265/365: National Ice Cream Cone Day

There’s no sense waffling around when it comes to this holiday, sugar: September 22 is National Ice Cream Cone Day!

I should also point out that there are exactly 100 days left in our challenge. Tomorrow, we’re into double digits for the first time all year! It’s actually felt like the end was in sight for some time now, and today just cements that fact. We can do this!

We’ve already honored numerous flavors of ice cream this year, but today is the first time we pay homage to the invention of the wafer that allows us to hold ice cream in our hands and eat it without a spoon or a bowl. As with many of the food holidays we celebrate, there is some dispute over the invention of this treat. Julien Archambault’s French cookbook published in 1825 mentions rolling a cone from “little waffles” to carry ice cream, and Englishwoman Agnes Marshall’s 1888 tome Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book features a recipe for “cornet in a cone,” in which the cornets were made from almonds and baked in an oven. But it was New Yorker Italo Marchioni who filed a patent on this day in 1903 for an edible pastry cup used to hold ice cream. This was not a true cone, and Marchioni later lost a number of lawsuits he filed for patent infringement. Ice cream cones showed up at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, where no fewer than three men claimed to have created it: George Bang, Ernest Hamwi, and Abe Doumar. I guess we’ll never truly know who invented the first ice cream cone, but we can thank Frederick Bruckman of Portland, Oregon for patenting a machine used to roll ice cream cones in 1912. Prior to that, cones were rolled by hand from hot, thin wafers. Fred later went on to sell his company to Nabisco, which still makes ice cream cones to this day.

Cones are available in a variety of shapes, sizes, and flavors. The most popular are cake cones, sugar cones, and waffle cones. I’m not much of a sugar cone fan (unless we’re talking about frozen Drumsticks™, which were invented by J.T. “Stubby” Parker in 1928), but have always been partial to either cake cones or waffle cones.

I debated about having fun with this holiday and repurposing the cone to hold something other than ice cream. Like beef stew, maybe. Or spaghetti. After all, we’re celebrating ice cream cones – nobody says we need to eat them with ice cream! In the end, common sense prevailed, and we went ahead and had them with ice cream. Yeah, I know….boring. But good!

Related articles

• The best part of an ice cream cone (lycheesoda.wordpress.com)