Ice Cream New York

Before the ice cream cone
The Industrial Revolution of 19th century was sweetened for the working masses by an accompanying revolution in ice cream: mass production, distribution of ice, and the beginnings of refrigeration technology made it possible and potentially profitable to produce ice cream and ices commercially and sell single servings for low prices. Ice cream had heretofore usually been enjoyed only by those who could amass the means of production: the money to buy imported sugar and hand-cranked ice cream freezers, the livestock to produce the eggs and milk, and the kitchen staff to make it were the necessary capital. In Europe, ice cream had initially been a rare treat for the rich and the royal. In the New World, ice cream was known to have become available in the market economy to anyone who was in the right place and could afford it by the time of US independence.

Then as now, New York was on the cutting edge of food fashions and luxury retail for upscale consumers: The first Gelateria (ice cream shop) in the United States was established in New York in 1770 by an Italian emigrant, Giovanni Bosio. (Stradley, Linda, 2004, via http://whatscookingamerica.net at subsite http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/IceCream/IceCreamHistory.htm)
It wasn’t long before Bosio had competition: In 1774, “The first public advertisement of ice cream was made by Filippo Lenzi, a caterer and confectioner. He notified residents of New York city that he had just arrived from London and would be offering for sale jams, jellies, pastries, sugar plums, ice cream, and other luxuries. Caterers and chefs of this era sometimes prepared ice cream for a limited clientele, usually on special order. Lenzi inserted other advertisements in the newspaper in order to call attention to his wares. In the New York Gazette-Mercury for May 19, 1777, he thanked his customers for their valued patronage, told of his move to Hanover Square and stated, ‘May be had almost every day, Ice Cream’." (op. Cit.) “Lenzi reputedly came from London and set up business in Dock Street and later in Hanover Square, now renamed Stuyvesant Square. (Liddell, Caroline, and Weir, Robin, 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY, p. 15.) There seems to be no trace of his shop in Hanover Square today, but many of the buildings and the street plan layouts of the time period exist in the surrounding community. Cargo brokers, commodities traders, ships’ chandlers, and the legal and financial firms that go with them abounded, as did retail and restaurant establishments that served the upscale working rich clientele. In today’s lower Manhattan, only the technology and the location of the shipping industry has changed. And New Yorkers then, like New Yorkers now, created a consumer demand for inexpensive versions of luxury products that were priced for the general population.
{pagebreak}

“The first ice cream street vendors were familiar figures on the streets of New York as early as 1828. The National Advertiser in Washington reported that a group of noisy fellows, with kettles in their hands, had added “I scream, ice cream” to the street cries of New York. Much of the ice cream was, in truth, ice milk, because of the difficulty of obtaining fresh cream.” (Reynolds, Al, 1998-2002 “IACV Memories The History of Ice Cream” published by the International Association of Ice Cream Vendors via www at http://www.iaicv.org/memories/history_of.htm )
Now the enjoyment of ice cream was democratized: anybody with a few pennies could buy a serving.
However, serving it up to a transient public was problematic at first. Ice cream parlors, cafes, and soda fountains which attracted a middle-class clientele served ice cream in porcelain or glass goblets made in a vaguely conical shape, similar to present-day ice cream sundae glasses: those who wished to do a volume business by selling “low end” portions of ice cream developed smaller versions of this kind of dish to serve smaller amounts of ice cream at a lower price. These dishes, which were about the size of egg cups, and the ice cream served therein were called “penny licks”. Though there are drawings showing penny lick dishes of ice cream being served on a saucer accompanied by a spoon and some wafer cookies, in real life, most vendors probably never gave out spoons or bothered with this sort of ceremony. I remember once seeing an old photo of a Coney Island ice cream stand by the beach with a crowd clustering around it, licking ice cream from these tiny dishes.
The advantage of serving ice cream this way was that costs were minimal and since the diminutive glass dishes were returned to the vendor, there was no litter. “A further advantage of serving ice cream in the lick was that customers, instead of continuing their promenade along the beach, would be obliged to stand around the ice cream seller creating a crowd, until they had finished their ice cream and returned the lick.” (Liddell, C., and Weir, R., 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY., p.20.) The vendors who used them continued to use them well after the invention of the ice cream cone and into the 1920s. However, as part of keeping costs down, the dishes were often not washed, or simply soaked in a communal basin of water! An increasingly germ conscious public started to look for alternatives, and government authorities attempting to stop communicable diseases, especially tuberculosis, banned the licks in some major cities, and they eventually fell into disuse as these public health measures became more widespread. The tiny uncoated paper cup that most Italian Ices are served in might have been developed at this time as a disposable alternative to Penny Lick dishes.

