Andrew F. Smith

Ice Cream Cone and the St. Louis World’s Fair

Appears in
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

By Andrew F. Smith

Published 2004

  • About
The sweet equivalent of the sandwich, the ice cream cone belongs to one of America’s favorite food categories, the hand-held wrapped dish in which filler and wrapping are eaten together. Like many other iconic American dishes, ice cream cones were made for public eating and became popular in venues such as seaside resorts, fairs, and carnivals at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The classic cone is a wheat-based wafer baked in an iron mold and then rolled into a cone shape with a pointed bottom. The wafer is a venerable dish, dating to the European Middle Ages. Its more immediate antecedent in the United States is the waffle, which was brought to North America by Dutch immigrants in the seventeenth century. As in Europe, ice cream, which had become popular throughout colonial America, was often eaten with sweet wafers. The earliest written recipe yet discovered for a “cornet with cream” comes from England and appears in Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book (1888), written by a then guru of French cookery. Marshall’s recipe calls for flour, eggs, ground almonds, and orange water, and suggests that the ice cream should be eaten from the cone with a utensil.