The custom of making frozen cream desserts spread from Italy to France, and then to Britain, during the second half of the 17th century. Ice was obtained locally, or imported from the Baltic countries, and stored in deep brick-lined ice houses. By the mid-18th century, ice cream was a major part of the dessert, and the ice pail used to serve it was often the largest and most imposing single item in the dessert service. Ice pails were usually made in three parts: the pail itself, which was packed with ice; a liner (missing from this example), which contained the ice cream or other frozen foodstuffs; and the cover, which would be filled with ice and perhaps topped with fruit.

This ice pail and cover is a striking example of early 19th-century naturalism. Unlike many other production lines of the Davenport works, this distinctive type of modelling was particular to the factory. Davenport was one of the big four English ceramic firms during the early-mid 19th century, alongside Minton, Spode and Wedgwood, and was generally at the cutting edge of design, but not always innovative in terms of materials and techniques. However, the firm left no archive, and in part because it did not pioneer a new ceramic material with which the factory’s name became synonymous (as with Wedgwood with Jasper and Minton with Majolica), and because it left no archive, its importance was largely forgotten until the 1970s.