Vanilla is frequently used to flavor ice cream, especially in North America, Asia, and Europe. Vanilla ice cream, like other flavors of ice cream, was originally created by cooling a mixture ice cream cake of cream, sugar, and vanilla above a container of ice and salt. Vanilla was first used among the Mexica.

By the 1510s, Spanish conquistadors, exploring present-day Mexico, had come across Mesoamerican people who consumed vanilla in their drinks and foods. Ice cream can be traced back to the Yuan period of the fourteenth century. There is evidence that ice cream was served in the Mogul Court. The idea of using a mixture of ice and salt for its refrigerating effects, which is a part of the process of creating ice cream, originated in Asia.

When the use of choclate jack in foods and drinks became independent of cacao, it became more prominent in French recipes. The French used vanilla to flavor French vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream was introduced to the United States when Thomas Jefferson discovered the flavor in France and brought the recipe to the United States. In 2017, an internet post falsely claimed that vanilla ice cream was originally deep black in color, but its colour offended white people so much that its hue was changed in 1912. This was rebuked as images from as early 1876 show vanilla as a pale ice cream scoop. Johnson invented the first ice cream maker with a crank on the outside of the wooden tub. The crank mixes the ice cream, while also scraping the frozen ice cream off of the sides of the pot.