In the neighboring town of Manitowoc, George Giffy joined in the trend of adding toppings, but, according to lore, did so only on Sundays. When a little girl was refused the treat one day because it wasn’t Sunday, she supposedly argued that “this must be Sunday,” and got her ice cream, which has been called a “sundae” ever since. No one has yet come up with a story to explain why it was spelled with an e instead of a y, so we still have that tale to look forward to.
Then again, some claim to already know the story. According to them, religious people were so offended that something as frivolous as ice cream would be called a Sunday that merchants changed the spelling so as not to lose customers. Local historians in Evanston, Illinois, even claim that this alteration in spelling—but not the birthplace of the sundae itself—took place at their local ice cream shop, Garwood’s Drugstore.
Ithaca, New York, annoys these Wisconsin towns with its own claim to being the true birthplace of the ice cream sundae, and local historians there have gone to great lengths to document this. As their story goes, on the Sunday afternoon of April 3, 1892, the Reverend John M. Scott went to Platt & Colt Pharmacy, as was his custom after services. He met up with the owner, Chester C. Platt, who was also the church treasurer; this was their traditional Sunday meeting place. Platt ordered two bowls of ice cream from the fountain server, DeForest Christiance, who decided to add cherry syrup and candied cherries to the frozen treat. Scott then dubbed the dish Cherry Sunday.
All kinds of sundaes started to be created, particularly in the Midwest. At the 1934 World’s Fair, a sundae was served with hot maple syrup and strawberries. This was said to be the inspiration for Chef Maciel’s “Hot Strawberry Sundae” at the Westport room in the Kansas City’s Union Station. Here is the recipe:
1 pint strawberries, cut in half
4 tbsp Jamaica (dark) rum
¾ cup strained honey
4 tbsp lemon juice
rind of 1 orange cut in strips
1 qt vanilla ice cream
Marinate strawberries in rum one hour. In a small saucepan, slowly bring honey, lemon juice, and orange rind to a boil. Remove the orange rind. Combine strawberry/rum mixture with flavored honey, remove from heat, and serve immediately over vanilla ice cream.
An unknown ice cream hawker on the Bowery of New York City is thought to have invented the ice cream sandwich around the turn of the last century. He sold them on the street for a penny each. However, many cultures in many countries have created various kinds of ice cream sandwiches served on everything from local wafers to breads, so it is difficult to say which was first.
No one challenges the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair’s claim to having invented Alaska Pie, a square of hard frozen ice cream dipped in batter and quickly fried. That may be because no one eats them anymore, but it was the probable forerunner to the Eskimo Pie, invented by Danish immigrant Christian Kent Nelson in Onawa, Iowa, in 1920. He called the chocolate-covered confection an I-Scream Bar. He went into partnership with Russell Stover, the chocolate maker, and Stover renamed it Eskimo Pie. Nelson made a fortune with his Eskimo Pies, claiming to have sold one million a day in 1922. He died a wealthy man in 1992 at the age of ninety-nine.
There are also a number of stories about the ice cream cone. One tells of a man named Italo Marchiony, who immigrated from Italy to New York in 1895 and sold lemon ice and ice cream from a pushcart on Wall Street. At first, he sold his confections in small glasses, but they often broke and had to be constantly washed. So he started baking waffles and folding them while still hot into “edible cups.” Soon he had a very successful business, with more than forty pushcarts in his fleet. When he could not make enough edible cups to satisfy the demand, he developed an industrial way to produce them in a factory in Hoboken.
Others believe that the real inventor of ice cream cones was Ernest Hamwi, who sold Persian waffles and introduced ice cream cones at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. According to Marchiony’s daughter, Jane Marchiony Paretti, her father was selling ice cream at the 1904 Fair when he ran out of edible cups, and Hamwi, the waffle man, pitched in to help him.
