Celebrated every year on August 2, National Ice Cream Sandwich Day conjures up visions of our favorite summer treat. It’s a simple thing, really, but oh, what deliciousness! In our American version, take two rectangular or circular flat cookies made of chocolate or oatmeal and match them with your favorite flavor of ice cream. Then, make it into a neat little sandwich. There’s nothing better than the taste of sugary sweet, ice cold creaminess and sometimes, chocolate all together in one outrageously-good dessert!
There are records of pushcart vendors selling slabs of ice cream between pieces of paper in the 1890s. Noted food historian Jeri Quinzio told The Boston Globe that these early creations were called “hokey pokeys” and sold for the princely price of a penny. They were an instant hit, with people of all classes lining up to get their “sandwich.”
Sponge cake got its turn as the “bread” of the ice cream sandwich, according to Food Network, but the creation was too fragile and became a true disaster if the ice cream began to melt. The next natural step was some sort of cracker. Graham crackers were tried, according to culinary anthropologist Deb Duchon, and the current concept of ice cream sandwiches certainly doesn’t stray far from that.
It soon rose in popularity and recipes for the dessert cropped up in Newspapers around the country, with writers recommending readers recreate the sandwich with shortbread or sponge cake. This adoption of the ice-cream sandwich, and later experimentations with the recipe are like the original version of current TikTok trends. Is it too far to state that the ice-cream sandwich was the original #FoodTrend? Maybe, but then again, maybe not!
Because the ice-cream sandwich did not stay on the other side of the Atlantic, it traveled, and it traveled far. By the 1970s, in Ireland, Wales and England, an ice-cream sandwich was a popular alternative to the better known ice-cream cone. It was alternatively known as ‘an ice-cream wafer’. Many countries around the world have their own version of the ice cream sandwich. In Vietnam, street vendors sell ice cream stuffed between two layers of bread. In Iran, pistachio or rose-flavored ice cream is sandwiched between two thin wafers.
However, the ice cream sandwich in its current form, vanilla ice cream between two chocolate cookies, traces its history to a vendor named Jerry Newberg, who sold the treats at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field during baseball games starting in 1945. That’s according to Newberg himself, although impartial third-party evidence to prove his claims has yet to surface.
When it comes to that natural offshoot of the ice cream sandwich, the chipwich — with two chocolate-chip cookies serving as the “bread” for the sandwich — the history is somewhat clearer. Richard LaMotta first marketed the chipwich in 1978 in New York City. According to Food Network, the only recorded prior effort at using cookies took place 50 years earlier, when a San Francisco ice cream vendor put ice cream between two oatmeal cookies, then dipped the whole creation in chocolate.
But no matter how you stuff it, the good, old Yankee version of an ice cream sandwich on National Ice Cream Sandwich Day is a must!
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