November 6, 2025 • 35 mins
For fans of sweet, frozen sweets, there's nothing as perfect as ice cream. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max scoop into a bizarrely niche controversy: Who actually invented the 'Ice Cream Sundae,' and why on Earth is it spelled 'Sundae,' rather than 'Sunday'? Ben here: we do figure it out, and history is super weird. Thanks for tuning in!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
Max the Madman.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Williams screaming for ice cream. Yeah, I love ice cream.
It's delicious.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
And that's mister Noel Brown, none other than And you're
Ben Bullin and I am Ben Bullen. And today, in
typical Ridiculous History fashion, given that it is a colder
time of the year and our Fairmantrop Bliss of Atlanta,
we decided to do an episode about a specific version
(01:06):
of ice cream. And I can't remember if I told you,
nol MX, but when circumstances found me in Vienna as
the weather was turning several years ago, was quite cold,
and surprise, surprise, people were still lining up for ice cream.
Austrians love ice cream in all versions.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Mm hmmm, yeah, I mean, I don't blame them. It's
a delightful confection and I don't find it to be
necessarily seasonal. If you're indoors and you have climate control,
what's stopping you from eating ice cream?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Right? And you have to have some kind of climate
control to make ice cream in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
My gosh, we should do an episode on the history
of ice And one of my favorite phrases you ever
used that still occurs to me sometimes is once, oh,
a few years ago, we were making some videos for
stuff they Don't Want you to do, and you described
part of the good life as iced creams. Oh. Yes,
(02:06):
of course I love iced creams. Yes, I like that.
I like like egg creams, which contains neither egg nor cream.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, the pity of the formula, right, we don't have
to relitigate that one. But we do have something to
bring to you today, fellow ridiculous historians. It's something that
caught the eye of our research associate superproducer Max Williams
for this episode. The concept of the ice cream Sunday
(02:34):
conventionally spelled here in the US, not like the day
of the week, but s U N.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
D a e s one of those things you see
and you're like, I don't know, maybe it's it's given
you pause where you're like, is that what is this?
Is this an invented word?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
And I realized in reading this brief Max, I'd never
really questioned it. I don't believe. But then the moment
that I started looking into your research, I was like,
of course that's weird. Why in the hell is it
spelled that way? And of course it has something to
do with religion.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Right, Yes, as we'll see. So let's begin with an
excellent article slash Investigation by Cory Ryan Earl, writing for
the Kenelians.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Cornellians.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, from Cornell, a semi famous university in Ithaca, New York.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Right, shout out to my buddy James, the Cornell alone
one of them Ivy leagues. If I'm not mistaken, it
is true. That is true.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
No, and congrats James. Those schools so our buddy Corey says,
the ice cream Sunday is an American staple. This simple
and customizable treat simply put scoops of ice cream with
some sort of sauce and toppings, gained popularity in the
early twentieth century. Now, if you go to Corey's research,
(04:02):
you'll see that there's a strong argument the ice cream
Sunday originated in Ithaca, New York. However, as we will learn,
with so many inventions that may not be entirely the case. Spoiler,
Wisconsin is going to enter the chat a little bit later,
maybe we get to what about this, Maybe we get
(04:25):
to the origin story that Corey Earl gives.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Us for sure. Can we also just get it out
of the way right up front? Ice cream with sauce
and toppings. Not the most unique take. It probably was
done by a couple of folks, you know, for the
quote unquote first time. The idea of calling it a
Sunday is I think what's at question was at the
heart of this investigation. So yeah, it's almost more branding
(04:51):
one hundred percent yep. And then why the hell is
it spelled that way? Well, we're gonna get to it.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
So.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Plattin Cult's drug Store was a soda fountain shop operating
in downtown Ithaca on two sixteen East State Street. One day,
according to lore Chester, Platt, the proprietor of said drug
store slash soda fountain, stopped by the shop after church
(05:17):
on Sunday, where he attended at Ithaca's first Unitarian church.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Which is interesting for the time universal Unitarianism could be
its own episode.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Very progressive. I grew up hanging with some Unitarians and
they would always host like metal shows in there, like
a fellowship hall, which I thought was pretty cool. So
we would play, you know, shows at the Unitarian church
there in Augusta. So yeah, the first Unitarian church. He
actually came with a with a guest to his shop,
the Reverend John Scott, and Platte asked his soda fountain
(05:50):
worker one de Forest Christians, I love the name, the
fabulous name, to prepare two dishes of vanilla ice cream. Now, well,
let's set the stage here, folks. We are again on Sunday,
mid afternoon, April third, eighteen ninety two, where a Platin
Colt's drug store and the guy who is bringing his guest,
(06:13):
a man of local renowned the reverend. The guy, the
proprietor Chester is trying to flex a little bit, so
we say he's probably saying to the Reverend John Scott,
you know, get whatever you want, Reverend. Don't order the
lobster because we probably don't have it. But you know,
if you want to throw something on this vanilla ice cream,
(06:36):
be my guest. And so accounts different again per Corey
Earle as to which man chose the specific toppings for
this vanilla ice cream. Ultimately they ended up with ice
cream that was not just vanilla, but it had cherry
syrup and a candied cherry atop the scoop. Now it
(06:58):
would have been the kind of cherry syrup they would
have used in the soda fountain problem. So this was
not like we did not yet have bespoke ice cream toppings. Yeah,
and they had to kind of use what was available.
Hence the lore of it all. One man asked the other,
which one asked, who is still as history mystery what
the new concoction might be called? The reply was a
(07:21):
cherry Sunday, in honor of its creation day.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Get it, because it's Sunday, we put cherries on it,
you know what I mean. We're today, we're doing our thing,
and we're also a bit unitarian and unorthodox because we're
putting soda syrup.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
It's a bit of a cross of the sacred and
the profane, you might argue, you know, I mean, ice
cream is sort of an indulgence, a bit of a
naughty treat.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
I like the papal reference. Also, we have to admit that,
we have to admit that American nomenclature has had a
weird headway and with the phrase vanilla, because now vanilla
is meant to describe something very beige and unremarkable. But
civilizations absolutely rose and fell based on vanilla as a spice.
