England, c.1790 Pewter
Private collection

Ice cream was made in the eighteenth century using this sort of equipment. This sorbetier was used in Gunter’s, a fashionable confectionery shop in Berkeley Square, London, which started off life in the 1750s as ‘The Pot and Pineapple’, run by Domenico Negri from Turin and his English wife, Elizabeth Gunter.

Sometimes pineapple-flavoured ice cream was put into pewter moulds to replicate the pinecone-shaped body of the fruit, like the mould displayed here. When the frozen ice was removed, real pineapple leaves were inserted into its crown to make a very convincing trompe l’oeil ‘pineapple in ice’.