This story, widely acknowledged, even by the U.S. Postal Service with a commemorative stamp, has problems. To begin with, seven years before Marchiony immigrated and sixteen years before the St. Louis World’s Fair, Agnes Bertha Marshall, popularly known in England as the Queen of Ices for her ice cream and frozen dessert recipes, published Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, in which she gave a recipe for “cornets with cream.” Very festive-looking cornets, or cones, they were, too. Here is the recipe:
CORNETS WITH CREAM
Mix together into a paste, four ounces of finely chopped almonds, two ounces of fine flour, two ounces of castor sugar, one large raw egg, a pinch of salt, and a tablespoon of orange flour water. Put one or two baking tins into the oven, and when they are quite hot, rub them over with white wax and let the tins get cool; then spread the paste smoothly and thinly over the tins (say one tenth of an inch thick) and bake in the oven for three or four minutes. Take out the tins and quickly stamp out the paste with a plain round cutter about two and a half to three inches in diameter, and immediately wrap these rounds of paste on the outside of cornet tins which have been lightly oiled inside and out, pressing the edges well together so that the paste takes the shape of the cornet; Then remove the paste and slip it inside the tin and put another one of the tins inside the paste so that it is kept in shape between the two tins; Place them in a moderate oven, and let them remain till quite crisp and dry: take them out and remove the tins. These can be kept any length of time in a tin box in a dry place. Ornament the edges with a little royal icing by means of a bag and pipe, and then dip the icing into different coloured sugars; fill them with whipped cream sweetened and flavoured with vanilla, using a forcing bag and pipe for the purpose, and arrange them in a pile on a dish, paper, or napkin. These cornets can also be filled with any cream or water ice, or set custard or fruits, and served for a dinner, luncheon, or supper dish. [If you want to try this recipe—easy to follow, but difficult to carry out—tin cone-shaped molds, “cornet tins,” are still available.]
This is the earliest known reference to an edible ice cream cone, so until someone finds an earlier reference, Agnes Bertha Marshall was its true inventor. Her creation took on added importance after 1899, when a germ-conscious London banned the penny lick—ice cream served in a small glass and literally licked clean—because they feared that the glasses were not being properly washed and would spread diseases. In any event, the penny lick was a deceptively shallow glass designed to conceal the true size of the meager one-penny serving.
Marshall became a celebrity in Victorian England, giving lectures and cooking demonstrations to huge crowds. Her specialty was ice cream, and two of her four cookbooks were devoted exclusively to it. She was also a great huckster who put coupons for her books in the drums of the baking powder she sold. She had her own newspaper, which promoted her products, including a wide and shallow ice cream maker; an “ice cave,” or insulated box for storing ice cream; and a saccharometer for measuring sugar content.
Her books promoted her products shamelessly. In her seven-point “Hints on making ices,” Point 1 is “Too much sugar will prevent the ice from freezing properly” and Point 2 is “Too little sugar will cause the ice to freeze hard and rocky.” Both true enough, and a simple way to make it correctly would have been to follow the measurements in her recipes. But her solution was to use one of the saccharometers that she sold. Similarly, Point 6 is “Fruit ices will require to be colored according to the fruit,” and she sold a line of “Pure Harmless Vegetable Colors” in bottles with her name embossed on them.
Agnes Bertha Marshall, “The Queen of Ices.” (ICES: Plain and Fancy, 1885)
Marshall so popularized ice cream making in England that she was credited with causing an increase in ice imports from Norway. However, the true pivotal figure in bringing Norwegian ice to London was Carlo Gatti, who immigrated to
London from the Swiss Italian town of Ticino in the late 1830s. He started by selling waffles and coffee from pushcarts but then established permanent food stands and cafés throughout the city and staffed them with immigrants that he brought in from Ticino. Gatti introduced London to the ill-fated penny lick. He also put out many Ticino immigrants as hokey-pokey men.
“Hokey-pokey man” was a term used in both London and New York for Italian immigrant pushcart ice cream vendors. The origin of the term is uncertain, but is thought to have come from the mispronunciation of a phrase from an Italian song they sang. The hokey-pokey men worked long hours on the streets and on a good day made one dollar in profit.
