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Who invented the ice cream cone? There are several stories about how it came to be -- including one that connects the invention to Northeast Ohio -- though no one knows for sure.
(Kristen Davis, cleveland.com)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ever wonder who first got the idea to put a scoop of ice cream in an easily transportable, edible container -- the ice cream cone?
There are plenty of stories out there, including one that connects its invention to Northeast Ohio, but it still seems the origin of the ice cream cone is a rather murky one - even among the most astute foodies.
The most popular story is the cone was created at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
Food Historian Anne Funderburg's history of ice cream describes seven origin myths for the ice cream cone -- starting with the tale of Ernest Hamwi, an immigrant from Syria who was making zalabia, a wafer dessert, next to an ice cream stand at the fair. When the ice cream stand ran out of cups, the story says Hamwi suggested combining his wafers with the ice cream, which quickly caught on.
Hamwi continued to work in the business of ice cream cones, eventually opening the Missouri Cone Company.
The International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers named him as the official creator of the ice cream cone in the 1950s.
Still, other stories claim someone else gave Hamwi the idea or invented the cone themselves.
Our local connection to the invention of the ice cream cone is that Charles Menches of Akron and his brother, Frank, of St. Louis, Mo., ran ice cream concessions at fairs and events across the Midwest.
The family of the brothers claim they came up with the ice cream cone at the 1904 World's Fair when a lady friend took one layer of a baked waffle and rolled it into a cone around the ice cream. They had the idea to wrap a warm waffle around a fid (a cone-shaped splicing tool for tent ropes). The waffle cooled and held its shape to provide an edible handle for eating ice cream.
The brothers are also credited with the invention of candy-coated peanuts and popcorn that was sold under the name "Gee Whiz," today known as Cracker Jack, as well as the first hamburger.
According to the International Dairy Association, there is no evidence that supports one of the ice cream cone stories over the other.
But there are numerous reports that say they were most certainly invented long before that date.
WhatsCooking.com says both paper and metal cones were used in France, England, and Germany before the 19th century. Travelers to Dusseldorf, Germany, reported eating ice cream out of edible cones in the late 1800s.
An 1807 etching of the Parisian Cafe Frascati shows in the lower right corner of the image a woman licking something out of a hand-held container, which ice cream historian Robin Weir writes is the "first pictorial evidence for ice cream cones."
Almost 40 years later, Charles Francatelli's 1846 book "The Modern Cook," described how to make "wafer-gauffres" filled with "filbert-cream-ice" to garnish a molded desert called "Iced Pudding a la Duchess of Kent." The accompanying illustration clearly showed the cone shape, and his gauffres recipe described shaping still-warm wafers into "small cornucopiae" before they cooled and became brittle.
Toward the end of the century, Agnes B. Marshall, who ran a cooking school and wrote numerous cookbooks, included a recipe for "Cornets with Cream," which included instructions that the cornets could "be filled with any cream or water ice." Her 1894 book "Fancy Ices" had additional recipes for cornets filled with ice creams -- but, while they were a step closer to the current incarnation of the ice cream cone, they were still elegant deserts meant to be put on a plate and eaten with utensils.
In the second half of the 19th century, ice cream bought outside the home was served in a small glass container, called a "penny lick" for the price. You would lick the ice cream out of the glass and return it to the vendor to wash and reuse.
This practice wasn't necessarily sanitary, and it could cause delays if too many people wanted ice cream at the same time.
The solution: an edible container.
The International Dairy Association credits Italo Marchiony with the invention of the cone. Marchiony claimed he had been making edible cups to serve ice cream in New York City since 1896, when he sold lemon ice on Wall Street. He originally used liquor glasses to serve his ice cream in. To reduce his overhead, caused by customers breaking or wandering off with his serving glasses, he baked edible waffle.
While the waffles were still warm, he folded them into the shape of a cup, then a cone. His waffle cups made him the most popular vendor on Wall Street and soon afterward, he had a chain of 45 carts.
He filed a patent in 1903 for his own ice-cream-cup-making machine.
Once cones became popular after the 1904 St. Louis Fair, Marchiony tried to protect his patent through legal channels but failed. Since Marchiony's patent was for only the specific mold construction and there were lots of other ways to mold cones, his patent was not much good.
According to some historians, cones were rolled by hand until 1912, when Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Ore., patented a machine for doing the rolling. In 1928, Nabisco bought Bruckman's company and rights, but no record of this patent was ever found.
It remains unclear exactly which invention story is the true story. But, while the ice cream cone was probably not first invented at the 1904 World's Fair, the fair did serve to popularize the cone as a container.
By the 1920s, the cone business had expanded, and in 1924 reached a record 245 million. Now, millions of rolled cones are turned out on machines that are capable of producing about 150,000 cones every 24 hours.