Ice-Cream Cones

Appears in

Pride and Pudding: The History of British Puddings, Savoury and Sweet

Published 2016

About

It is assumed that Italo Marchiony invented the waffle ice-cream cone in New York in 1896. He received a patent for ‘a molding apparatus for forming ice cream cups’ in 1903. However, in 1902 Antonio Valvona, an ice-cream manufacturer of Manchester, received a patent for his ‘Apparatus for baking biscuit-cups for ice-cream’. These two men, however, are not the inventors of an ice-cream cone, although they created devices to mould wafer cups.

Food historian Ivan Day notes, in Ice Cream: A History (2011) that wafer cones are first mentioned in Bernard Claremont’s The Professed Cook in 1769. They were initially not used for ice cream but to serve with other sweetmeats during the dessert course. The first record of someone actually filling one of these wafer cones or cornets with ice cream is Charles Elmé Francatelli, who mentioned them in The Modern Cook in 1846 as a garnish in a recipe for his ‘Chesterfield Cream Ice’. The illustration in his book shows the tall ice-cream pudding decorated with a crown of ice-cream cones at the base. He instructs to fill the cones with ice cream.

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