This is a “factoid” that I’ve been telling people for ages, and am now questioning its validity (damn you, SDMB).
Former British PM Lady Margaret Thatcher definitely studied Chemistry when at Oxford. According to hearsay, while there (or in her subsequent employment as a chemist prior to her becoming a full-time politician), she pioneered, or invented, or her research contributed to, the mechanism to propel UHT spray cream out of the can.
Has anyone else heard this? Is it true? False? Verifiable either way?
A quick dig confirms that she worked at J Lyons after graduating in 1947, where she worked with cake fillings and ice cream before moving on to qualify as a lawyer. This site mentions her employment but nothing about any breakthroughs in spray cream technology (!). Unfortunately the company itself ceased to exist a long time ago, broken up after being bought by Allied Breweries in July 1978, so there’s no “official” version.
She worked for a time in 1949/50 or thereabouts as a research chemist at J Lyons, which was a major manufacturer and retailer of food and food products, and operated very well-regarded research laboratories. According to this site http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/globalwarning/ch10.html (which plainly has an axe to grind) she wrote a paper on “the elasticity of ice cream” which would have been relevant to the whipped ice cream which was, and still is, popular in the UK. I don’t know if anything similar is sold in the US. That research might also have been applicable to cream in a spray-can.
I heard her blood is ice cold acid and she can spray bile ala “The Exorcist” with deadly accuracy to a range of 50 feet.
Or is that just an urban legend too?
Yep: there’s nothing abnormal about air in ice cream per se (it’s responsible for the softness). We’re talking about the frothed-up palm oil concoctions that nearly drove decent ice cream to extinction in the UK.
From what I can glean from google, the following seems to be the case.
J Lyons was a very large food manufacturer and retailer which ran a large and well-regarded research department.
Margaret Thatcher did a chemistry degree at Oxford. She never did any postgraduate work.
She worked for a time as a research chemist with a plastics company, and then moved to J Lyons where she worked between one and two years.
She did not particularly shine as a research chemist. When she left J Lyons she qualified as a barrister and practised in the area of tax and patents.
While at J Lyons she wrote a paper of “the elasticity of ice cream”, which would have been relevant to the production of aerated whipped ice cream, and possibly also other aerated dairy products. Whether she conducted an experiment designed by somebody else and reported on the results, or whether she made some more signficant contribution is not clear. Nor is it clear whether the paper made a signficant impact on the design or development of any product.
The ice-cream van selling soft ice cream starts to become much more common from around 1950, so it is quite possible that the research which Margaret Thatcher did was connected with the development of a product for this market. How significant it was is another matter.
I’m glad someone posted this, because I’d heard the same thing a couple of years ago and still wasn’t sure whether or not my mate was pulling my leg.
Astro, Mr Whippy and its ilk are quite different to supermarket ice cream. It’s very soft indeed (cheap ice cream sold in tubs still sets rock hard in the freezer), and has a very smooth texture. Although aerated, it doesn’t contain big pockets of air; the air is whipped in very finely so you can’t really see it.
This type of ice cream isn’t, as far as I know, sold in buckets. Normally you’d buy it from an ice cream van, or any establishment equipped with the appropriate machine. This machine freezes the ice cream, while simultaneously whipping it up. The vendor simply pulls a lever, and the ice cream is extruded through a nozzle into a cone.
FWIW, while not exactly a gourmet ice cream, IMHO it’s OK for what it is.