Ice Cream -> Scoop Ice Cream

Scoop Ice Cream

The Super Bowl Sundae is quite huge. The dish, big as a birdbath, holds eight scoops of ice cream cradled between the bananas, with gooey toppings and nuts filling in the cracks, topped with flavored whipped creams, as many as you want, then heaped with jimmies, sprinkles and also with few outrageous decorations.

Generously scooped ice cream cones are normally stuck with the mini pinwheel. Paper umbrellas are jabbed in the Tin Ceiling Sundaes, and gold coins tumble above the banana splits. Oars and paddles decorate the floats and hot pink palm trees with a monkey on a stick top of tropical sherbets.

Have you ever heard about the Great Ice Cream Cone Controversy? It has the folks in St. Louis hopping mad – and also more than a little embarrassed. After several decades of boasting that, like the hotdog bun and the great hamburger, the ice cream cone was invented at the St. Louis Fair in the year 1904, it turns out that a New Yorker named Italy Marching had a U.S. patent on just such an item several months before the fair opened. Marching had been selling lemon ice cream in the cones from his pushcart since 1896, and was issued a patent on his mold on December 13, in the year 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. Hemi, 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 Dormer claimed that he invented the ice cream cone in a very similar way at the Fair, making a cornucopia of a waffle, filling it with a good scoop of ice cream, and selling it nightly during 6 p.m. where the concessionaires gathered in the entertainment area of the Fair. Meanwhile, the Turkish native named David Avaya, who had owned several ice cream shops in the New Jersey, claimed that he started selling edible cones at the St. Louis Fair because he'd long known about the 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, in the year 1904 Fair was the place where the cone became popular. They called it the "World's Fair Cornucopia." Nice touch. And, in case you hadn't noticed, it caught on.