(08:15):
So it's weird for sure, and you know, it does
make me think too. This idea of christening a dairy based,
you know, treat after the Lord's Day is pretty progressive
considering that, you know, in the past, the Catholic Church
might have, you know, forced you to put a buck
in that butter box in order to consume a tasty
(08:35):
dairy treat. Right, yeah, And you can hear various games
of telephone regarding the Sunday origin story, and some of
these pieces of anecdote or apocrypha will suggest that students
at Cornell helped popularize this idea. They also wanted their
(08:57):
vanilla with a little bit of cherry, the concept being,
or the argument being, that they witnessed the debut of
this secret off menu item, and they kept coming back
to pratting cults and ordering the new treat just the
same way the reverend did. And then they would go
(09:18):
on vacation on the constitutionals and they would come back
to the town after graduation and they would say, oh,
we want that platin cult off menu special item, not
just vanilla. Creams for us, but please with some cherry
sauce and a cherry at top. Please, Yes, pretty please
(09:41):
with a cherry on top. I like the etymology there, Noel,
we also see the Platin cult leaned into this. Over
the next several weeks, they would run advertisements in the
local paper, the Daily Sun, advertising what they called the
Cherry Sunday spelled at this point s U n.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
D A y Well. I mean, soda fountain history has
a lot in common with diner history and the idea
of like daily specials and stuff like that, you know,
so this sort of falls into that in an interesting way.
We're gonna get to more of of how that's the
case in a little bit. But we've got another potential
version of the story in the form of Wisconsin, who
(10:23):
has now entered the chat.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Absolutely not, this is the origin story. This is our
shortest episode ever. Thank you for tuning in, and sorry
about the ads.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Fun Let's talk about Wisconsin. Scratch, nice scratch Wisconsin people.
Oh god, they're so nice, and they, you know, are
a bit more dairy centric over there and very little
so record scratch.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Wisconsin has entered the Chat. Let's go to Dean Robbins
for Wisconsin Life, he says, and I'm not going to
do the voice. I like driving across Wisconsin to see
a legendary historical sites. I planned whole trips around the
(11:11):
Euclaire baseball field where Hank Aaron got a start, and
the Janesville House where Abraham Lincoln spent the night, which
is his story for another day. But every once in
a while, says Dean, I stumble across a bit of
Wisconsin history. I knew nothing about. That happened on a
recent drive through the northeast part of the state. When
(11:33):
I pulled into two rivers in Central Park, I noticed
an official Wisconsin historical marker claiming it as the birthplace
of the ice cream Sunday spelled Sundae, which is oddly
a bit Korean.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Any Wait a minute, now, they can't. They don't just
pass out historical markers willy nilly, right, so the guy continues,
Dean continues, coincidentally, my favorite dessert.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Could such a major phenomenon have originated in this small town?
Let's learn more about the marker.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
On the marker, it claims that a local man by
the name of George Hallower. Too many very similar story
walked into a soda fountain fifteenth Street there in Eau
Claire in eighteen eighty one. This is eleven years. However,
prior to the previous origin story, he asked the proprietor
of this soda fountain, one Edward Berner, to top a
(12:28):
dish of ice cream off with some chocolate sauce, a
substance that had previously been only used for ice cream sodas,
which is of course a thanks scoop of ice cream
like a root beer float. Also, chocolate sauce would have
been used in those egg creams we were talking about
a minute ago. This new concoction says, the marker caught
on and Berner began to sell them for a nickel,
(12:51):
but only on Sundays.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Only on Sundays, and as we have proven in previous
episodes of this and many other shows, capitalism manufactured scarcity right. However, However,
out of all the people who might have walked in
on a Saturday or a Tuesday and unsuccessfully attempted to
order this nickel chocolate sauce iced cream, there was a
(13:17):
ten year old girl who must have had a lot
of charm about her. She said she wants her dish
of ice cream, well with that stuff on the top
on a different day of the week. Now our buddy,
our momentary protagonist, the proprietor, Edward Berner. He says, absolutely
not until this girl, who again is just rolling that
(13:41):
twenties on diplomacy.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Regular Shirley Temple.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, just so she says, well, you know,
mister b why don't we just pretend it is Sunday
that he's going. He's not a monster, he's not gonna
be rude to a child. So he says, okay, very well,
because you are so arming, and so Shirley templish, we'll
give it to you. That opens the flight gates. Other
(14:06):
kids here about it. They call them scamps. Patted him
on the head, you know, I get yeah, you little rumplements.
And so the shopkeeper, I'm okay with it.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's an Apartif I'm not mistaken, I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
I just think it's a fun word. So this spreads
like any other popular treat or toy amid the children,
amid the juvenile populace, and the shopkeeper can't if he
says yes to one kid, he's got to say yes
to the other ones. So they start offering the dish
(14:44):
every day, and they start offering it in more flavors. Again,
this is pretty apocryphal. But now we've got Wisconsin versus
New York for the origin of the Sunday. Now our
next question is which of these stories is true. So
if we go back to Corey Earle, we'll see that
(15:06):
he looks into this origin or providence of the chocolate
Sunday or the Sunday is a concept right for his
case in Ithaca, it's the cherry Sunday, and he says, look,
if you check out the publications of the time, then
you will see the first use of the word Sunday
(15:28):
referring to this dessert does show up in the Ithaca
Daily Journal on Tuesday, April fifth, eighteen ninety two, just
two days after local Lore says this confection was created.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Right, and then we have another notice published in the
Daily Sun the next day, Cherry Sunday a delicious, dainty
ice cream novelty just out yesterday at Platin Colts Fountain
and nowhere else. Earl goes on. Platin. Coult's claim is
bolstered by its attempts to trademark the term Sunday. Evidence
by a letter dated March twenty third, eighteen ninety four
(16:03):
in Chester Platt's collected papers that are held in archive
at the University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections. So as
far as the wisconstant claim goes Robbins, the historical nemesis
of Earl. Now, I'm sure they're cool, goes on. The
most aggressive challenger is Ithaca, referring to the Wisconsin claim
(16:27):
New York, which points to a nineteenth century newspaper article
or ad rather are for a locally served Sunday as
referred to above. In a New York Times article on
the dispute, Ithaca's mayor through some serious shade at Two Rivers,
saying we have the historical documents to prove it, and
they don't. Two Rivers wouldn't take this sitting or lying down,
(16:49):
and they passed a resolution. There's a RealD beef going on.
