Facts and Myths surrounding the history of Ice Cream..  

A Little History..... There are plenty of myths about where ice cream was first invented. Some suggest Marco Polo first brought ice cream from China. The earliest evidence of anything resembling ice cream actually does come from China. In the 1500s, ice cream was developed in Italy. In the 1600s France and Spain developed forms of ice cream and in the late 1600s folks in England had their own secret recipes for ice cream.  It wasn't until the 1700s that the Americas first dabbled in ice cream. In the 19th century ice cream became a popular treat with the advent of mechanical freezer technology and modern continuous freezing methods. So here's some facts and folklore generated around America's favorite desert item.

Have you heard about the Great Ice Cream Cone invention Controversy?  It has the folks in St. Louis hopping mad -- and more than a little embarrassed.  After several decades of boasting that, like the hotdog bun and the  hamburger, the ice cream cone was invented at the St. Louis Fair in 1904, it turns out that a New Yorker named Italo Marchiony had a U.S. patent on just such an item several months before the fair opened.  Marchiony had been selling lemon ice in cones from his pushcart since 1896,  and was issued a patent on his mold on December 13, 1903, after having applied for the patent in September of that year.  In his application he described his invention as being "like a waffle iron and producing several small pastry cups with sloping sides."  Sounds like an ice cream cone to me.

However, on a hot day the following summer at the St. Louis Fair,  Ernest M. Hamwi, a pastry baker of  Syrian origin, rolled up some of his Zalabia pastry and sold the cones to an ice cream concessionaire who was running out of dishes.    But -- uh oh -- a man named Abe Doumar claimed to have  invented the ice cream cone in a very similar way at the Fair, making a cornucopia of a waffle,  filling it with a scoop of ice cream, and selling it nightly after 6 p.m. where the concessionaires gathered in the entertainment area of the Fair.   Meanwhile, a Turkish native named David Avayou, who had owned several ice cream shops in New Jersey, claimed that he started selling edible cones at the St. Louis Fair because he'd long known about  French ice cream cones of pastry, or even of paper or metal. It has been noted that there were around fifty ice cream stands at that Fair in St. Louis and a large number of waffle shops.   Doubtless, the 1904 Fair was the place where the cone became popular. 

Ice Cream History and Folklore

Most of the following material has been extracted from "The History of Ice Cream", written by the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers (IAICM), Washington DC, 1978. Much of the early history of ice cream remains unproven folklore as many have tried to take credit for this delicious invention.

Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, Charles I of England hosted a sumptous state banquet for many of his friends and family. The meal, consisting of many delicacies of the day, had been simply superb but the "coup de grace" was yet to come. After much preparation, the King's french chef had concocted an apparently new dish. It was cold and resembled fresh- fallen snow but was much creamier and sweeter than any other after- dinner dessert. The guests were delighted, as was Charles, who summoned the cook and asked him not to divulge the recipe for his frozen cream. The King wanted the delicacy to be served only at the Royal table and offered the cook 500 pounds a year to keep it that way. Sometime later, however, poor Charles fell into disfavour with his people and was beheaded in 1649. But by that time, the secret of the frozen cream remained a secret no more. The cook, named DeMirco, had not kept his promise.

This story is just one of many of the fascinating tales which surround the evolution of our country's most popular dessert, ice cream. It is likely that ice cream was not invented, but rather came to be over years of similar efforts. Indeed, the Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar is said to have sent slaves to the mountains to bring snow and ice to cool and freeze the fruit drinks he was so fond of. Centuries later, the Italian Marco Polo returned from his famous journey to the Far East with a recipe for making water ices resembling modern day sherbets.

Most books are full of myths about the history of ice cream. According to popular accounts, Marco Polo (1254-1324) saw ice creams being made during his trip to China, and on his return, introduced them to Italy. The myth continues with the Italian chefs of the you Catherine de'Medici taking this magical dish to France when she went there in 1533 to marry the Duc d'Orleans, with Charles I rewarding his own ice-cream maker with a lifetime pension on condition that he did not divulge his secret recipe to anyone, thereby keeping ice cream as a royal perogative.