Doing The Hokey-Pokey: The Individually Wrapped Ice Cream is Born
Italians emigrated across Europe and to the USA, often working as street vendors where ever they took up residence, hence the public image of Italian organ grinders on the streets of old New York. Ice cream vendors of Italian extraction cried, "Ecco un poco, che un poco" (Here's a little for so little [money]), and this cry became distorted by non-Italians into the words “hokey pokey”. “In New York and other American cities—where the custom had migrated by the mid-1800s—the Penny-Ice Men were known as Hokey pokey Men”. (How Products Are Made, vol. 6, Ice Cream Cones via the www at http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Ice-Cream-Cone.html)
Some of them sold Italian Ices or gelato in the tiny glass “penny lick” goblets, but a distinct new form of ice cream in individual servings began to be sold by these street vendors: squares of dense, hard frozen ice cream, sliced off of a molded brick, each slice wrapped in paper. This was usually Neapolitan ‘striped’ ice cream, and this type of ice cream itself became known as hokey pokey. (Liddell, C., and Weir, R., 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY, p.29.) “Nowadays the word is used in New Zealand for a sort of crunchy toffee bar, and also for ice cream containing little pieces of such toffee. ---An A-Z of Food & Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 160)” (Lynne Olver 2004, Food Timeline, “history notes: ice cream and ice” updated 3 August 2006 via www at http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodicecream.html)
There are only a few short steps forward from the hokey-pokey to the more modern varieties of square-shaped mass produced ice cream treats, such as chocolate covered ice cream bars and ice cream sandwiches.

More about Ice Cream Sandwiches
It is unknown who developed the first ice cream sandwich, but two distinct types emerged: square-shaped and rounded. Somewhere along the line, a hokey-pokey vendor decided to make his treats less messy or longer lasting-or dispense with the paper wrappers- by serving the slices of ice cream between same-size wafers and/or experimenting with chocolate and crumb coatings, and managed to make it fly with the public.
“We checked several ice cream stories in the New York Times from 1886-1929 and the earliest reference we found to ice cream sandwiches by name was an editorial titled "New Hot-Weather Refreshments" published August 31, 1928 (page 18, column 6) "...ice cream cones, dainties' and sandwiches still hold their own with the new ices." (Lynne Olver 2004, Food Timeline, “history notes: ice cream and ice”
updated 3 August 2006 via www at http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodicecream.html)
Good Humor is credited with the initial mass production and distribution of rectangular ice cream sandwiches. Square shaped ice cream sandwiches even in the present day tend to be plain in flavor and composition, limited to a few basic varieties, and in many cases, made of low quality ice cream and hard cookie wafers, reflecting their possible proletarian origin. “The chocolate cookie sandwiches probably didn't come about until the inception of the Hydrox cookie in 1908, added Andrew F. Smith, a culinary historian. He said the first commercial sandwich was made by Good Humor in the 1920's. ‘The Good Humor Man in the ice cream truck driving around and selling sandwiches is what made them famous,’ he said.” Vora, Shivani, May 31, 2006, “Frozen Treats: A Bite of Childhood”, via www at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/dining/31sandwich.html?ei=5070&en=9245669a7e53f1d8&ex=1156564800&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1156417407-cYU7BWZLy3dsWp8cB+mh4g