Ice cream freezer. (Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, 1888)
The homemade ice creams of the hokey-pokey men were said to have been made in unsanitary basements and garages, and so the men were constantly pursued by health inspectors, who claimed they were spreading disease. Though the accusation was likely true, it was probably also true of many other ice cream vendors. The hokey-pokey men were likely victims of anti-immigrant sentiment.
In the 1850s Gatti started a major wholesale ice business and he was the one who started importing thousands of tons of ice from Norway, which was why ice was readily available for Agnes Marshall’s ice cream trend.
Agnes Marshall’s ice cream molds. (ICES: Plain and Fancy, 1885)
In 1904, the year of the World’s Fair, Agnes Marshall suffered serious injuries from a horseback riding accident and never recovered, dying the following year at the age of forty-nine. She left behind her four popular books, her cooking school, and a number of machines she had invented, but her family failed to achieve any financial success with any of this, and the Queen of Ices and inventor of the ice cream cone was soon forgotten.
In 1859, the year before the Civil War began, the total amount of ice cream produced in the United States was estimated to be 4,000 gallons—it was still largely a luxury item, sold to a fortunate few. This estimate is very rough because most ice cream was produced in homes for private consumption. But by 1869, in an expanding and increasingly industrialized nation, 24,000 gallons were produced. And by the last year of the century, 5 million gallons were produced.
The demand for ice cream was far greater than the capacity to produce it. The 5 million gallons sold in 1899 were still made in hand-cranked freezers. However, the problem lay not only in the making of ice cream, but in the storing of it, because without industrial freezers, ice cream makers had to sell whatever they produced within a few hours. Anything left over would go to waste.
Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, enormous brine circulating freezers became available. These were machines for manufacturers, and allowed for a much greater production of ice cream. In 1904, 12,199,000 gallons of ice cream were produced. Five years later, production had more than doubled, to 29,637,000 gallons. No longer a luxury, now ice cream could be enjoyed by everyone.
Incredibly, however, the wholesale ice cream industry in America began with handmade ice cream before there were freezers in which to keep it. The first wholesale ice cream business was started in the 1850s by Jacob Fussell Jr., a dairyman from Baltimore as well as a Quaker abolitionist and friend of Abraham Lincoln. Like others, Fussell found ice cream to be more profitable than milk—even when selling it at far below the usual prices. His low prices made it extremely difficult for him to keep up with demand, and so he opened an ice cream factory in Baltimore, followed by factories in Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. With no freezer transportation, his company could sell only in places where they had a plant. Others in the trade constantly accused him of underselling. But he made ample profits with his low-cost ice cream, and others soon followed his example.
Before industrial freezers, ice cream was stored in large iron cans lined with porcelain and placed in cedar tubs packed with ice. But the iron cans could keep ice cream for only a limited time. Delivery wagons were also packed in ice and salt, the salt slowly corroding the wagon parts. Ice cream makers also had to worry about warm winters, which would lead to ice shortages. Ice was harvested in New England and upstate New York and shipped from insulated icehouses there throughout the year.
Fluctuations in the price of salt made pricing difficult, leading some ice cream makers to open their own salt works. Sometimes, too, the ice cream was cheaply made, or too old, and would start to separate, with the top and bottom of a can going bad while the middle was well preserved. Some manufacturers started using egg whites, which helped hold everything together, to prevent this, but sometimes the egg whites made the ice cream too light.
Pellegrino Artusi, a wealthy Florentine silk merchant, whose self-published L’Arte di Mangiar Bene, “The Art of Eating Well,” has become a classic of Italian cooking, suggested a way of conserving salt when making ice cream. After the ice cream is made, he suggested, boil the brine down to salt crystals and reuse them. Artusi was not extraordinarily frugal, but like many of the wealthy commercial class, he resented taxes, and this was a way around the Italian government’s tax on salt.
Artusi’s book gave thirteen ice cream recipes. His pistachio called for six egg yolks and his vanilla eight, but he also included many light ice creams made without any eggs. Here is one:
CAFFÈ LATTE GELATO
1 quart milk
1½ cups sugar
1 pint brewed espresso
Heat the milk and melt the sugar in it, then mix in the coffee and let it cool. Pour the mixture into an ice cream machine, and serve it, in cups or little glasses, when it becomes firm.
