Ruby first became known to me as a vegan contestant on the BBC Great British Bake Off. I think she is fab, however...
(I write this for the American reader.)
The essay didn't mention the lore regarding Margaret Thatcher in her food scientist years, allegedly being responsible for 'soft serve' ice cream in the UK.
Thatcher became known as the milk snatcher for cutting free school milk, however, by working out how to get more air in ice cream, she had arguably been a milk snatcher before entering politics.
Regarding Walls, their factory is on a prominent road in Gloucester, or it used to be, in the heyday.
The lore, in these pre-internet times, was that they cut the fat from the pigs in the bacon factory and that became the mystery 'animal fats' in the ice cream product. Allegedly they only moved to cheaper vegetable fats later, when they could get a better price for the excess 'bacon' fat.
Because the factory presented itself as being 50% bacon and 50% ice cream, this was an easy story to believe by many a child, so the myth perpetuated itself, because it made perfect sense as a conspiracy story. Everything was explained.
This was at a time when cows were no better. The countryside frequently had upturned cows on fire due to either foot and mouth or BSE. At the time there was no knowing if BSE led to CJD - death by prions.
As a consequence, you would be doomed whether those 'animal fats' on the label of your typical Walls ice cream came from milk or porcine sources. They could have said 'milk' instead of 'animal fats'.
Ruby also mentions clotted cheese. That came to Cornwall with the tin trade, three thousand years ago. The Phoenicians brought the recipe and it enabled year round tin mining, with the chalk highlands providing grassland for grazing (rather than fearsome swamps, forest and rocks, not suited for keeping cows). They got their copper from Afghanistan, to make bronze in the Levant.
The name (Great) Britain means 'land of tin'. Who knew.
All these odd history facts are explained in considerable depth in the applications for regionally protected foods, and any visitor to the UK is advised to look for such foods, for example, the Cornish Pastry has to have good ingredients in it, and be from Cornwall, so they are not 'processed food', even if bought from a motorway service station or convenience store.
It is the same with CORNISH clotted cream, it isn't going to be like an adulterated Walls product, full of mystery 'animal fat' or, nowadays, mystery 'vegetable fat'.
I also felt that Ruby is too young to tell the story. As a child, at the time, there were other aspects of the story such as the joke (or riddle) on the stick. This was standard at the start of the era, and an ice cream without a joke on a stick was like getting a Christmas cracker that doesn't go bang. However, by the time the adult products come along (Magnum), the joke on a stick tradition has been banished. Why?
Walls had a local rival that they never put out of business. Winstones made a better product and they had a factory shop in the middle of a common full of cows. Their model was the classic dozens of flavours, where you have n+1 scoops of whatever you want, made up for you in a cone, with the middle class, car owning customer expected to buy some 5 litre tubs of their favourite flavours.
Winstones customers could tell themselves the product used real milk. Typically they had those vast chest freezers at home, this being peak boomer consumer lifestyle. Winstones did have distribution in local supermarkets, and, although Walls dominated, for those in the know, there were the equivalents of Winstones, with a better product.
Ruby also forgot to mention 'Ice Magic'. This was the chocolate syrup that formed a hard shell on ice cream, as served from the tub. There must have been an issue with food safety and Ice Magic as they had to drop the product, to reintroduce it without it forming the hard shell.
The moral panic of the time was food additives and no food was more brightly coloured than ice cream. In one ice cream a child could be exposed to every food colouring that has subsequently been banned, which never harmed anyone, however, today's product just lacks the full spectrum of very bright colours that were possible during the good old days.
Packaging was also a key area of innovation, which was solved by Walls with the Cornetto coming in a new form factor, with ritual involved in opening it. Mylar film was not available at the time, again, Walls innovated with this for Magnum. Beforehand it was always 'waxed' paper that might need to be blown into, to separate it from the ice cream.
In period, Walls was for common people in housing estates whereas middle class people had either posh Winstones (or equivalent) or huge tubs of supermarket ice cream, in the chest freezer. The ice cream van was for the housing estate, not the village in the shire, so there was this aspect of class going on. Cornetto was an affordable treat to all, far from gentrified.
People in housing estates were not two-car families, whereas, in the middle class shires, they were. The middle class people, buying in bulk, with the car and the big chest freezer, paid a fraction of the price 'per serving' of the kid in the council estate, who would be handing over coins on a daily basis.
Nowadays everyone is eating posh ice cream with 'luxury' titles. Vanilla is no longer vanilla, it has to be 'organic Madagascar vanilla drenched with slow pulled Etruscan caramel with Pink Tibetan Monkey Salt flavoured ice cream'.
OG vanilla is a low-status product, no longer considered edible. We need the fancy labels because it is all about conspicuous consumption rather than basic pleasure. We need fancy labels, high prices and faux myths ('Italian') to tell us something is delicious, and that we are not eating kid's stuff.
Final snippet of lore, the Walls catch phrase was 'Stop me and buy one!', and, although they stopped using this on their vans, the phrase lived on in the toilets of public houses in the form of 'Buy me and stop one!', common graffiti on the condom machines that were quite common in pub toilets, in those days, when people didn't nonchalantly put boxes of condoms in their regular shopping 'with no cringe factor'.