No trouble right here in Two Rivers City. The city
passed a resolution demanding the Ithaca cease and desist with
its Sunday's landers. It said, man, this is getting heated.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
I do want to point out the Chester Platte you
did something awesome. I've always i have always speculated over
whether my collective works will end up in a university
library's rare manuscript collection.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
It's pretty tight. I hope that far. It's the dream.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It's a dream for sure. Let us not forget that, Nola,
you did a pretty solid reference to trouble right here
in River City. Phenomenal musical number.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
If we're trying to figure out whether these folks in
Ithaca and two Rivers are actually beefed up, we have
to get an outside opinion. So if you go to
trade groups like US Food, you'll see articles here's the
best one. You'll see articles like a brief history of
the ice Cream Sunday s U n d Ae. Who look,
(17:58):
they delve into it as an objective third party. They
cannot figure out the providence, and they make the whole
thing even more of a slappy bowl of ice cream
because they point out that there are not just these two,
but several other cities who claim to invent to have
(18:19):
invented the ice cream Sunday, including New Orleans and Eveston, Illinois.
So now we have to maybe loop Illinois and Louisiana
and this conversation. Look, we already have a ton of
we already have a ton of episodes that hinge on
(18:40):
New York, Illinois and Louisiana because we clearly listen to
those first two soft John Stevens albums and decided that
we were going to make an episode for every state.
And yes, Discounts is our Wisconsin episode. We're in on
a technicality.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Heck, yeah, love a technicality. So what's the deal? Which
story is true? As often is the case in these
types of history mysteries, not entirely clear even to this day.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, yeah, And with that, the mystery remains unsolved. The
riddle remains ridiculous, ridliculous. I'm gonna keep it and Max,
thank you for the drum riff on that. When one
of the big questions we had the hopefully the same
(19:34):
question you had, fellow ridiculous historians, one that we posed
at the beginning of this episode, why is it now
spelled sun day s U N d A E and
not sun day s U and d A Y.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
What happened? Yeah, it's like we teased at the top.
The idea is an Evanston, Illinois, which was often referred
to as Heavenstone ill because it was known for being
a bit Bible Thumpy, they passed a city ordinance banning
the sale of ice cream sodas on Sunday. We've talked
(20:11):
about these blue laws often. Some have been in effect
still to this day, and in fact, in South Carolina
across the bridge from my hometown. I distinctly remember when
I was a student in college needing to repair something,
or needing like a shower curtain or some kind of
household item, and being denied purchasing them at the local
(20:33):
hardware store. And that was the first time I was
kind of made aware of what blue laws were. But
they are these puritanical sort of prohibitions of certain items
that are not considered to be necessities or even could
be considered more like indulgences. Alcohol sale on Sundays would
certainly be considered one of these blue laws, and I'm
(20:54):
sure there are still places in the country that do that,
and there are of course dry counties. Well, but yeah,
they needed a workaround, didn't they been, Yeah, they did.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Blue laws are a very strange phenomenon, not unique to
the United States. So Heavenston Evanston is getting a little
bit persnicty about their fundamentalist approach to recreation and to
what they see as vice. So thanks again to Jeff
Wells writing for Mental Floss, which is where we're pulling
(21:35):
this from. The Methodist Church which runs the town of
Evanston doesn't like that there are a lot of crowds
going to local soda fountains, perhaps in place of going
to church. So the soda fountains and drug stores came
up with this workaround and they started calling it not
(21:56):
an ice cream soda, but a Sunday soda. Here's a
former newspaper editor named Richard Lloyd Jones who grew up
in Evanston at the time, and he said, look, here's
what they did. They served ice cream with the syrup
of your choice, the stuff that would ordinarily go in
(22:17):
your favorite soda, without the soda. So it was technically
not an ice cream soda. It was just ice cream
and the syrup.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
They were upset about the soda, not the ice cream.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
The specific ingredients were the problems, so they removed one
of the ingredients, which means they technically complied with the law.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
I guess that it's funny that there's this whole hullabaloo
around ice cream sodas versus just sodas or just ice cream.
It's like the combination of them makes it like more decadent.
It's two decaded for Sunday.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
And this is.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Something that reminds me of again that excellent song You
Got Trouble, originally written by Robert Preston, where he talks about, uh,
you know, the the first thing a kid is gonna
do is start wearing knickerbockers.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
You'll hear him say so is your old man? Uh yeah, he'll.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Trouble sleep it in the core crip. Well, never mind
the Dan lines getting pulled.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Oh man, it's okay. With a capital T that rhymes
with P that stands for pool.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, well the capital B and that rhymes with P
and that stands for pool, and your youth will be
frittering away. So it is a great song, and please
do check out SETH McFarland's cover of it. I don't
know if anybody's seen it, but the man has perfect pitch.
He's a phenomenal musician.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
He's a great singer and a great voice artist in
his comedy ticularly Also, the New Its series on HBO
IS makes great use of this exact sequence from the
music Man as a as A as A motif in
the first episode.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, the name of that show is Welcome to Darry.
We're big fans of it. If you're checking out HBO
or Max already do check out The Chair Company, which
we are absolutely gaga for anyway. So, because of this loophole,
the Sunday Soda succeeded where other approaches in Evanston failed.
(24:15):
They went with another name change to avoid offending the
church so that they did not.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
They did not.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Have the Lord's Day Day associated with this confection, so
they changed it to be spelled s u n d A.
That's the theory at least.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Right Yeah, no, but it makes sense though, I mean,
whether that's the case or not, the wanting to keep
that branding and keep that you know, everyone knows who
this thing is now, but also not run a foul
of any you know, religious organizations. I could see it.
But can you Are there any other clever ways you
could you could reappropriate Sunday other than AE?
