Lizzie Borden Society Forum

For reasons that had to do with both nature and culture, the Fourth of July was the one day a year that nineteenth-century Americans did eat ice cream. Ice Cream marked the beginning of summer. There was still plenty of ice in storage from the winter and the Jersey or Guernsey cows were just producing the first high-quality cream of the year. Because of this, ice cream was to Fourth of July what turkey is to Thanksgiving or ham to Christmas; it was the key culinary element of the holiday. It seems as though the tradition began as early as the 1830s, when a growing number of families would travel into the countryside or to a nearby lake, purchase ice or pull some from underneath the straw in their cellar, splurge on the ingredients, and spent the day churning the custard mixture inside a bucket of ice. If they were lucky, a substance similar to modern ice cream emerged from their pails by the end of the day.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, transportation networks and freezing technologies had improved to the point that ice cream was more readily available than in years past. Calling themselves hokey-pokey men and ice cream hokey-pokey, vendors, usually Italian immigrants, began peddling ice cream on street corners in the 1890s. As they did, they would sing out: “Here’s the stuff to make you jump; hokey-pokey, penny a lump.” From there, hokey-pokey men scooped ice cream into a common bowl, customers ate the ice cream, returned the dish, and the process repeated itself throughout the day, with the same few bowls passing through hundreds of hands.Its ties to Italian-Americans and the questionable health practices involved in its consumption radically changed the meanings of the treat in mainstream American culture. Even as late as World War I, ice cream was seen as a dangerous food, one tied to questionable immigrant cultures that could corrupt America’s youth. Young white women, it was thought, were especially susceptible to the deleterious effects of ice cream’s pleasures. In this climate, early ice cream parlors were painted as a strange mix between a brothel and a saloon. “Ice cream parlors,” noted one woman in 1910, “are the places where scores of girls have taken their first step downward.” Another man noted that, “One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for her entanglement.”

Even while these crusaders cried their warnings, ice cream’s image was already changing. In 1904, the ice cream cone was invented—by who, exactly, is heavily contested—at the World’s Fair, making the ingestion of ice cream safer in the eyes of public health officials who railed against the unsanitary nature of ice cream consumption. The tremendous gains in freezing technology were even more important to ice cream’s cultural rebirth. High-grade quick freezers were available to large manufacturers by the early twentieth century. From there, they became cheaper, making their way to smaller manufacturers, then larger retailers, then smaller retailers, then finally the home by the 1930s. The key turning point during this technological proliferation came in 1930, when a DuPont chemist named Thomas Midgely invented Freon, a seemingly safe and cheap chemical that revolutionized the freezing process. With Freon, freezing, and ice cream, belonged to the masses.