 In 1774, a caterer named Phillip Lenzi announced in a New York newspaper that he had just arrived from London and would be offering for sale various confections, including ice cream. Dolley Madison, wife of U.S. President James Madison, served ice cream at her husband's Inaugural Ball in 1813. "Betty Jackson, a black woman from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, established a tea room on French Street in Wilmington, Delaware, where she sold cakes, fruit, and desserts to wealthy people for their parties. Her son, Jeremiah Shadd, was a butcher, well-known for his ability to cure meat. His wife, known as Aunt Sallie Shadd, achieved legendary status among Wilmington's free black population as the inventor of ice cream. The story was that the butcher Jeremiah purchased Sallie's freedom. Like other members of her family, she went into the catering business and created a new dessert sensation made from frozen cream, sugar, and fruit. Dolly Madison, the wife of President James Madison, heard about the new dessert, came to Wilmington to try it, and afterward made ice cream a feature of dinners at the White House.

" First Ice Cream Parlor In America - Origins Of The English Name ICE CREAM

The first ice cream parlor in America opened in New York City in 1776. American colonists were the first to use the term "ice cream". The name came from the phrase "iced cream" that was similar to "iced tea". The name was later abbreviated to "ice cream" the name we know today.

Methods and Technology

Whoever invented the method of using ice mixed with salt to lower and control the temperature of ice cream ingredients during its making provided a major breakthrough in ice cream technology. Also important was the invention of the wooden bucket freezer with rotary paddles improved ice cream's manufacture.

Nancy Johnson and William Young - Hand-Cranked Freezers

Augustus Jackson, a confectioner from Philadelphia, created and published many new recipes for making ice cream in 1832, so ice cream had to be a popular home made desert amongst American immigrants. In 1846, Nancy Johnson patented a hand-cranked freezer that established the basic method of making ice cream still used today. William Young patented the similar "Johnson Patent Ice-Cream Freezer" in 1848. In 1851, Jacob Fussell in Baltimore established the first large-scale commercial ice cream plant. Alfred Cralle patented an ice cream mold and scooper used to serve on February 2 1897.

Collection of Hand Crank Home made Ice Cream Freezers.

Mechanical Refrigeration & the Continuous Process Freezer

The treat became both distributable and profitable with the introduction of mechanical refrigeration. The ice cream shop or soda fountain has since become an icon of American culture. Around 1926, the first commercially successful continuous process freezer for ice cream was invented by Clarence Vogt.

In the United States, ice-cream cones were popularized in the first decade of the 20th century. On December 13, 1903, a New Yorker named Italo Marchioni received U.S. patent No. 746971 for a mold for making pastry cups to hold ice cream; he claimed that he has been selling ice cream in edible pastry holders since 1896. Contrary to popular belief, his patent was not for a cone and he lost the lawsuits that he filed against cone manufacturers for patent infringement.

Many Americans ate their first ice cream cone in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. According to one legend, a Syrian pastry maker, Ernst Hamwi, who was selling zalabia, a crisp pastry cooked in a hot waffle-patterned press came to the aid of a neighboring ice cream vendor (perhaps Arnold Fornachon) who had run out of dishes; Hamwi rolled a warm zalabia into a cone that could hold ice cream. However, numerous vendors sold pastries at the World's Fair, and several of them claimed to have invented the ice-cream cone, citing a variety of inspirations. Hamwi's story is largely based on a letter he wrote in 1928 to the Ice Cream Trade Journal, long after he had established the Cornucopia Waffle Company (later the Missouri Cone Company). Nationally, by that time, the ice-cream cone industry was producing some 250 million cones a year.

The owners of Doumar's Cones and BBQ in Norfolk, Virginia claim that their uncle, Abe Doumar, sold the first ice-cream cones at the St. Louis World's Fair. Other World's Fair vendors who claimed to have invented the cone include Nick and Albert Kabbaz, David Avayou, and Charles and Frank Menches. The first cones were rolled by hand but, in 1912, Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented a machine for rolling ice-cream cones. He sold his company to Nabisco in 1928. Nabisco is still producing ice-cream cones, as it has been since 1928. Independent ice-cream manufacturers often make their own ice-cream cones.