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, for sure, Yeah you could. You could call it
su u n That's sure. You could call it you know,
you could just elongate the vowels mm hmm, yeah, you
could do that, or s.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
U n d ee heyway, so the the there's a
murky bit of historical mystery here, but we do know
again leaning on the research of Corey Earl, that in
a nineteen o two article in a magazine called the Spatula,
which was sort of a trade uh trade rag for pharmacists,
(25:33):
you don't understand what to do with pharmacists, but I guess, yeah, yeah,
I guess spachelas were much more important in pharmacology at
the time.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
They they described the growing popularity of the Sunday spelled
s u n d ae. So that proves that this
spelling had become popularized, normalized, and accepted by the end
of the by the turn of the twentieth century. Wisconsin's
(26:04):
idea of Wisconsin's defense of the spelling change and the
providence is tough because most of them have been drinking
too much to give us a straight answer.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Too much milk. Sure, and we'll go with that.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
With that, we have we have a bunch of other
stuff that we we wanted to get to, but we're
just gonna mention too.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
For time.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
You can't talk about the original og Sunday without talking
about the infamous banana split.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Well that's the thing, man, It starts to really occur
to me that this idea of a Sunday is such
a catch all because like I think, all banana splits
are Sundays, but not all sundays or banana splits. It's
one of those kind of like ven Diagram things because
it is literally just an ice cream Sunday ad banana right.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And you could even argue that an ice cream Sunday
is kind of a tactic or that's aproach more so
than a list of discrete ingredients.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Oh yeah, because it can be anything. I mean, that's
why it's so, it's why it seems to be such
parallel thinking. And the use of Sunday is really the
only mystery here, because ice cream on its own is great,
But who wasn't going to decide to, you know, drizzle
some stuff on top of it.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
You've got other stuff that you can add in about
olive oil and ice cream.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
I have good, yeah, good, nice grassy olive oil. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I like that you point out grassy because not all
olive oil is created equally.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
And you got that out with a plum, my friend,
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So the history of the banana split, according to the
Great American banana split celebration is a real thing.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It starts when a kid who's like twenty three years
old named Dave Strickler is working in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and
he starts combining different stuff with ice cream.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Real mad scientists there, Yeah, very much so.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
And he he ends up splitting a banana in half
length wise. He adds vanilla, chocolate and strawberry or we
know he adds three scoops. We don't know what they
were originally, and then he puts syrup, nuts, swipt cream
and a little cherry on it and people love it.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Remember that terrifying hr puffin stuff. Ask the television show
the Banana Splits, I do horrifying hor They look like
the Rock of Fire explosion band from Chuckie Cheese came
to life and started a psychedelic band.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Oh god, I mean honestly, I just read this and
I'm like, dude, this guy just sounds like he's like
super high, Like he just comes in He's.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Like totally yeah, throw it in there.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Also, at this point in time, he without getting into
the weeds of chronology, our buddy Dave does not have
a cell phone, so he's not on social media. He's
sitting around and if it's a slow day, he's got
to find something to fill his time. And that happened
to be mad Science experiments with confections.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
You know.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
That's why the sixties are fine. That's why, like you know,
period films are so important and and fun, like the
new it thing takes place in the sixties where kids
had to go outside and play and make stuff and
trying funny ingredients on their ice streak from a hose.
There you go.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, Mom says, I can't come back in the afternoon
because the milkman's coming over, and then the post office worker,
and then I still have to be home before dark.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Is there some hanky panking going on between mom and
the and the milkman?
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Who are we to pank the hank? We can't say. However,
one thing that's always on our mind with this kind
of stuff is the most outrey, the most ostentatious, the
most opulent version of a nice cream.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
How much could a banana cost?
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Michael right, exactly so per the Guinness Book World Records.
As we found out, this is something w end on.
The World's most expensive ice cream ever comes from Japan
from a company called salato.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah. I saw a video of somebody eating one of
these and they were like it's fine, you know, like
A yeah, I mean because the sticker shock of something
like that, there's no way it can live up to
the high There's just no possible way. And a big
part of this cost is that, of course it's like
covered in gold leaf and has like you know, finest
Parmesano Reggiano cheeses and some sort of byproduct of sake
(30:33):
that's like, uh, do you know about this ben sake?
Le's isn't like the way that comes from the cheese,
like the curry. Okay, that's a that's a good comparison. Yeah,
they're claim to fame. This Japanese company is an ice
cream called b.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Y A k u y a.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
They source white truffles from Alba, Italy. Like you like
you said Pamagano Reggiano. Uh, the sake lees I that
comparison you're making to kurds and whey, they're they're the
leftover stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
There's a ton of gold leaf, folks.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
If you want a scoop of this ice cream, you're
paying six thousand, six hundred and ninety six US dollars
for four point four ounces. I'm gonna pass.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, it's a hard pass for me. But if you
do want to check it out and see somebody react
to it, you can go to it looks like Insider Food. No,
here we are. There's an even better one. BuzzFeed video
did it. This is the one where they're kind of
like it's man on Tasty as well as on Insider Food.
Is the world's most expensive ice cream worth its price tag?
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, and the answer is going to be probably not,
just to be honest. Also, ice cream is a flavor medium,
which means you can put all sorts of flavors upon
that frozen dairy confection. I've had blue cheese ice cream.
I didn't hate it. I've had every everything. Bagel ice
(32:01):
cream appeals to me.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
That's somewhat appeals to me.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
I wasn't mad at it, but it felt like the
scoop took a while. They're all all sorts of flavors.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
I'll tell you what I like. I like cereal milk
ice cream. There was a Mama Fuku had like a
little soft survey place. I don't know if they do
it anymore. It was called Momofuku Milk Bar. But not
to be confused with milk bar, the other cookie you know,
confectionery place. But they had Cereal milk ice cream, which
I think they made by like soaking like fruity pebbles
(32:33):
in milk and then using that milk to make the
ice cream. But one that I really dug there was
a little odd seeming was cream corn. Very tasty.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
I wasn't opposed. I was also surprised by mac and
cheese ice cream. Pickle ice cream was interesting, but I'm
also quite compelled by the future of spiced ice cream.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Spiced cream. Yeah, yeah, with that, we can't wait to
spice must flow.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yes, the spice bus flow. We can't wait to hear
from you, folks. Hop on over to our Facebook page,
Ridiculous Historians. Give us some of your favorite weird ice
cream flavors. Who are we to judge one person's weird
as another person's Thursday?
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Tell you someone's young, right, you know, live and let lift.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Yeah, as long as you're not hurting somebody else, right,
uh so. Big thanks to our super producer mister Max
Williams as well as our research associate for today's episode,
and big thanks to Alex Williams who composed this Slap
and bop has breaking news nol Jonathan Strickland aka the
Twister invited us to go see a play.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
I did not receive this invites.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Okay, I'll forward the email. He's not performing in it,
so so we're.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Gonna give you as to forward. And I don't think
I was invited. Just put that out there, Just put.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
It out so we'll say, we'll say this, you get
a pass this time in the credits, Twister, We're not
gonna dump on.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
I also thought you were gonna say has died. Just
throw that in as you said it a little little
known fact that Jonathan Strickland, the Quizz has died and
now he lives. He lives.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
I would just be like, okay, and who else? Noel?
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Who else? He's unkillable?
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Frankly, yeah, he rises faster and stronger.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
You can't kill an idea, you can't kill a concept.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Of he can't stop the signal. Also big thanks to
doctor Rachel Big Spinach Lance and A. J. Bahamas Jacobs.
