G6 The Boston Globe WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019
more.
I’m here for the ice cream sand-
wiches. Aug. 2 is National Ice Cream
Sandwich Day, surely a holiday worth
celebrating. And this year marks the
ice cream sandwich’s 120th birthday.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Many date the
novelty (as single-serving frozen treats
are called) to 1899, but such things are
hard to pinpoint.
“What I know is that initially they
were sold on the Bowery in New York
by street vendors,” says author Jeri
Quinzio, whose books include “Des-
sert: A Tale of Happy Endings” and “Of
Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice
Cream Making.” These peddlers sold
something called “hokey pokeys,”
small slabs of ice cream that were
placed between two pieces of paper to
make them easier to hold. “That was
messy and not very convenient, so
somebody came up with the idea of us-
ing crackers or cookies.”
Written mentions of the treat start
cropping up around the turn of the
century. “It was written about a lot in
newspapers,” Quinzio says. “This was
quite the innovation. It sold for a pen-
ny, and you had to have a penny be-
cause they were making them so fast
they didn’t have time to make change.”
In 1899, she says, the New York
Mail and Express ran a story headlined
“A New Sandwich.” “There are ham
sandwiches and salmon sandwiches
and cheese sandwiches and several
other kinds of sandwiches,” it began,
“but the latest is the ice-cream sand-
wich. As a new fad the ice cream sand-
wich might have made thousands of
dollars for its inventor had the novelty
been launched by a well-known cater-
er, but strangely enough the ice-cream
sandwich made its advent in an hum-
ble Bowery push-cart.”
Well la-di-da. The street vendors ca-
tered to the hoi polloi, while the upper-
class patronized fancy confectioners.
But soon enough, everyone was stand-
ing in line to try the Cronut of the
1900s. A New York Sun story that ran
Aug. 19 of that year stated that on Wall
Street, “the brokers themselves got to
buying ice cream sandwiches and eat-
ing them in a democratic fashion side
by side on the sidewalk with the mes-
sengers and the office boys.” Restau-
rants then began serving upscale ver-
sions made with sponge cake and the
like. “Elite confectioners started using
plates and forks in a dainty fashion,
and saying [their sandwiches were] so
much better than the ones sold on the
street,” Quinzio says.
(There is an oft-repeated story that
a guy named Jerry Newberg invented
the vanilla-and-chocolate version we
know today and sold it at Forbes Field
in Pittsburgh. I know this to be per-
haps notquiteaccurate because I
spoke with Newberg, along with son
Bruce and grandson Matt, who were
visiting the 91-year-old. It’s true he did
sell ice cream. He would zip around on
a scooter selling the sandwiches for a
nickel. “Ice cream, get your ice cream
here,” he trumpets into the phone: He’s
still got it. He was also a radio an-
nouncer. He also called square dances.
He lost his arm in a car accident when
he was 3, so he couldn’t go into the ser-
vice. “I tried everything at least once,
which includes the girls,” he says. He
believes he invented the ice cream
sandwich, so, Matt tells me, “as an ode
to my grandfather, I cited him as one
of the inventors in Wikipedia.” This
then made its way into plenty of arti-
cles and a couple of books as fact.
“We’re not sure he’s actually the inven-
tor,” Matt says, “but we call him that
because we love him.”)
The ice cream sandwich’s trajecto-
ry, from humble treat of the masses to
elevated version for the elite, sounds
familiar. Here we have the classic ice
cream sandwich, as exemplified by
Hood’s offering: an oblong of vanilla
ice cream between two rectangular
chocolate cookies neatly stippled with
holes. All is as it should be. There is
tradition here. There is ritual. Are you
a biter? Or do you linger, licking
around the edges so the ice cream
grows smaller and smaller and the
cookies’ edges finally collapse around
it? However we choose to live our ice
cream sandwich-consuming lives, we
all meet the same end: sucking sticky
cookie residue off our fingertips after
everything else is gone. Thus it has
been all of our lives — visiting the ice
cream truck, at camp, on hot evenings
at dusk when the fireflies start to come
out. And thus it should always be.
Yet we take a completely perfect
product — affordable, delicious, al-
ready inhabiting its own ideal form —
and begin to riff on it. In 2016, market-
research firm Mintel declared the ice
cream sandwich the year’s “Hot Trend
in Indulgence.” Chief among the rea-
sons: social media. Ice cream sand-
wiches are deeply photogenic, and the
uICE CREAM
Continued from Page G1
groovier they become, the more we
want to post them.
And so we get delicious innovation.
We get the gleeful, rainbow-sprinkled
excess of Blackbird Doughnuts’ made-
to-order, soft serve-filled rounds: Pick
any doughnut you like, then choose va-
nilla, chocolate, or swirl. (Last week
Krispy Kreme announced the intro-
duction of scoop sandwiches, dough-
nut-infused ice cream inside a sliced
doughnut with customizable toppings.
