If you probe around various history sites you’ll be informed that 104 years ago today Charles E. Menches of St. Louis conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with ice cream and thereby invented the ice cream cone. So a lazy, trusting writer might conclude that this is a momentous day. However, poke around further and you find that nearly 100 years before that there was at least one painting that showed someone eating ice cream from a cone. And over 15 years earlier in 1888a cookbook (Mrs. Marshall’s Cookery Book – a bargain at $212.50 at Amazon) speaks of ice cream served in cones. And that at least two patents were granted prior to this date for machinery to make ice cream cones. So saying that Mr. Menches invented the ice cream cone is approximately the same as saying Madonna invented the breast cone. Apparently, like Madonna, Mr. Menches had an excellent publicist.
BTW, the sort of gluey mouth feel you get from an ice cream cone comes f
rom tapioca flour.
Regardless of who invented it, the ice cream cone was a huge improvement in portable ice cream and soon became the standard for ice cream on the go. It stood as the single biggest innovation in ice cream for ¾ of a century until the 70’s when the world was rocked by Tom Carvel’s release of Cookiepuss – which of course couldn’t have existed without the ice cream cone. The Cookie Puss commercial is a TV classic.
I’ve emailed Masaharu Morimoto to find out what sort of cone – regular, sugar or waffle – he suggests to go with his trout ice cream. I’ll let you know when I get a response.
rom tapioca flour.
2 comments:
Getting spam as comments now!! Cool. You've arrived. Loved the cone story.
Could have done without the trout ice cream reference though......
When you talk to him, see what he'd suggest serving Bacon Ice Cream in.
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