Who else? Who else?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Oh yeah, a jbj that's what we call him. Who else? Gosh,
Chris Frosciotis and Eves Jeff Co's here in spirit, I'm
gonna throw my hat in the ring to thank Max
again for this awesome research doc. And thanks to you Ben,
this has really been a fun conversation.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
And thanks to you, Cory, Ryan Earl, thanks to you
Dean Robbins, and thanks to all the bored soda jerks
of yesteryear.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
Max the Madman.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Williams screaming for ice cream. Yeah, I love ice cream.
It's delicious.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
And that's mister Noel Brown, none other than And you're
Ben Bullin and I am Ben Bullen. And today, in
typical Ridiculous History fashion, given that it is a colder
time of the year and our Fairmantrop Bliss of Atlanta,
we decided to do an episode about a specific version
(01:06):
of ice cream. And I can't remember if I told you,
nol MX, but when circumstances found me in Vienna as
the weather was turning several years ago, was quite cold,
and surprise, surprise, people were still lining up for ice cream.
Austrians love ice cream in all versions.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Mm hmmm, yeah, I mean, I don't blame them. It's
a delightful confection and I don't find it to be
necessarily seasonal. If you're indoors and you have climate control,
what's stopping you from eating ice cream?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Right? And you have to have some kind of climate
control to make ice cream in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
My gosh, we should do an episode on the history
of ice And one of my favorite phrases you ever
used that still occurs to me sometimes is once, oh,
a few years ago, we were making some videos for
stuff they Don't Want you to do, and you described
part of the good life as iced creams. Oh. Yes,
(02:06):
of course I love iced creams. Yes, I like that.
I like like egg creams, which contains neither egg nor cream.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, the pity of the formula, right, we don't have
to relitigate that one. But we do have something to
bring to you today, fellow ridiculous historians. It's something that
caught the eye of our research associate superproducer Max Williams
for this episode. The concept of the ice cream Sunday
(02:34):
conventionally spelled here in the US, not like the day
of the week, but s U N.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
D a e s one of those things you see
and you're like, I don't know, maybe it's it's given
you pause where you're like, is that what is this?
Is this an invented word?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
And I realized in reading this brief Max, I'd never
really questioned it. I don't believe. But then the moment
that I started looking into your research, I was like,
of course that's weird. Why in the hell is it
spelled that way? And of course it has something to
do with religion.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Right, Yes, as we'll see. So let's begin with an
excellent article slash Investigation by Cory Ryan Earl, writing for
the Kenelians.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Cornellians.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, from Cornell, a semi famous university in Ithaca, New York.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Right, shout out to my buddy James, the Cornell alone
one of them Ivy leagues. If I'm not mistaken, it
is true. That is true.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
No, and congrats James. Those schools so our buddy Corey says,
the ice cream Sunday is an American staple. This simple
and customizable treat simply put scoops of ice cream with
some sort of sauce and toppings, gained popularity in the
early twentieth century. Now, if you go to Corey's research,
(04:02):
you'll see that there's a strong argument the ice cream
Sunday originated in Ithaca, New York. However, as we will learn,
with so many inventions that may not be entirely the case. Spoiler,
Wisconsin is going to enter the chat a little bit later,
maybe we get to what about this, Maybe we get
(04:25):
to the origin story that Corey Earl gives.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Us for sure. Can we also just get it out
of the way right up front? Ice cream with sauce
and toppings. Not the most unique take. It probably was
done by a couple of folks, you know, for the
quote unquote first time. The idea of calling it a
Sunday is I think what's at question was at the
heart of this investigation. So yeah, it's almost more branding
(04:51):
one hundred percent yep. And then why the hell is
it spelled that way? Well, we're gonna get to it.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
So.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Plattin Cult's drug Store was a soda fountain shop operating
in downtown Ithaca on two sixteen East State Street. One day,
according to lore Chester, Platt, the proprietor of said drug
store slash soda fountain, stopped by the shop after church
(05:17):
on Sunday, where he attended at Ithaca's first Unitarian church.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Which is interesting for the time universal Unitarianism could be
its own episode.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Very progressive. I grew up hanging with some Unitarians and
they would always host like metal shows in there, like
a fellowship hall, which I thought was pretty cool. So
we would play, you know, shows at the Unitarian church
there in Augusta. So yeah, the first Unitarian church. He
actually came with a with a guest to his shop,
the Reverend John Scott, and Platte asked his soda fountain
(05:50):
worker one de Forest Christians, I love the name, the
fabulous name, to prepare two dishes of vanilla ice cream. Now, well,
let's set the stage here, folks. We are again on Sunday,
mid afternoon, April third, eighteen ninety two, where a Platin
Colt's drug store and the guy who is bringing his guest,
(06:13):
a man of local renowned the reverend. The guy, the
proprietor Chester is trying to flex a little bit, so
we say he's probably saying to the Reverend John Scott,
you know, get whatever you want, Reverend. Don't order the
lobster because we probably don't have it. But you know,
if you want to throw something on this vanilla ice cream,
(06:36):
be my guest. And so accounts different again per Corey
Earle as to which man chose the specific toppings for
this vanilla ice cream. Ultimately they ended up with ice
cream that was not just vanilla, but it had cherry
syrup and a candied cherry atop the scoop. Now it
(06:58):
would have been the kind of cherry syrup they would
have used in the soda fountain problem. So this was
not like we did not yet have bespoke ice cream toppings. Yeah,
and they had to kind of use what was available.
Hence the lore of it all. One man asked the other,
which one asked, who is still as history mystery what
the new concoction might be called? The reply was a
(07:21):
cherry Sunday, in honor of its creation day.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Get it, because it's Sunday, we put cherries on it,
you know what I mean. We're today, we're doing our thing,
and we're also a bit unitarian and unorthodox because we're
putting soda syrup.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
It's a bit of a cross of the sacred and
the profane, you might argue, you know, I mean, ice
cream is sort of an indulgence, a bit of a
naughty treat.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
I like the papal reference. Also, we have to admit that,
we have to admit that American nomenclature has had a
weird headway and with the phrase vanilla, because now vanilla
is meant to describe something very beige and unremarkable. But
civilizations absolutely rose and fell based on vanilla as a spice.
