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Myth-busting the origin of ice cream cones, again

This week's radio show (22 August) has the tasty segment with two of Rick's Italian guides where they discuss the importance of daily - or more - gelato when visiting Italy.

The last time this segment came out I pointed out that the old fable about ice cream cones at the 1904 St. Louis fair is a fable, not least because mass production cone machinery was granted US patents in 1903.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/radio/best-gelato-isn-t-italian-and-ice-cream-cone-fables

Now I see that Time magazine reports on evidence for ice cream waffle cones in France decades earlier:

https://time.com/4288576/ice-cream-cone-history/

In looking around the interwebs now I am struck by how much 'history' is being mangled and manipulated by the search engines on the WWW, which privilege some postings over others, and the Time piece crediting the Phila. centennial fair with the origin of the ice cream soda but not any ice cream cones.

The age of print is going to be an outlier in the long (but declining) history of human culture because for a few hundred years we had a slightly harder time inventing any past that we cared to invent. Before print, history was controlled by the clergy, and now that we're coming into an era post-print, history is being controlled by the wealthy.

I'll have some ice cream...

Posted by
1316 posts

I would go with the Syrian who rolled his waffles as an aid to an ice cream cellars who ran out of cups. Necessity is the mother of invention and pitas had already been in use as wraps earlier than the ice cream cone. So it is a natural jump to a waffle being rolled since now there was something to put in it appropriate for a sweet waffle, ice cream.