History of the Ice Cream Sandwich...

ICE CREAM SANDWICH FIRST APPEARANCE: All Wall Street Buying Them nowa-days, to the Profit of the Inventor....24 August 1900, Long Branch (NJ) , pg. 4:

The latest thing that the purveyors to the gastronomic demands of the office boys, messengers and clerks in the Wall street district are supplying to their patrons is the ice cream sandwich. It made its first appearance during the hot spell of last week. A young man showed up with a wagon and began to descant on the value of his wares at the corner of Nassau and Wall streets. He soon had a crowd around him, and the first man that tried an ice cream sandwich bit into it gingerly. It was made of two graham wafers and a slab of ice cream between. The wafers were fresh and crisp and sweet and the ice cream was good. Then, too, it had the advantage of being cold in addition to being palatable. The cost of the sandwich was one, two and three cents, according to the thickness of the slab of ice cream

This new edible made such a hit that its fame spread through the Wall street district the first day and the young man who invented it did not have enough of stock to satisfy the demand. The second day the brokers themselves got to buying ice cream sandwiches and eating them in a democratic fashion side by side on the sidewalk wit hthe messengers and the office boys. All of the other ice cream and lemonade vendors saw that they were outclassed and immediately began to sell imitations. The young man held the bulk of the trade, however, throughout the week.

Second Source: 9 September 1900, Dubuque (Iowa) Sunday Herald, pg. 11, col. 6: A Novel Refection That Is Sold from Pushcarts in the Bowery of New York..... "There are ham sandwiches and salmon sandwiches and cheese sandwiches and several other kinds of sandwiches -- a down-town restaurant advertises 30 varieties -- but the latest is the ice-cream sandwich. As a new fad the ice cream sandwich might have made thousands of dollars for its inventor had the novelty been launches by a well-known caterer, but strangely enough the ice cream sandwich made its advent in an humble Bowery pushcart and is sold for a penny, says the New York Mail and Express.

The idea is worthy of a better field, for the ice cream sandwich is not only a distinct novelty, but has merits of its own. It will be appreciated by the child who on eating ice cream for the first time wanted to have it warmed. While losing nothing of its flavor, the thin wafers which go to make up the sandwich help to modify the coolness of the ice cream, so that it can be eaten more readily. The ice cream sandwich as made on the Bowery is constructed in this wise: A thin milk biscuit is placed in a tin mold just large enough to receive it. Then the mold is filled with ice cream from a freezer and another wafer is placed on top. There is an arrangement for forcing the sandwich out of the mold when complete, and the whole process takes only a few seconds. The ice cream sandwich man is the envy of all the other pushcart restaurateurs on the Bowery, as he has all the patrons he can attend to and the cart is always surrounded by curious customers."

Free Ice Cream Push Carts .... Daily Ice Cream Truck Rentals

CK Corporation also sells Well's Blue Bunny, Northstar and Rich's Ice cream bars as well as a large variety of Funny cartoon face frozen ice pops. We also carry for resellers and general public counter sales, Chocolate malt cups -frozen shakes, vanilla slices, dixie cups and Dry Ice. Independent Ice Cream truck route drives can stop by our warehouse office and pick up a reseller price list upon proof of a company Tax ID# and occupational license. To see Wholesale case lot price list for counter customers ...click here.

Captain Kool has participated in hundreds of Ice Cream special events for over 29 years for company and Union picnics, graduation parties and employee gatherings, fireworks displays, birthday parties, Church fairs, City parades and summertime weddings. We offer daily truck and Ice Cream push cart rentals which allow event coordinators to choose from over 60 novelty ice cream bars at wholesale counter prices.

Servicing the Ice Cream needs of Metro Detroit Neighborhoods since 1976