(08:15):
So it's weird for sure, and you know, it does
make me think too. This idea of christening a dairy based,
you know, treat after the Lord's Day is pretty progressive
considering that, you know, in the past, the Catholic Church
might have, you know, forced you to put a buck
in that butter box in order to consume a tasty
(08:35):
dairy treat. Right, yeah, And you can hear various games
of telephone regarding the Sunday origin story, and some of
these pieces of anecdote or apocrypha will suggest that students
at Cornell helped popularize this idea. They also wanted their
(08:57):
vanilla with a little bit of cherry, the concept being,
or the argument being, that they witnessed the debut of
this secret off menu item, and they kept coming back
to pratting cults and ordering the new treat just the
same way the reverend did. And then they would go
(09:18):
on vacation on the constitutionals and they would come back
to the town after graduation and they would say, oh,
we want that platin cult off menu special item, not
just vanilla. Creams for us, but please with some cherry
sauce and a cherry at top. Please, Yes, pretty please
(09:41):
with a cherry on top. I like the etymology there, Noel,
we also see the Platin cult leaned into this. Over
the next several weeks, they would run advertisements in the
local paper, the Daily Sun, advertising what they called the
Cherry Sunday spelled at this point s U n.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
D A y Well. I mean, soda fountain history has
a lot in common with diner history and the idea
of like daily specials and stuff like that, you know,
so this sort of falls into that in an interesting way.
We're gonna get to more of of how that's the
case in a little bit. But we've got another potential
version of the story in the form of Wisconsin, who
(10:23):
has now entered the chat.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Absolutely not, this is the origin story. This is our
shortest episode ever. Thank you for tuning in, and sorry
about the ads.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Fun Let's talk about Wisconsin. Scratch, nice scratch Wisconsin people.
Oh god, they're so nice, and they, you know, are
a bit more dairy centric over there and very little
so record scratch.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Wisconsin has entered the Chat. Let's go to Dean Robbins
for Wisconsin Life, he says, and I'm not going to
do the voice. I like driving across Wisconsin to see
a legendary historical sites. I planned whole trips around the
(11:11):
Euclaire baseball field where Hank Aaron got a start, and
the Janesville House where Abraham Lincoln spent the night, which
is his story for another day. But every once in
a while, says Dean, I stumble across a bit of
Wisconsin history. I knew nothing about. That happened on a
recent drive through the northeast part of the state. When
(11:33):
I pulled into two rivers in Central Park, I noticed
an official Wisconsin historical marker claiming it as the birthplace
of the ice cream Sunday spelled Sundae, which is oddly
a bit Korean.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Any Wait a minute, now, they can't. They don't just
pass out historical markers willy nilly, right, so the guy continues,
Dean continues, coincidentally, my favorite dessert.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Could such a major phenomenon have originated in this small town?
Let's learn more about the marker.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
On the marker, it claims that a local man by
the name of George Hallower. Too many very similar story
walked into a soda fountain fifteenth Street there in Eau
Claire in eighteen eighty one. This is eleven years. However,
prior to the previous origin story, he asked the proprietor
of this soda fountain, one Edward Berner, to top a
(12:28):
dish of ice cream off with some chocolate sauce, a
substance that had previously been only used for ice cream sodas,
which is of course a thanks scoop of ice cream
like a root beer float. Also, chocolate sauce would have
been used in those egg creams we were talking about
a minute ago. This new concoction says, the marker caught
on and Berner began to sell them for a nickel,
(12:51):
but only on Sundays.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Only on Sundays, and as we have proven in previous
episodes of this and many other shows, capitalism manufactured scarcity right. However, However,
out of all the people who might have walked in
on a Saturday or a Tuesday and unsuccessfully attempted to
order this nickel chocolate sauce iced cream, there was a
(13:17):
ten year old girl who must have had a lot
of charm about her. She said she wants her dish
of ice cream, well with that stuff on the top
on a different day of the week. Now our buddy,
our momentary protagonist, the proprietor, Edward Berner. He says, absolutely
not until this girl, who again is just rolling that
(13:41):
twenties on diplomacy.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Regular Shirley Temple.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, just so she says, well, you know,
mister b why don't we just pretend it is Sunday
that he's going. He's not a monster, he's not gonna
be rude to a child. So he says, okay, very well,
because you are so arming, and so Shirley templish, we'll
give it to you. That opens the flight gates. Other
(14:06):
kids here about it. They call them scamps. Patted him
on the head, you know, I get yeah, you little rumplements.
And so the shopkeeper, I'm okay with it.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's an Apartif I'm not mistaken, I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
I just think it's a fun word. So this spreads
like any other popular treat or toy amid the children,
amid the juvenile populace, and the shopkeeper can't if he
says yes to one kid, he's got to say yes
to the other ones. So they start offering the dish
(14:44):
every day, and they start offering it in more flavors. Again,
this is pretty apocryphal. But now we've got Wisconsin versus
New York for the origin of the Sunday. Now our
next question is which of these stories is true. So
if we go back to Corey Earle, we'll see that
(15:06):
he looks into this origin or providence of the chocolate
Sunday or the Sunday is a concept right for his
case in Ithaca, it's the cherry Sunday, and he says, look,
if you check out the publications of the time, then
you will see the first use of the word Sunday
(15:28):
referring to this dessert does show up in the Ithaca
Daily Journal on Tuesday, April fifth, eighteen ninety two, just
two days after local Lore says this confection was created.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Right, and then we have another notice published in the
Daily Sun the next day, Cherry Sunday a delicious, dainty
ice cream novelty just out yesterday at Platin Colts Fountain
and nowhere else. Earl goes on. Platin. Coult's claim is
bolstered by its attempts to trademark the term Sunday. Evidence
by a letter dated March twenty third, eighteen ninety four
(16:03):
in Chester Platt's collected papers that are held in archive
at the University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections. So as
far as the wisconstant claim goes Robbins, the historical nemesis
of Earl. Now, I'm sure they're cool, goes on. The
most aggressive challenger is Ithaca, referring to the Wisconsin claim
(16:27):
New York, which points to a nineteenth century newspaper article
or ad rather are for a locally served Sunday as
referred to above. In a New York Times article on
the dispute, Ithaca's mayor through some serious shade at Two Rivers,
saying we have the historical documents to prove it, and
they don't. Two Rivers wouldn't take this sitting or lying down,
(16:49):
and they passed a resolution. There's a RealD beef going on.
No trouble right here in Two Rivers City. The city
passed a resolution demanding the Ithaca cease and desist with
its Sunday's landers. It said, man, this is getting heated.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
I do want to point out the Chester Platte you
did something awesome. I've always i have always speculated over
whether my collective works will end up in a university
library's rare manuscript collection.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
It's pretty tight. I hope that far. It's the dream.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It's a dream for sure. Let us not forget that, Nola,
you did a pretty solid reference to trouble right here
in River City. Phenomenal musical number.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
If we're trying to figure out whether these folks in
Ithaca and two Rivers are actually beefed up, we have
to get an outside opinion. So if you go to
trade groups like US Food, you'll see articles here's the
best one. You'll see articles like a brief history of
the ice Cream Sunday s U n d Ae. Who look,
(17:58):
they delve into it as an objective third party. They
cannot figure out the providence, and they make the whole
thing even more of a slappy bowl of ice cream
because they point out that there are not just these two,
but several other cities who claim to invent to have
(18:19):
invented the ice cream Sunday, including New Orleans and Eveston, Illinois.
