesh’s
World History classes, assisted by Chef Peter Turro and the High Tech Kitchen, had
a “taste” of the Industrial Revolution by making vanilla ice cream using an old
hand crank churner, announced
Dr. Joseph Giammarella, Principal of High Tech High School.
On Monday, June 1st, and
Wednesday, June 3rd, Kliesh’s World History classes approached their lesson about the Industrial Revolution
by combining ingredients like heavy cream, half-and-half cream, sugar, and
vanilla extract, ingredients hard to come by during the industrial revolution, yet
if one wanted this delicacy, one had to make it from scratch: cream from
milking a cow and waiting for the curds to rise, buying sugar imported from the
Caribbean, and waiting weeks for vanilla extract to arrive at the local grocer
as well.
To
make the ice cream, students mixed the aforementioned
ingredients thoroughly,
transferred the mixture to a tin canister, and placed
it in a wood bucket surrounded by ice. Then, students sealed the lid connected to a
handle on the canister, and began cranking the ice. These instructions
for making ice cream make ice
cream seem much easier than in truth. During
the Industrial Revolution, one could spend hours cranking the handle, but the students
only cranked a couple minutes at a time.
Thanks
to this ice cream from scratch lesson, students learned not to take things for
granted, since, in modern times, they come so easily to people. In short, the lessons of the Industrial
Revolution, vis-à-vis through ice cream making, demonstrated the hardships that
the people of the early Industrial era had to overcome,
and not just in making ice cream.
