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July 8, 2024 7 mins

On this day in 1881, according to culinary legend, the first ice cream sundae was made at Ed Berners’ soda fountain in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that serves up a scoop of history every day
of the week. I'm Gabe Lucier, and in this episode,
we're looking at the surprisingly heated debate surrounding the origin

(00:22):
of the ice cream Sunday. The day was July eighth,
eighteen eighty one. According to culinary legend, the first ice
cream Sunday was made at Ed Berner's Soda Fountain in

(00:43):
Two Rivers, Wisconsin. It happened one summer Sunday when Berner's
was preparing a dish of vanilla ice cream for George
hall Hour, a friend who was visiting from Marshall, Illinois.
Hall Hour spotted a bottle of chocolate syrup on the
back shelf behind the counter, and he asked Berners to
pour some of it over his ice cream. The shopkeeper

(01:05):
tried to talk him down from this unusual request, explaining
that the chocolate syrup was meant to be mixed with
seltzer when making an ice cream soda, so in its
concentrated form it would have been excessively sweet, but Holler
wouldn't be denied, insisting that he'd try anything once, so
Berners was forced to oblige. He doused the ice cream

(01:27):
with the chocolate syrup, and to his surprise, haul hour
ate every bite. Happy to be proven wrong, Berners quickly
put ice cream and chocolate soda syrup on the menu
as a Sunday special, which he sold for five cents
a dish. It was a huge hit with customers, and
with one little girl in particular, who insisted that they

(01:47):
served the treat on other days beside Sunday. Berners eventually
agreed and added the item to the permanent menu. He
also started experimenting with other toppings, including bananas, nuts, raspberry sauce,
and puffed rice. He thought up colorful names for these
new concoctions, such as the Jenny Flip and the Floradora,

(02:10):
and he settled on a name for his chocolate syrup
and ice cream dish too. Even though he now sold
it every day of the week, he called it a Sunday.
There's no solid answer for why the name of the
dish is spelled with an E at the end instead
of with a Y, but there are some likely theories.
Many accounts say it's because of a misspelling on an

(02:31):
order form. Burners had placed an order for canoe shaped
dishes from a glassware salesman, and in his request he
referred to them as Sunday dishes, spelling Sunday with an E.
The misspelling could have been a simple mistake, but most
historians think it was likely on purpose. At the time,
Christian churches held a lot of sway in small American towns,

(02:55):
and since Sunday was the Sabbath, it may have been
seen as disrespectful to sell a diy dish of ice
cream named after the Lord's Day. Changing the y to
an E could have been a way to avoid offending
the church once the dish had started to catch on.
At this point, you may have noticed that I've been
hedging a little on whether or not any of this

(03:15):
actually happened. Well, the reason for that is that Twin
Rivers isn't the only town to lay claim to the
ice cream Sunday. Other challengers include Evanston, Illinois, Norfolk, Virginia,
and Cleveland, Ohio. Many of their stories connect to the
so called Blue laws or Sunday laws, that were prevalent

(03:36):
in nineteenth century America. These are state and local laws
that were strict or ban certain activities on Sundays as
a way to promote a day of rest in accordance
with Biblical tradition. The consumption of alcohol was a frequent
target of blue laws, but the most puritanical bands forbade
drinking soda as well. Such was the case in Evanston, Illinois,

(03:59):
when in eighteen ninety the town prohibited the sale of
ice cream sodas on Sunday. Thankfully, for all the residents
sweet tooths, the soda fountains and drug stores found a workaround.
They started serving ice cream sodas without the soda, or
just ice cream and the syrup of your choice. This
new dish was dubbed the Sunday Soda, and according to

(04:22):
Evanston residence, it was the true original Sunday. But don't
tell that to the people of Ithaca, New York. The
upstate college town is easily the most aggressive challenger to
the Sunday throne. According to city officials, it was on Sunday,
April third, eighteen ninety two that the world's first Sunday
was made. The story goes that Reverend John Scott stopped

(04:46):
by the platte and cult Pharmacy after delivering his sermon
and ordered a bowl of his usual plain vanilla ice cream,
but for whatever reason, the store's proprietor, Chester Platt, decided
to spice things up by adding cherry syrup and a
candied cherry on top. Platte called his creation the Cherry
Sunday in honor of the Reverend, and it quickly became

(05:08):
one of the most popular items on the menu, though
he too, eventually changed the name to Sunday with an
E to avoid offence. The stories of Two Rivers, Evanstone,
and Ithaca are all pretty similar, and it isn't a
stretch to imagine that multiple places might think of drizzling
flavored syrup over ice cream and around the same time.

(05:30):
Many argue that Evanston and Ithaca have the stronger claims,
as theirs are backed up by hard evidence newspaper ads
and articles from the eighteen nineties that touts Sunday Sodas
and cherry Sundays respectively. Meanwhile, Two Rivers paper trail only
goes back to eighteen twenty nine, when Ed Berners gave

(05:50):
an interview recounting the fateful day when he invented the
ice cream Sunday. Despite the lack of concrete proof, Two
Rivers maintains that Burner's was the first person by about
a decade to combine syrup and ice cream without soda.
It's hard to say with certainty when and where the
ice cream Sunday was invented, but Two Rivers certainly boasts

(06:14):
the oldest claim, as well as the most officially recognized.
It's the only one endorsed by the National Register of
Historic Places, and in twenty sixteen, the United States Postal
Service introduced a series of ice cream Sunday stamps, which
it sold for the first time at the Two Rivers
visitor Center. Edward Berner closed down his soda fountain in

(06:36):
nineteen twenty seven, but there's a working replica of it
inside the visitor center. None of those appeals to authority
are likely to satisfy Two Rivers detractors, and the debate
over who deserves credit for the ice cream Sunday is
far from over. But thankfully you don't have to choose
sides in order to eat one. I'm gay, blues gay,

(07:01):
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep
up with the show. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my
way by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com.

(07:23):
Thanks to kazb Bias for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in History class

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