So now we have to maybe loop Illinois and Louisiana
and this conversation. Look, we already have a ton of
we already have a ton of episodes that hinge on
(18:40):
New York, Illinois and Louisiana because we clearly listen to
those first two soft John Stevens albums and decided that
we were going to make an episode for every state.
And yes, Discounts is our Wisconsin episode. We're in on
a technicality.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Heck, yeah, love a technicality. So what's the deal? Which
story is true? As often is the case in these
types of history mysteries, not entirely clear even to this day.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, yeah, And with that, the mystery remains unsolved. The
riddle remains ridiculous, ridliculous. I'm gonna keep it and Max,
thank you for the drum riff on that. When one
of the big questions we had the hopefully the same
(19:34):
question you had, fellow ridiculous historians, one that we posed
at the beginning of this episode, why is it now
spelled sun day s U N d A E and
not sun day s U and d A Y.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
What happened? Yeah, it's like we teased at the top.
The idea is an Evanston, Illinois, which was often referred
to as Heavenstone ill because it was known for being
a bit Bible Thumpy, they passed a city ordinance banning
the sale of ice cream sodas on Sunday. We've talked
(20:11):
about these blue laws often. Some have been in effect
still to this day, and in fact, in South Carolina
across the bridge from my hometown. I distinctly remember when
I was a student in college needing to repair something,
or needing like a shower curtain or some kind of
household item, and being denied purchasing them at the local
(20:33):
hardware store. And that was the first time I was
kind of made aware of what blue laws were. But
they are these puritanical sort of prohibitions of certain items
that are not considered to be necessities or even could
be considered more like indulgences. Alcohol sale on Sundays would
certainly be considered one of these blue laws, and I'm
(20:54):
sure there are still places in the country that do that,
and there are of course dry counties. Well, but yeah,
they needed a workaround, didn't they been, Yeah, they did.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Blue laws are a very strange phenomenon, not unique to
the United States. So Heavenston Evanston is getting a little
bit persnicty about their fundamentalist approach to recreation and to
what they see as vice. So thanks again to Jeff
Wells writing for Mental Floss, which is where we're pulling
(21:35):
this from. The Methodist Church which runs the town of
Evanston doesn't like that there are a lot of crowds
going to local soda fountains, perhaps in place of going
to church. So the soda fountains and drug stores came
up with this workaround and they started calling it not
(21:56):
an ice cream soda, but a Sunday soda. Here's a
former newspaper editor named Richard Lloyd Jones who grew up
in Evanston at the time, and he said, look, here's
what they did. They served ice cream with the syrup
of your choice, the stuff that would ordinarily go in
(22:17):
your favorite soda, without the soda. So it was technically
not an ice cream soda. It was just ice cream
and the syrup.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
They were upset about the soda, not the ice cream.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
The specific ingredients were the problems, so they removed one
of the ingredients, which means they technically complied with the law.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
I guess that it's funny that there's this whole hullabaloo
around ice cream sodas versus just sodas or just ice cream.
It's like the combination of them makes it like more decadent.
It's two decaded for Sunday.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
And this is.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Something that reminds me of again that excellent song You
Got Trouble, originally written by Robert Preston, where he talks about, uh,
you know, the the first thing a kid is gonna
do is start wearing knickerbockers.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
You'll hear him say so is your old man? Uh yeah, he'll.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Trouble sleep it in the core crip. Well, never mind
the Dan lines getting pulled.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Oh man, it's okay. With a capital T that rhymes
with P that stands for pool.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, well the capital B and that rhymes with P
and that stands for pool, and your youth will be
frittering away. So it is a great song, and please
do check out SETH McFarland's cover of it. I don't
know if anybody's seen it, but the man has perfect pitch.
He's a phenomenal musician.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
He's a great singer and a great voice artist in
his comedy ticularly Also, the New Its series on HBO
IS makes great use of this exact sequence from the
music Man as a as A as A motif in
the first episode.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, the name of that show is Welcome to Darry.
We're big fans of it. If you're checking out HBO
or Max already do check out The Chair Company, which
we are absolutely gaga for anyway. So, because of this loophole,
the Sunday Soda succeeded where other approaches in Evanston failed.
(24:15):
They went with another name change to avoid offending the
church so that they did not.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
They did not.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Have the Lord's Day Day associated with this confection, so
they changed it to be spelled s u n d A.
That's the theory at least.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Right Yeah, no, but it makes sense though, I mean,
whether that's the case or not, the wanting to keep
that branding and keep that you know, everyone knows who
this thing is now, but also not run a foul
of any you know, religious organizations. I could see it.
But can you Are there any other clever ways you
could you could reappropriate Sunday other than AE?
