Gardner ‘half-minute freezer’ ice cream machine

This small alumimium ice cream maker was designed and patented by J H Gardner and made by Freezer Inc.in the USA. It follows other traditional ice cream makers by using a freezing mix and a handle system to churn and freeze the ice-cream mix. More unusually, in this example the freezing mixture is inside the internal cylinder and the ice cream mix in the outer container. The ice cream was scraped off the outer wall of the freezing cylinder as it froze.

John, who was a child when his family first used the machine, remembers that it made “fairly horrible ice cream”, but people enjoyed it as a novelty. In the late 1950s, he took it to boarding school and used it once a year for a "house fete" to raise money for charity, using a recipe that involved evaporated milk, eggs and sugar. The freezing mixture was ice and common salt, which could sometimes leak past the perished gasket of the drum and taint the ice cream.