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KEENELAND.COM K SUMMER 2016 61 across the street became available. "I would sit outside my place and think, 'What would work there?' " Savane said. After consulting his family (wife, son, and two daughters), he decided on an ice cream shop and rented the space. His son, Bangaly, came up with the name Sav's Chill and began managing the shop while attending commercial fight school at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington. After opening, Sav's Chill carried 24 favors of Valentine's. But in early 2015 its arrange- ment with the Winchester company ended, Savane said, after its owner, Scott Berryman, left for an ice cream start-up in South Carolina and closed Valentine's. Savane bought Val- entine's production equipment, and Bangaly, who still manages Sav's Chill, soon learned the ice cream process. Sav's Chill makes about 100 gallons of ice cream, gelato, sorbet, and frozen yogurt a week for its shop, mobile trailer, and four Lexington restaurants. Its dairy base is from a London, Kentucky, supplier, and it uses other local ingredients when available. Bourbon ball and Kentucky coffee ice creams are its most popular favors. The business, which has on average about fve employees, is "doing very, very well," Savane said. Mamadou "Sav" Savane and his son and general manager, Bangaly, have a hit in Sav's Chill, which pro- duces about 100 gallons of frozen confection a week. Catherine de' Medici was an early fan of favored ices. RON SUMNERS/ISTOCK ICE CREAM'S ANCIENT ORIGINS Ice cream has been around since Nero was eating it while Rome burned. Well, maybe, because it's not certain what the evil emper- or did amid the fre, and ice cream as we now know it didn't exist 2,100 years ago. But frozen desserts did, and it's said Nero sent slaves to nearby mountains to harvest snow, which was stored in straw-covered pits, then favored in his court with fruits and juices. The history of ice cream is sparse — this was food, after all, not war or politics — and often mythic, but besides Nero, King Solomon and Alexan- der the Great enjoyed favored ices. So too Tang emperors; medieval Arabs (the word sherbet traces to the Arabic sharba); Marco Polo; and Catherine de Medici and assorted Europe- an royals. In the late 17th century Antonio Latini, an Italian, published recipes for two fro- zen-fruited ices or sorbetti: a sugar one and a milk-based one that culinary histori- ans consider the frst actual ice cream. In the same period, in 1686, Frances- co Procopio dei Coltelli, a Sicilian, opened Il Procope, Paris' frst café, and introduced a gelato there. In America, Washington, Jeffer- son (who created a vanilla recipe), Madison, and Lincoln ate ice cream. As in the rest of the world, it was mostly an exotic dessert for the elite until around the mid 1800s. Then, with advances in steam and electric power, re- frigeration, homogenization, packing machines, and more, its production increased. By the late 1800s it was widely available and popular. And it soon became a cultural touchstone — American as apple pie — and even, in Wallace Stevens' celebrated poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream," a metaphor for life and death. Almost 900 million gal- lons of ice cream (including gelato) are produced each year now in the United States, and Americans con- sume about 5.5 gallons of it per capita. About 67 percent of ice creams are marketed regionally and 16 percent of them nationally. (In 2014 global ice cream sales reached $50 billion, and China surpassed the United States for the frst time as the leading market.) 900 MILLION GALLONS MADE EACH YEAR