Slow to the punch.) We get childhood
reconjured in Gracie’s Ice Cream’s ver-
sion, vanilla pressed between marsh-
mallow treats made with Fruity Peb-
bles or Cocoa Pebbles. We get food
trucks such as the Cookie Monstah and
Frozen Hoagies that troll the city’s
streets plying us with frozen desserts.
And we get to watch pastry chefs run
with it on restaurant menus: macaron
ice cream sandwiches at Yvonne’s, a
chocolate cookie and mint ice cream
sandwich with bitter poppy caramelon a menu honoring nonconformist
winemakers at Forage.
These are pure delights. But are
they really ice cream sandwiches? Ter-
minology matters. Remember the
2006 case that hinged on the defini-
tion of “sandwich”? Burritos, tacos,
and quesadillas: not sandwiches, ruled
the judge, paving the way for a Qdoba
to open in a Shrewsbury shopping cen-
ter despite the objections of the Panera
that was already there. As cookbook
author Chrissy Teigen once tweeted,
“Ice cream sandwiches made with
cookies are garbage. The only ice
cream sandwich should be the rectan-
gular blocks with chocolate cakey
bread with holes. This is not an opin-
ion, it is a fact.”
There’s no need to mess with a clas-
sic. Ice cream sandwiches are doing
fine. Last year Hood sold more than 2
million boxes. The frozen-novelty cate-
gory is seeing an increase in growth.
“In 2018, frozen novelties reached $5.8
billion, a 4.1% increase over the prior
year,” according to information provid-
ed by Mintel’s Beth Bloom, associate
director of food and drink reports.
“Comparatively, traditional ice cream
remained largely flat.” In 2021, Mintel
predicts, the frozen novelties segment
will reach $6.4 billion, about 27 per-
cent more than in 2018.Why are we enamored with such a
throwback? Precisely because it is one.
“Nostalgia has always been part of the
food landscape,” says Robertson Allen,
senior consultant at the Hartman
Group, which focuses on consumer be-
havior in the food and beverage mar-
ket. “We’re having a nostalgic moment
now for sure. There’s a turn to comfort
foods in times of uncertainty. There’s
political uncertainty for a lot of people.
Climate change is definitely a thing
that’s on more folks’ radar now, and
people are feeling uncertain about
what to do about it. The big one is eco-
nomic uncertainty. Millennials espe-
cially are feeling a lot more strapped
economically.”
But we can’t cling to the past forev-
er. Even Hood, unusually nimble for
company started in 1846, is mixing
things up. It now makes mini ice
cream sandwiches, cookies ’n’ cream
ice cream sandwiches, mint chip ice
cream sandwiches, unicorn confetti
ice cream sandwiches. “It tastes just
like Froot Loops,” Fabbri says of the
last.
Back on the floor of the HP Hood
Ice Cream Plant, wearing hairnets and
hardhats and ear protection, we head
for the ice cream sandwich line. The
ice cream goes through a rectangular
pipe, which molds it into the appropri-ate shape. As it comes out of the pipe,
two cookies surround the ice cream.
It’s moving so fast that the sandwich
breaks cleanly off, no need for slicing.
Then it gets wrapped, sealed, and sent
down a conveyor for boxing. In a day
of production, the facility can turn out
about 100,000 sandwiches.
“There are so many ice cream fads
out there,” Fabbri says. “In my mind,
all these things are here today, gone to-
morrow. One thing that’s always going
to be here is ice cream.”
He reaches out, plucks a newborn
ice cream sandwich off the line, and
hands it to me. I open the wrapper.
The ice cream is soft. The cookies are
intensely crunchy. You can’t eat a just-
made ice cream sandwich the way you
would one from the store. If you bite
right in, the filling will squirt out the
sides. Instead, you have to break off a
piece of the cookie and scoop out the
ice cream.
It’s so delicious. It’s so fresh. But,
forgive me, I’d rather have the soggy-
sided, freezer-aged ice cream sand-
wich we all know and love. It doesn’t
count unless you get your hands dirty.Devra First can be reached at
[email protected]. Follow her
on Twitter @devrafirstIce cream sandwich has
had its share of reinvention
From top: Ice cream sandwiches
from Frozen Hoagies (left) and
Blackbird Doughnuts; Karie
Jewett loads wafers into a
machine making ice cream
sandwiches at HP Hood; the HP
Hood plant in Suffield, Conn., and
tubs of HP Hood frozen yogurt.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFF (TOP RIGHT); LANE TURNER/GLOBE STAFF (ABOVE, BELOW)