The rounded ice cream sandwiches have diverse and much later origins: individual varieties, such as the Chipwich, are traced back to mid-20th century inventors: the “Flying Saucer” sold by Carvel is said to have been devised in the 1950s and to be the first such confection sold by a national chain. The Flying Saucer has harder and less cloying cookie components than its rectangular counterpart at Good Humor, and the ice cream therein comes in several flavors, also unlike the Good Humor product. Rounded ice cream sandwiches made with homemade cookies and exotic flavors of ice cream are served for desert during the summer at a number of the better sort of restaurants in New York City, and are reviewed and depicted in New York magazine and other local publications as a rite of the summer season and an item of gourmet interest.
According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, the Anderson ice cream sandwich making machine was registered with the government February 1, 1926 registration number 0615682. The USPTO record does not indicate whether or not this particular device was made/manufactured or ever produced its intended product.” (Lynne Olver 2004, Food Timeline, “history notes: ice cream and ice”
updated 3 August 2006 via www at http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodicecream.html)

The Ice Cream Cone: A Good Idea to Two Different Ethnic Groups in Two Different Parts of America.
As anyone who has survived summer in New York City knows, Italian Ices quickly turn into sticky liquid and run through the tiny paper cups they are served in, and holding naked ice cream in a paper wrapper can be messy while walking. “In 1903 (the year before the World's Fair), Italo Marchiony was awarded a patent for the ‘pastry comet’, which he developed to hold his frosty wares. Marchiony was an Italian immigrant who lived in New York City. His product was lemon ice that he scooped onto small glasses and sold to customers along Wall Street. After consuming the ice, the customer returned the glass, and it was washed and used again. Breakage and the continual task of washing dishes frustrated Marchiony; he substituted paper cones, but these (and littering consumers) made a messy problem. As early as 1896, Marchiony invented a fully consumable alternative. By 1903, he had made a machine that created cones like the sugar cone known today. The machine resembled a long waffle iron with spaces to cook 10 cones. Later, Marchiony opened a cone factory in Hoboken, New Jersey. He is also credited with building the first ice cream sandwich with two waffle squares.” (How Products Are Made, volume 6, The Ice Cream Cone, via www at http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Ice-Cream-Cone.html) A picture from the patent record for the device shows that the “cones” produced by this device were in fact flat-bottomed shallow dishes. (Liddell, Caroline, and Weir, Robin, 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY., p. 21.) The flat-bottomed cone also recalls the shape of the “penny lick” and the paper cup for Italian Ices.
The flat-bottomed cake cone though undisputedly on record as coming from the mind of Marchiony, seems to have been then lost or ignored until the late 1940s when Joseph Shapiro of the Maryland Cup Corporation (later the Ace Baking Company) is said to have made a cone for mass production with a flat base especially for the Dairy Queen chain. Filling pointy-bottomed cones and handing them to customers takes two hands, but the flat-bottomed cone stands on its own and can be filled more easily. (How Products Are Made, volume 6, The Ice Cream Cone, via www at http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Ice-Cream-Cone.html)
Marchiony’s “pastry comet” may have been much like the cornucopias of flaky, soft-baked pastry known in the USA as “Italian horns” filled with ricotta-based cream and found in Italian bakeries, bearing only a passing resemblance to the modern hard-baked ice cream cone. Food historians Robert J. Weir and his wife Caroline Liddell cite an 1807 engraving showing ladies eating pastry coronets of ice cream by picking them up in their fingers at Fraschetti’s Café in Paris as evidence that the idea of serving ice cream in edible conical pastry products originated in Europe long before the first recorded appearance of the ice cream cone in the USA. (Weir, Robert J., “An 1807 Ice Cream Cone: Discovery and Evidence” at Day, Ivan, 2003, Historic Food, via the world wide web at http://www.historicfood.com/Ice%20Cream%20Cone.htm)

