SC - Cone History

[Christine A Seelye-King]

I thought this might be of interest in the waffle/cone discussion.  
Christianna

>From "Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things" by Charles Panati

	Ice Cream Cone: 1904, St. Louis, Missouri

	For centuries, ice cream was served in saucers and dishes and heaped on
waffles, but there is no evidence for the existance of an edible pastry
cone until 1904, at the St. Louis World's Fair.  Organized to commemorate
the hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, the fair cost
fifteen dollars (the same price as the Louisiana Purchase) and had a host
of special attractions, including the John Phillip Sousa Military Band
and the first demonstration of electric cooking; it also offered its
thirteen million visitors a large number of food concessions.  Side by
side in one area were a Syrian baker, Ernest Hamwi, specializing in
waffles, and a French-American ice cream vendor, Arnold Fornachou. 
Enter the legend.  
	As one version of the story goes, Fornachou, a teenager studying to
become a watch repairman, ran out of paper ice cream dishes and rolled
one of Hamwi's waffles into a cone, creating a new sensation.  The
alternate version credits Ernest Hamwi.  An immigrant pastry chef from
Damascus, Hamwi offered fairgoers a zalabia, a wafer-thin Persian
confection sprinkled with sugar.  He is supposed to have come to
Fornachou's aid with rolled zalabias.  
	Nonetheless, several newspaper accounts of the day unequivocally record
that ice cream cones, or "World's Fair cornucopias," became a common
sight at the St. Louis Exhibition.  Cones were rolled by hand until 1912,
when Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented a
machine for doing the job.  In little more than a decade, one third of
all ice cream consumed in the United States was eaten atop cones.  
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