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, for sure, Yeah you could. You could call it
su u n That's sure. You could call it you know,
you could just elongate the vowels mm hmm, yeah, you
could do that, or s.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
U n d ee heyway, so the the there's a
murky bit of historical mystery here, but we do know
again leaning on the research of Corey Earl, that in
a nineteen o two article in a magazine called the Spatula,
which was sort of a trade uh trade rag for pharmacists,
(25:33):
you don't understand what to do with pharmacists, but I guess, yeah, yeah,
I guess spachelas were much more important in pharmacology at
the time.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
They they described the growing popularity of the Sunday spelled
s u n d ae. So that proves that this
spelling had become popularized, normalized, and accepted by the end
of the by the turn of the twentieth century. Wisconsin's
(26:04):
idea of Wisconsin's defense of the spelling change and the
providence is tough because most of them have been drinking
too much to give us a straight answer.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Too much milk. Sure, and we'll go with that.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
With that, we have we have a bunch of other
stuff that we we wanted to get to, but we're
just gonna mention too.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
For time.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
You can't talk about the original og Sunday without talking
about the infamous banana split.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Well that's the thing, man, It starts to really occur
to me that this idea of a Sunday is such
a catch all because like I think, all banana splits
are Sundays, but not all sundays or banana splits. It's
one of those kind of like ven Diagram things because
it is literally just an ice cream Sunday ad banana right.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And you could even argue that an ice cream Sunday
is kind of a tactic or that's aproach more so
than a list of discrete ingredients.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Oh yeah, because it can be anything. I mean, that's
why it's so, it's why it seems to be such
parallel thinking. And the use of Sunday is really the
only mystery here, because ice cream on its own is great,
But who wasn't going to decide to, you know, drizzle
some stuff on top of it.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
You've got other stuff that you can add in about
olive oil and ice cream.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
I have good, yeah, good, nice grassy olive oil. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I like that you point out grassy because not all
olive oil is created equally.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
And you got that out with a plum, my friend,
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So the history of the banana split, according to the
Great American banana split celebration is a real thing.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It starts when a kid who's like twenty three years
old named Dave Strickler is working in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and
he starts combining different stuff with ice cream.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Real mad scientists there, Yeah, very much so.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
And he he ends up splitting a banana in half
length wise. He adds vanilla, chocolate and strawberry or we
know he adds three scoops. We don't know what they
were originally, and then he puts syrup, nuts, swipt cream
and a little cherry on it and people love it.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Remember that terrifying hr puffin stuff. Ask the television show
the Banana Splits, I do horrifying hor They look like
the Rock of Fire explosion band from Chuckie Cheese came
to life and started a psychedelic band.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Oh god, I mean honestly, I just read this and
I'm like, dude, this guy just sounds like he's like
super high, Like he just comes in He's.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Like totally yeah, throw it in there.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Also, at this point in time, he without getting into
the weeds of chronology, our buddy Dave does not have
a cell phone, so he's not on social media. He's
sitting around and if it's a slow day, he's got
to find something to fill his time. And that happened
to be mad Science experiments with confections.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
You know.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
That's why the sixties are fine. That's why, like you know,
period films are so important and and fun, like the
new it thing takes place in the sixties where kids
had to go outside and play and make stuff and
trying funny ingredients on their ice streak from a hose.
There you go.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, Mom says, I can't come back in the afternoon
because the milkman's coming over, and then the post office worker,
and then I still have to be home before dark.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Is there some hanky panking going on between mom and
the and the milkman?
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Who are we to pank the hank? We can't say. However,
one thing that's always on our mind with this kind
of stuff is the most outrey, the most ostentatious, the
most opulent version of a nice cream.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
How much could a banana cost?
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Michael right, exactly so per the Guinness Book World Records.
As we found out, this is something w end on.
The World's most expensive ice cream ever comes from Japan
from a company called salato.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah. I saw a video of somebody eating one of
these and they were like it's fine, you know, like
A yeah, I mean because the sticker shock of something
like that, there's no way it can live up to
the high There's just no possible way. And a big
part of this cost is that, of course it's like
covered in gold leaf and has like you know, finest
Parmesano Reggiano cheeses and some sort of byproduct of sake
(30:33):
that's like, uh, do you know about this ben sake?
Le's isn't like the way that comes from the cheese,
like the curry. Okay, that's a that's a good comparison. Yeah,
they're claim to fame. This Japanese company is an ice
cream called b.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Y A k u y a.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
They source white truffles from Alba, Italy. Like you like
you said Pamagano Reggiano. Uh, the sake lees I that
comparison you're making to kurds and whey, they're they're the
leftover stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
There's a ton of gold leaf, folks.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
If you want a scoop of this ice cream, you're
paying six thousand, six hundred and ninety six US dollars
for four point four ounces. I'm gonna pass.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, it's a hard pass for me. But if you
do want to check it out and see somebody react
to it, you can go to it looks like Insider Food. No,
here we are. There's an even better one. BuzzFeed video
did it. This is the one where they're kind of
like it's man on Tasty as well as on Insider Food.
Is the world's most expensive ice cream worth its price tag?
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, and the answer is going to be probably not,
just to be honest. Also, ice cream is a flavor medium,
which means you can put all sorts of flavors upon
that frozen dairy confection. I've had blue cheese ice cream.
I didn't hate it. I've had every everything. Bagel ice
(32:01):
cream appeals to me.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
That's somewhat appeals to me.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
I wasn't mad at it, but it felt like the
scoop took a while. They're all all sorts of flavors.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
I'll tell you what I like. I like cereal milk
ice cream. There was a Mama Fuku had like a
little soft survey place. I don't know if they do
it anymore. It was called Momofuku Milk Bar. But not
to be confused with milk bar, the other cookie you know,
confectionery place. But they had Cereal milk ice cream, which
I think they made by like soaking like fruity pebbles
(32:33):
in milk and then using that milk to make the
ice cream. But one that I really dug there was
a little odd seeming was cream corn. Very tasty.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
I wasn't opposed. I was also surprised by mac and
cheese ice cream. Pickle ice cream was interesting, but I'm
also quite compelled by the future of spiced ice cream.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Spiced cream. Yeah, yeah, with that, we can't wait to
spice must flow.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yes, the spice bus flow. We can't wait to hear
from you, folks. Hop on over to our Facebook page,
Ridiculous Historians. Give us some of your favorite weird ice
cream flavors. Who are we to judge one person's weird
as another person's Thursday?
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Tell you someone's young, right, you know, live and let lift.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Yeah, as long as you're not hurting somebody else, right,
uh so. Big thanks to our super producer mister Max
Williams as well as our research associate for today's episode,
and big thanks to Alex Williams who composed this Slap
and bop has breaking news nol Jonathan Strickland aka the
Twister invited us to go see a play.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
I did not receive this invites.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Okay, I'll forward the email. He's not performing in it,
so so we're.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Gonna give you as to forward. And I don't think
I was invited. Just put that out there, Just put.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
It out so we'll say, we'll say this, you get
a pass this time in the credits, Twister, We're not
gonna dump on.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
I also thought you were gonna say has died. Just
throw that in as you said it a little little
known fact that Jonathan Strickland, the Quizz has died and
now he lives. He lives.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
I would just be like, okay, and who else? Noel?
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Who else? He's unkillable?
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Frankly, yeah, he rises faster and stronger.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
You can't kill an idea, you can't kill a concept.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Of he can't stop the signal. Also big thanks to
doctor Rachel Big Spinach Lance and A. J. Bahamas Jacobs.
Who else? Who else?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Oh yeah, a jbj that's what we call him. Who else? Gosh,
Chris Frosciotis and Eves Jeff Co's here in spirit, I'm
gonna throw my hat in the ring to thank Max
again for this awesome research doc. And thanks to you Ben,
this has really been a fun conversation.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
And thanks to you, Cory, Ryan Earl, thanks to you
Dean Robbins, and thanks to all the bored soda jerks
of yesteryear.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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