Most Americans attribute the invention of the common pointy-bottomed ice cream cone to a “waffle vendor” at the St. Louis, Missouri World’s Fair held in 1904. The most common story goes that the ice cream vendor next to him ran out of dishes but still had a lot of ice cream to be served, whereupon the waffle vendor formed one of his waffles into a cone, the ice cream man put his ice cream in it, and voila, a way to eat ice cream without dishes or spoons was born. But have you ever actually tried this at home? To roll a cone out of a conventional waffle and try to hold ice cream in it usually ends in dropped ice cream. Things become clearer when it is revealed in most of the tales concerning the origin of the ice cream cone that the waffle vendor who is said to have improvised the cone was of Turkish or Arab extraction. Thus it is possible if not probable that the “waffle” in question wasn’t a common American waffle, soft and spongy in texture, but a thinner, crisper pastry called a zalabia, inherently stiffer stuff, less potentially leaky. “They are historically Levantine, popular in Syria, Lebanon and parts of Iraq and Turkey. For that matter, they're not made in a waffle iron—they're too flat; they most resemble Italian pizzelle, including in the grid pattern that marks their surface. (North African zalabia is a very different dessert: It consists of looping, pretzel-like strands of deep-fried batter, smothered in honey or syrup and often tinted a garish orange.)” (Harvey, David Alan, and Marlowe, Jack, July/August 2003, Saudi Aramco World via www at http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200304/zalabia.and.the.first.ice-cream.cone.htm)
Ernest A. Hamwi, David Avayou, and Abe Doumar all claim to have been vendors at the fair and to have invented the ice cream cone, with Doumar, a Lebanese immigrant, later developing a waffle-making machine, moving to North Bergen, NJ, selling ice cream at Coney Island, NY (presumably contained in cones derived from zalabia) and starting Doumar's Cones and Barbecue, a restaurant still operating in Norfolk.
Frozen treats of all kinds are still easily bought in many different forms and prices on the streets of New York. High-quality gelato and homemade ice cream, sometimes with offbeat flavors, is sold in little shops which draw their customer base from the modern-day working rich and cuisine cognoscenti. Branch locations of major chains cater to tourists and soccer moms in all five boroughs. Nearly every NYC tourist attraction has its vendors of cheap, paper-wrapped ice cream bars and popsicles, and most small grocery stores have a freezer case full of these modern-day variations of the merchandise of the hokey-pokey man. The vendor of ices hasn’t completely gone away either, though he is now more likely to be selling his wares in his own shop, or mass-produced and pre-packaged in the supermarkets and delis. Shaved-ice vendors who offer affordable icy treats and stock syrup flavorings appealing to Hispanic tastes push their carts in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side.
A little bit of nearly everything has always been available in Manhattan, but New York City is where frozen yogurt launched nationwide as a food fad in the 1980s with the start of a chain of health food restaurants called Everything Yogurt which originated in Port Richmond, Staten Island, grew into a nationwide phenomenon, got bought by Villa Pizza, and provided the capital which established The Nicotra Group as one of the biggest business entities in Staten Island.
Whatever the future holds for ice cream and related frozen treats will most likely be field-tested in the streets, shops, and restaurants of New York City.
{pagebreak}

Ice Cream hits the streets of New York

Before the ice cream cone

The Industrial Revolution of 19th century was sweetened for the working masses by an accompanying revolution in ice cream: mass production, distribution of ice, and the beginnings of refrigeration technology made it possible and potentially profitable to produce ice cream and ices commercially and sell single servings for low prices. Ice cream had heretofore usually been enjoyed only by those who could amass the means of production: the money to buy imported sugar and hand-cranked ice cream freezers, the livestock to produce the eggs and milk, and the kitchen staff to make it were the necessary capital. In Europe, ice cream had initially been a rare treat for the rich and the royal. In the New World, ice cream was known to have become available in the market economy to anyone who was in the right place and could afford it by the time of US independence.

Then as now, New York was on the cutting edge of food fashions and luxury retail for upscale consumers: The first Gelateria (ice cream shop) in the United States was established in New York in 1770 by an Italian emigrant, Giovanni Bosio. (Stradley, Linda, 2004, via http://whatscookingamerica.net at subsite http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/IceCream/IceCreamHistory.htm) It wasn’t long before Bosio had competition: In 1774, “The first public advertisement of ice cream was made by Filippo Lenzi, a caterer and confectioner. He notified residents of New York city that he had just arrived from London and would be offering for sale jams, jellies, pastries, sugar plums, ice cream, and other luxuries. Caterers and chefs of this era sometimes prepared ice cream for a limited clientele, usually on special order. Lenzi inserted other advertisements in the newspaper in order to call attention to his wares. In the New York Gazette-Mercury for May 19, 1777, he thanked his customers for their valued patronage, told of his move to Hanover Square and stated, ‘May be had almost every day, Ice Cream’." (op. Cit.) “Lenzi reputedly came from London and set up business in Dock Street and later in Hanover Square, now renamed Stuyvesant Square. (Liddell, Caroline, and Weir, Robin, 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY, p. 15.) There seems to be no trace of his shop in Hanover Square today, but many of the buildings and the street plan layouts of the time period exist in the surrounding community. Cargo brokers, commodities traders, ships’ chandlers, and the legal and financial firms that go with them abounded, as did retail and restaurant establishments that served the upscale working rich clientele. In today’s lower Manhattan, only the technology and the location of the shipping industry has changed. And New Yorkers then, like New Yorkers now, created a consumer demand for inexpensive versions of luxury products that were priced for the general population.