A distinction was starting to be made between quality homemade ice cream and an overly whipped industrial product. The Confectioners Journal of 1883 called industrialized ice cream “a sham-puffed-up article with no soul or body in it.”
The year 1902 marked the beginning of change in the ice cream industry. That summer, the I.X.L. Ice Cream Company of Warren, Pennsylvania, was having trouble getting enough ice. Burr Walker, a son of the company owner, found that a local oil company chilled wax by cooling brine with an ammonia compressor. The principle of cooling is to use energy to rob heat, and compression is a way to vaporize a liquid very quickly. A vapor is expanding liquid. That expansion requires energy, which can be derived by taking heat from objects around it. So the vaporizing ammonia was taking the energy from brine with its low freezing point and chilling it.
Walker made the first brine freezer. Others followed. These were huge cumbersome machines. The Walker freezer had a 12-ton ammonia compressor that made 3 tons of ice daily, which allowed his company to make a thousand gallons of ice cream a day. It circulated 145 gallons of brine at 5 degrees below zero and could freeze ten gallons of ice cream in six to eight minutes.
In 1905 Emery Thompson, a soda fountain manager at a large New York department store, the Siegel-Cooper Company, improved ice cream production by designing a freezer that was vertical instead of horizontal. A new batch of ice cream could be going in the top while a finished batch was coming out the bottom. Because it was vertical, it took up less space—clearly a New York City idea. Working with two machines in a 25-by-60-foot room in the basement of Siegel-Cooper, Thompson produced 400 gallons of ice cream a day.
The new freezers were extremely expensive, and at first only a few companies were willing or able to buy one. But then came the winter of 1915, a catastrophically warm year for natural ice producers, and suddenly the cost of freezers seemed more reasonable—their cost was less than the loss resulting from ice shortages. Soon all wholesale ice cream producers had freezers for ice cream as well as ice-making machines.
The mass-produced ice cream flavors had little in common with the old-time handmade flavors. Vanilla, the most popular flavor, never got near a real bean anymore. The real bean is actually the pod of an orchid that is difficult to cultivate and thus expensive. In the 1870s scientists developed ways of infusing vanilla into alcohol and also started reproducing the flavor from other plants and chemicals. Chocolate,
the second most favorite flavor, though still far behind vanilla, was made with cocoa powder—i.e., chocolate with the cocoa butter removed. The number three flavor, strawberry, was made from canned strawberries.
Though largely eaten from April to October, ice cream grew in popularity with a concerted push from the emerging ice cream industry. Ice cream companies sponsored parades to celebrate the opening of the ice cream season in the spring. Sometimes little souvenirs were distributed and sometimes even free ice cream. The opening of the ice cream season corresponded with the opening of the baseball season, and in 1913, the industry let it be widely known that 90 percent of the players on the Detroit Tigers ate ice cream at least once a day and 75 percent ate it at both lunch and dinner.
Freezer trucks were built in the 1920s, and Harry B. Burt Sr., who had a shop in Youngstown, Ohio, started creating ice cream specialties frozen to a stick. He called them “good humor bars,” and inspired by the runaway sales of Eskimo Pies, decided to sell his bars from a fleet of freezer trucks manned by a kind of high-technology hokey-pokey man.
The United States became the ice cream country. By 1919 it was making 100 million gallons annually. Steamer ships started installing freezer compartments so that ice cream could be shipped to India, Japan, and China, despite the often-cited erroneous claim that Asians didn’t eat dairy products.
During Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, with no bars at which to gather, soda fountains became the place for many people to meet. Their popularity tapered off when Prohibition ended.
Freezers were still too large and expensive for retail stores. This did not change until the 1930s, when Clarence Birdseye and General Foods started installing smaller, cheaper freezing units with display windows in stores in their effort to promote frozen food. The final stage of allowing consumers to buy ice cream and keep it at home did not begin until after World War II, when refrigerators started to be built with working freezers.
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