A new book shows how cones made ice cream popular among customers in the 1900s despite health scares

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9 hours ago

In fact, so cone-crazy were Americans that they were estimated to have consumed 245 million ice cream cones just two decades after they first appeared at the St Louis fair. Meanwhile, the cone fad helped fuel overall us ice cream consumption. In 1900, annual consumption per capita was about a quart (950 ml). By 1915, that figure had quadrupled, according to the International Association of Ice Cream Vendors. By 1929, the year of the stock market crash, Americans were downing 365 million gallons (1.38 billion litres) of ice cream a year, up from 280 million gallons in 1916.
And the ice cream cone was widely acknowledged to be the engine propelling the ice cream industry's meteoric growth. According to Walter W Fisk, a Cornell University dairy professor, 'the years from 1900 to 1910' were 'epoch making' when it came to the ice cream trade. 'The cone sold many a gallon of ice cream and made many a dollar for those engaged in the business', he concluded.
Not surprisingly, ice cream cone production soared. At first, cones were produced by hand, but by 1909, an automatic cone roller came on line, and by the 1920s, the process was fully mechanised. Batter was dispensed into a cone-shaped mould to form the finished product, which was then baked until crisp. This process allowed the production of hundreds of cones at a time. In 1913, the New York Times reported: 'The factories run night and day and more are being built.'
But mushrooming cone production came with a stiff price. Newspapers wrote that cones tainted with boric acid and other contaminants were imperilling ice cream cone eaters, and the press reported lurid tales of children and adults taken ill or even dying after ingesting one of the unsanitary products. Muckraking newspaper writers took off after the cone makers: 'The gelid sweetness which it contains is but a deceptive lure to destruction, for it swarms with germs and is not free from ptomaines, to say nothing of a substantial ingredient of plain filth', warned the Oregonian in an August 1910 editorial emblazoned with the headline 'A Conical Evil'. In 1910, government officials accused a group of us producers of infecting their cones with boric acid. (The cone makers responded that the ingredient was needed to stiffen the product so it would retain its shape.) Federal officials wound up confiscating millions of affected cones, including 4.5 million in New York alone, and prosecuted some cone makers as well.
Despite the health scares, the cone's popularity continued to spiral upward. By the time of the Great Depression, the ice cream cone had already established itself as an American icon. Even with the economic downturn, in 1931 Americans dug into their wallets to purchase 300 million of the snacks. Meanwhile, merchants ran promotions – one Georgia purveyor boasted he could balance seven scoops on a single cone – to boost sales. Cones provided employment for many cash-strapped teens, as well. During the 1930s, my mother worked an after-school job at the Kresge drugstore soda fountain in Lynbrook, New York. She and her friend were assigned to stand behind the marble counter and scoop ice cream for cones. Her favourite flavour was chocolate – and she didn't stint when it came to treating herself and her pal to a more-than-occasional taste. 'We would sit at the counter and make cones', my mother recalled, chuckling. 'One for the customers, one for us.'
While cone sales were taking the us by storm, a new group of ice cream entrepreneurs came up with – or in some cases stumbled upon – additional groundbreaking concepts for portable ice cream treats.
Unlike fountain treats or even ice cream cones, all of which required a confectioner or soda jerk to assemble the treat by hand before it could be eaten, novelties arrived from the factory already formed, packaged and ready to be stored in a shop's ice cream freezer. The advent of mechanically refrigerated ice cream cabinets helped fuel the trend, and around 1920, the first automatic ice cream packaging machine rolled off the assembly line. Manufacturers also standardised ice cream mixes. They added corn sugars as well as artificial additives like gum stabilisers to create smoother textures. Carl von Linde, a German engineer, invented mechanical refrigeration in 1870. In 1888, the first refrigerated railway car distributed ice cream throughout the us. In 1929, American Clarence Vogt received a patent for the continuous process freezer. The machine reduced the amount of time it took for ice cream to be manufactured. Better homogenization and pasteurising techniques were adopted. And beginning in 1925, the United States enacted laws setting bacteria standards for commercial ice cream. Also in that year, the first mechanically refrigerated ice cream truck was unveiled at a us dairy show.
Leveraging these advances into broadly embraced ice cream novelty franchises in the second decade of the 20th century were three go-getter ice cream entrepreneurs: Christian Kent Nelson, creator of the Eskimo Pie; Harry B. Burt Sr, developer of the Good Humor bar; and Frank Epperson, who came up with the idea for the popsicle, a frozen ice on a stick.