However, serving it up to a transient public was problematic at first. Ice cream parlors, cafes, and soda fountains which attracted a middle-class clientele served ice cream in porcelain or glass goblets made in a vaguely conical shape, similar to present-day ice cream sundae glasses: those who wished to do a volume business by selling “low end” portions of ice cream developed smaller versions of this kind of dish to serve smaller amounts of ice cream at a lower price. These dishes, which were about the size of egg cups, and the ice cream served therein were called “penny licks”. Though there are drawings showing penny lick dishes of ice cream being served on a saucer accompanied by a spoon and some wafer cookies, in real life, most vendors probably never gave out spoons or bothered with this sort of ceremony. I remember once seeing an old photo of a Coney Island ice cream stand by the beach with a crowd clustering around it, licking ice cream from these tiny dishes. The advantage of serving ice cream this way was that costs were minimal and since the diminutive glass dishes were returned to the vendor, there was no litter. “A further advantage of serving ice cream in the lick was that customers, instead of continuing their promenade along the beach, would be obliged to stand around the ice cream seller creating a crowd, until they had finished their ice cream and returned the lick.” (Liddell, C., and Weir, R., 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY., p.20.) The vendors who used them continued to use them well after the invention of the ice cream cone and into the 1920s. However, as part of keeping costs down, the dishes were often not washed, or simply soaked in a communal basin of water! An increasingly germ conscious public started to look for alternatives, and government authorities attempting to stop communicable diseases, especially tuberculosis, banned the licks in some major cities, and they eventually fell into disuse as these public health measures became more widespread. The tiny uncoated paper cup that most Italian Ices are served in might have been developed at this time as a disposable alternative to Penny Lick dishes.

Doing The Hokey-Pokey: The Individually Wrapped Ice Cream is Born

Italians emigrated across Europe and to the USA, often working as street vendors where ever they took up residence, hence the public image of Italian organ grinders on the streets of old New York. Ice cream vendors of Italian extraction cried, "Ecco un poco, che un poco" (Here's a little for so little [money]), and this cry became distorted by non-Italians into the words “hokey pokey”. “In New York and other American cities—where the custom had migrated by the mid-1800s—the Penny-Ice Men were known as Hokey pokey Men”. (How Products Are Made, vol. 6, Ice Cream Cones via the www at http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Ice-Cream-Cone.html) Some of them sold Italian Ices or gelato in the tiny glass “penny lick” goblets, but a distinct new form of ice cream in individual servings began to be sold by these street vendors: squares of dense, hard frozen ice cream, sliced off of a molded brick, each slice wrapped in paper. This was usually Neapolitan ‘striped’ ice cream, and this type of ice cream itself became known as hokey pokey. (Liddell, C., and Weir, R., 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY, p.29.) “Nowadays the word is used in New Zealand for a sort of crunchy toffee bar, and also for ice cream containing little pieces of such toffee. ---An A-Z of Food & Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 160)” (Lynne Olver 2004, Food Timeline, “history notes: ice cream and ice” updated 3 August 2006 via www at http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodicecream.html)

There are only a few short steps forward from the hokey-pokey to the more modern varieties of square-shaped mass produced ice cream treats, such as chocolate covered ice cream bars and ice cream sandwiches.

