America’s first ice cream sandwich was sighted on Aug. 2, 1899, on the streets of New York City, being sold for a penny each. Street vendors hawked the product as a “hokey pokey.”
The standard definition of an ice cream sandwich is that it’s “a block of ice cream, usually vanilla, although other flavors can be used, sandwiched between two rectangular cookie wafers.”
The term is generic, and
there is a wide range of dessert manufacturers that are producing ice cream
sandwiches today.
Karen Hipson of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, editor of an online lifestyle blog, has traced the evolution of the product. “Early pictures show beachgoers at Atlantic City, N.J., with their ice cream sandwiched between milk biscuits,” she wrote.
“The sandwich layers included everything from angel food and sponge cake to shortbread cookies. Restaurants offered the ice cream sandwich as a decadent dessert for travelers. By 1940, grocers sold sandwiches made with crispy wafers,” Hipson commented.
“One account claims the modern ice cream sandwich with the now famous chocolate wafer was invented in 1945 by Jerry Newberg.”
He was an ice cream vendor at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Pa., who worked home games of the baseball Pirates and the football Steelers. (Newberg sold his ice cream sandwiches for a nickel apiece.)
“For me,” Hipson noted, “there’s something nostalgic about a standard ice cream sandwich – especially if the ice cream between the soft chocolate cookies is just a little bit melty.”
“I guess it brings me
back to summer as a kid,” she said, “sitting outside and trying to eat them
before they melted all over us.”
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