A Recipe for Ice Cream: The Shifting Meaning of America’s Favorite Dessert

Consuming nearly four servings a week, the average American at the beginning of the twenty-first century eats five gallons of ice cream every year—more than any other country in the world except New Zealand (New Zealanders consume six gallons per person annually).  Yet these extraordinary ice cream consumption statistics hide one peculiar fact: just a century ago, ice cream was foreign, exotic, and even dangerous to many. It was a food whose place in America’s gastronomic repertoire was insignificant at best, unwanted at worst. 

Indeed, through most of the nineteenth century ice cream was a culinary curiosity because of the geographical and technological limitations of American society.  Cream and sugar were ingredients very much bounded by their location.  Nearly all rural Americans had access to cream, but only the wealthiest kept sugar in their pantries. And while most urbanites could find inexpensive sugar, cream was a different story; only gourmands could rationalize the costs associated with transporting that commodity from farms to the city.

For reasons that had to do with both nature and culture, the Fourth of July was the one day a year that nineteenth-century Americans did eat ice cream. Ice Cream marked the beginning of summer. There was still plenty of ice in storage from the winter and the Jersey or Guernsey cows were just producing the first high-quality cream of the year. Because of this, ice cream was to Fourth of July what turkey is to Thanksgiving or ham to Christmas; it was the key culinary element of the holiday.  It seems as though the tradition began as early as the 1830s, when a growing number of families would travel into the countryside or to a nearby lake, purchase ice or pull some from underneath the straw in their cellar, splurge on the ingredients, and spent the day churning the custard mixture inside a bucket of ice. If they were lucky, a substance similar to modern ice cream emerged from their pails by the end of the day.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, transportation networks and freezing technologies had improved to the point that ice cream was more readily available than in years past.  Calling themselves hokey-pokey men and ice cream hokey-pokey, vendors, usually Italian immigrants, began peddling ice cream on street corners in the 1890s.  As they did, they would sing out: “Here’s the stuff to make you jump; hokey-pokey, penny a lump.” From there, hokey-pokey men scooped ice cream into a common bowl, customers ate the ice cream, returned the dish, and the process repeated itself throughout the day, with the same few bowls passing through hundreds of hands.

Its ties to Italian-Americans and the questionable health practices involved in its consumption radically changed the meanings of the treat in mainstream American culture. Even as late as World War I, ice cream was seen as a dangerous food, one tied to questionable immigrant cultures that could corrupt America’s youth. Young white women, it was thought, were especially susceptible to the deleterious effects of ice cream’s pleasures. In this climate, early ice cream parlors were painted as a strange mix between a brothel and a saloon.  “Ice cream parlors,” noted one woman in 1910, “are the places where scores of girls have taken their first step downward.” Another man noted that, “One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for her entanglement.”

Even while these crusaders cried their warnings, ice cream’s image was already changing.  In 1904, the ice cream cone was invented—by who, exactly, is heavily contested—at the World’s Fair, making the ingestion of ice cream safer in the eyes of public health officials who railed against the unsanitary nature of ice cream consumption. The tremendous gains in freezing technology were even more important to ice cream’s cultural rebirth.  High-grade quick freezers were available to large manufacturers by the early twentieth century. From there, they became cheaper, making their way to smaller manufacturers, then larger retailers, then smaller retailers, then finally the home by the 1930s. The key turning point during this technological proliferation came in 1930, when a DuPont chemist named Thomas Midgely invented Freon, a seemingly safe and cheap chemical that revolutionized the freezing process. With Freon, freezing, and ice cream, belonged to the masses. 

However, just because domestic cooks had freezers didn’t mean they needed, wanted, or knew how to make ice cream. (It wasn’t even available at grocery stores yet). That job landed with the freezer manufacturers that heavily promoted home ice cream production as one of the many wonders that could be had by cooks if they purchased a home freezer. Frigidaire, one of the early leading manufacturers of home freezers, published dozens of cookbooks, including Frigidaire Recipes (1928) and Frigidaire Frozen Desserts (1930). Westinghouse issued its The Westinghouse Refrigerator Book in 1935, while General Electric distributed the Silent Hostess Treasure Book in 1932. All of these cookbooks used tempting recipes for ice cream to lure consumers into purchasing one of these mammoth-sized, pricy machines. 

The acceptance of ice cream was as rapid as any single food in American culinary history. In 1910 it was a foreign and dangerous food; just a generation later, Americans of all races, ages, and ethnicities heralded the dessert as America’s treat.