More about Ice Cream Sandwiches

It is unknown who developed the first ice cream sandwich, but two distinct types emerged: square-shaped and rounded. Somewhere along the line, a hokey-pokey vendor decided to make his treats less messy or longer lasting-or dispense with the paper wrappers- by serving the slices of ice cream between same-size wafers and/or experimenting with chocolate and crumb coatings, and managed to make it fly with the public.

“We checked several ice cream stories in the New York Times from 1886-1929 and the earliest reference we found to ice cream sandwiches by name was an editorial titled "New Hot-Weather Refreshments" published August 31, 1928 (page 18, column 6) "...ice cream cones, dainties' and sandwiches still hold their own with the new ices." (Lynne Olver 2004, Food Timeline, “history notes: ice cream and ice” updated 3 August 2006 via www at http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodicecream.html) Good Humor is credited with the initial mass production and distribution of rectangular ice cream sandwiches. Square shaped ice cream sandwiches even in the present day tend to be plain in flavor and composition, limited to a few basic varieties, and in many cases, made of low quality ice cream and hard cookie wafers, reflecting their possible proletarian origin. “The chocolate cookie sandwiches probably didn't come about until the inception of the Hydrox cookie in 1908, added Andrew F. Smith, a culinary historian. He said the first commercial sandwich was made by Good Humor in the 1920's. ‘The Good Humor Man in the ice cream truck driving around and selling sandwiches is what made them famous,’ he said.” Vora, Shivani, May 31, 2006, “Frozen Treats: A Bite of Childhood”, via www at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/dining/31sandwich.html?ei=5070&en=9245669a7e53f1d8&ex=1156564800&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1156417407-cYU7BWZLy3dsWp8cB+mh4g

According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, the Anderson ice cream sandwich making machine was registered with the government February 1, 1926 registration number 0615682. The USPTO record does not indicate whether or not this particular device was made/manufactured or ever produced its intended product.” (Lynne Olver 2004, Food Timeline, “history notes: ice cream and ice” updated 3 August 2006 via www at http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodicecream.html)

The Ice Cream Cone: A Good Idea to Two Different Ethnic Groups in Two Different Parts of America

As anyone who has survived summer in New York City knows, Italian Ices quickly turn into sticky liquid and run through the tiny paper cups they are served in, and holding naked ice cream in a paper wrapper can be messy while walking. “In 1903 (the year before the World's Fair), Italo Marchiony was awarded a patent for the ‘pastry comet’, which he developed to hold his frosty wares. Marchiony was an Italian immigrant who lived in New York City. His product was lemon ice that he scooped onto small glasses and sold to customers along Wall Street. After consuming the ice, the customer returned the glass, and it was washed and used again. Breakage and the continual task of washing dishes frustrated Marchiony; he substituted paper cones, but these (and littering consumers) made a messy problem. As early as 1896, Marchiony invented a fully consumable alternative. By 1903, he had made a machine that created cones like the sugar cone known today. The machine resembled a long waffle iron with spaces to cook 10 cones. Later, Marchiony opened a cone factory in Hoboken, New Jersey. He is also credited with building the first ice cream sandwich with two waffle squares.” (How Products Are Made, volume 6, The Ice Cream Cone, via www at http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Ice-Cream-Cone.html) A picture from the patent record for the device shows that the “cones” produced by this device were in fact flat-bottomed shallow dishes. (Liddell, Caroline, and Weir, Robin, 1995, Frozen Deserts, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin imprint, NY., p. 21.) The flat-bottomed cone also recalls the shape of the “penny lick” and the paper cup for Italian Ices.

The flat-bottomed cake cone though undisputedly on record as coming from the mind of Marchiony, seems to have been then lost or ignored until the late 1940s when Joseph Shapiro of the Maryland Cup Corporation (later the Ace Baking Company) is said to have made a cone for mass production with a flat base especially for the Dairy Queen chain. Filling pointy-bottomed cones and handing them to customers takes two hands, but the flat-bottomed cone stands on its own and can be filled more easily. (How Products Are Made, volume 6, The Ice Cream Cone, via www at http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Ice-Cream-Cone.html)

