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An ice cream cone is a cone-shaped pastry, usually made of a wafer similar in texture to a waffle, in which ice cream is served, permitting it to be eaten without a bowl or spoon.
History
Paper and metal cones were used during the 19th century in France, Germany, and Britain for eating ice cream. The edible ice cream cone is popularly believed to have been invented in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with the popular story being that a Syrian pastry maker, Ernst Hamwi who was selling zalabia, a crisp pastry cooked in a hot folding waffle-patterned press, and dribbled with syrup, came to the aid of a neighboring ice cream vendor, perhaps Arnold Fornachou or Charles Menches, who was running out of dishes, by rolling a still-warm zalabia into a cone that could hold ice cream. Numerous men who sold pastries at the World's Fair claimed to have been the inventor of the ice cream cone, citing a variety of inspirations.
Its actual invention is credited to a New Yorker named Italo Marchiony, who on December 13, 1903 received U.S. patent No. 746971 on an ice cream cone-like invention he had been selling since 1896. A recipe for a similar pastry appeared in a British cookbook by a Mrs. A.B. Marshall in 1888.
Nevertheless, the ice cream cone became popular in 1904 in St. Louis, with more than 50 vendors copying the idea, and within a few years, the ice cream cone was being sold nationwide. Hamwi's story is largely based on a letter he wrote in 1928 to the Ice Cream Trade Journal, long after he had established the Cornucopia Waffle Company, which had grown into the Missouri Cone Company. Nationally, by that time, the ice-cream cone industry was producing some 250 million cones a year.
The first cones were rolled by hand, but in 1912, Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented a machine for rolling ice cream cones. He sold his company to Nabisco in 1928.
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