Ice Cream Cone

An ice cream cone is a nice cone-shaped pastry, that are usually made of a thin or thick wafer similar in texture to a waffle, in which ice cream is served, permitting it to be eaten without a bowl or any spoon. Today it is treated as a best ice cream loved by all age group.

History

Paper and metal cones were used during the 19th century in countries like France, Germany, and Britain for eating ice cream. The first reference to an edible cone could be found in Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, written in the year 1888 by celebrated British cookery writer Agnes Marshall. The Ice cream recipe for “Cornet with Cream” indicates that- “the cornets were made with the almonds and baked in the oven, not pressed between irons’ She adds- “these cornets could also be filled with any buttery cream or water ice or set custard or also fruits, and served for a dinner, luncheon, or even at supper dish”. Mrs. Marshall was an influential innovator and was greatly popularized ice cream in Britain. She published two recipe books specifically about ice cream and then about patented an ice cream making machine.

On December 13, 1903 a New Yorker named Italy Murchison, received U.S. patent No. 746971 on an ice cream cone-like invention he had been selling since 1896. Despite these prior claims, the popular belief is that the ice-cream cone was invented in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, where the story goes that a Syrian pastry maker, Ernst Hawk who was selling zalabia, a crisp pastry cooked in a hot folding waffle-patterned press, and dribbled with syrup, came to the aid of a neighboring ice cream vendor, perhaps Arnold Farinaceous or Charles Munches’, who was running out of dishes, by rolling a still-warm zalabia into a cone that could hold ice cream. However, numerous men who sold pastries at the World's Fair claimed to have been the inventor of the ice cream cone, citing a variety of inspirations.

After the fair the ice cream cone became popular in St. Louis and within a few years, the ice cream cone was being sold nationwide. Hawk’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, which was grown into the Missouri Cone Company. Nationally, by that time, the ice-cream cone industry had produced about 250 million cones a year.

The first cone was rolled by hand, but in 1912, Frederick Brickman, another inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented the machine for rolling ice cream cones. He sold his company to Nabisco in the year1928.

The idea of selling a frozen ice cream cones had ever long been a dream of ice cream makers, but it wasn’t until the year 1959 that Spica, an Italian ice cream manufacturer based in the Naples conquered the problem of the ice.