Marchiony’s “pastry comet” may have been much like the cornucopias of flaky, soft-baked pastry known in the USA as “Italian horns” filled with ricotta-based cream and found in Italian bakeries, bearing only a passing resemblance to the modern hard-baked ice cream cone. Food historians Robert J. Weir and his wife Caroline Liddell cite an 1807 engraving showing ladies eating pastry coronets of ice cream by picking them up in their fingers at Fraschetti’s Café in Paris as evidence that the idea of serving ice cream in edible conical pastry products originated in Europe long before the first recorded appearance of the ice cream cone in the USA. (Weir, Robert J., “An 1807 Ice Cream Cone: Discovery and Evidence” at Day, Ivan, 2003, Historic Food, via the world wide web at http://www.historicfood.com/Ice%20Cream%20Cone.htm) Most Americans attribute the invention of the common pointy-bottomed ice cream cone to a “waffle vendor” at the St. Louis, Missouri World’s Fair held in 1904. The most common story goes that the ice cream vendor next to him ran out of dishes but still had a lot of ice cream to be served, whereupon the waffle vendor formed one of his waffles into a cone, the ice cream man put his ice cream in it, and voila, a way to eat ice cream without dishes or spoons was born. But have you ever actually tried this at home? To roll a cone out of a conventional waffle and try to hold ice cream in it usually ends in dropped ice cream. Things become clearer when it is revealed in most of the tales concerning the origin of the ice cream cone that the waffle vendor who is said to have improvised the cone was of Turkish or Arab extraction. Thus it is possible if not probable that the “waffle” in question wasn’t a common American waffle, soft and spongy in texture, but a thinner, crisper pastry called a zalabia, inherently stiffer stuff, less potentially leaky. “They are historically Levantine, popular in Syria, Lebanon and parts of Iraq and Turkey. For that matter, they're not made in a waffle iron—they're too flat; they most resemble Italian pizzelle, including in the grid pattern that marks their surface. (North African zalabia is a very different dessert: It consists of looping, pretzel-like strands of deep-fried batter, smothered in honey or syrup and often tinted a garish orange.)” (Harvey, David Alan, and Marlowe, Jack, July/August 2003, Saudi Aramco World via www at http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200304/zalabia.and.the.first.ice-cream.cone.htm) Ernest A. Hamwi, David Avayou, and Abe Doumar all claim to have been vendors at the fair and to have invented the ice cream cone, with Doumar, a Lebanese immigrant, later developing a waffle-making machine, moving to North Bergen, NJ, selling ice cream at Coney Island, NY (presumably contained in cones derived from zalabia) and starting Doumar's Cones and Barbecue, a restaurant still operating in Norfolk.

Frozen treats of all kinds are still easily bought in many different forms and prices on the streets of New York. High-quality gelato and homemade ice cream, sometimes with offbeat flavors, is sold in little shops which draw their customer base from the modern-day working rich and cuisine cognoscenti. Branch locations of major chains cater to tourists and soccer moms in all five boroughs. Nearly every NYC tourist attraction has its vendors of cheap, paper-wrapped ice cream bars and popsicles, and most small grocery stores have a freezer case full of these modern-day variations of the merchandise of the hokey-pokey man. The vendor of ices hasn’t completely gone away either, though he is now more likely to be selling his wares in his own shop, or mass-produced and pre-packaged in the supermarkets and delis. Shaved-ice vendors who offer affordable icy treats and stock syrup flavorings appealing to Hispanic tastes push their carts in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side.

A little bit of nearly everything has always been available in Manhattan, but New York City is where frozen yogurt launched nationwide as a food fad in the 1980s with the start of a chain of health food restaurants called Everything Yogurt which originated in Port Richmond, Staten Island, grew into a nationwide phenomenon, got bought by Villa Pizza, and provided the capital which established The Nicotra Group as one of the biggest business entities in Staten Island. Whatever the future holds for ice cream and related frozen treats, one thing is clear; they'll most likely be field-tested in the streets, shops, and restaurants of New York City.

Invite a friend!

Ice Cream hits the streets of New York

Before the ice cream cone

Doing The Hokey-Pokey: The Individually Wrapped Ice Cream is Born

More about Ice Cream Sandwiches

The Ice Cream Cone: A Good Idea to Two Different Ethnic Groups in Two Different Parts of America

References