The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star, the noted gourmet Brillat-Savarin once wrote. If that's so, the discovery of ice cream must be worth a whole galaxy. And the name of the discoverer should be emblazoned in the heavens.

The trouble is, we don't know who made that first dish of vanilla, strawberry, or triple chocolate chunk ice cream. That may explain why there are candidates for the honor all over the world. Some give the ancient Romans credit for inventing ice cream, but although they did send their slaves off to the mountains to get snow, they didn't make ice cream with it. Others say Marco Polo brought ice cream back to Italy from China. He didn't. The Chinese and the Europeans developed their ice cream separately. In the Arab world, snow and ice were combined with fruits and a sweetener--usually honey or sugar--to make a chilled drink called a sharbat. The word led to the English sherbet, the French sorbet, the Italian sorbetto and the Spanish sorbete. But a sharbat was and still is a drink. The most-told story is that Catherine de Medici brought ices from Italy to France in the 16th century when she married the future King Henry II. The reality is that ices didn't appear in France for another century, and French confectioners said they had to go to Italy to learn how to make them.