Posted on: Wednesday, July 28, 2004
World's Fair of 1904 was Conehead Central
| • | The scoop on cones |
| • | Enhance waffle cones with flavor and flair |
Chicago Tribune
Experts seem to agree that the ice-cream cone — a nickname derived from its original name, cornucopia — became popular at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. That centennial is being celebrated this year. After that, though, the cone consensus rapidly disintegrates. Exactly how the cone was linked to ice cream and came to be served on the streets of St. Louis, and whether it was, in fact, served previously elsewhere, is mired in controversy.
As befits a nation of immigrants, those who claimed to have invented the cone were of Syrian, Turkish and Italian backgrounds.
The version according to the History of the Ice Cream Cone Web page credits Syrian pastrymaker Ernest Hamwi for providing emergency aid to a teenage ice-cream vendor at the fair who had run out of bowls. Hamwi offered up his zalabia, a thin wafflelike confection sprinkled with sugar. The ice cream was folded into the zalabia pastry, and the rest, as they say, is 100 years of delicious portable eating history.
Not so fast, argue the backers of the Kabbaz brothers' version. Nick and Albert, also of Syrian descent, may have worked for Hamwi but claimed to have come up with the folding-the-zalabia idea. Then there's Abe Doumar, another Syrian, who insisted he invented what he called a kind of Syrian ice-cream sandwich, again by putting ice cream inside a folded zalabia. David Avayou of Turkey and two U.S.-born brothers, Charles and Frank Menches, claimed to have been first to fold baked waffles into cone shapes at the fair. And Italian immigrant Italo Marchiony filed a patent in 1903 for a "molding apparatus ... for the manufacture of ice-cream cups and the like." (But, frankly, cups are not cones.)
Many of the cone-creation tales involve coming up with something on the spot to hold ice cream. So while the paternity of the cone may be unclear, necessity was clearly the mother of this invention. It just may be that more than one fair vendor or patron needed emergency ice-cream assistance at the same time in St. Louis 100 years ago. The creation of the cone could have come by one of those mysterious tipping points where a great idea spreads rapidly because the idea — ice cream you can eat one-handed — is just really great.
