Before Cookies, The Ice Cream Sandwich Was Sold Between Something Way More Boring

The genius idea of placing ice cream between two cookies to form a sandwich has survived for generations as one of the best summer desserts (you might even want to make one right now). But like any good invention, there were iterations of the ice cream sandwich, and the first idea was way more boring than the treat we all love today.

In 1890s New York, pushcart food vendors were seeking a better solution to serving ice cream on hot summer days than rinsing glass bowls between customers. One inventive food vendor put a slab of ice cream in the fold of a piece of paper, making the first handheld ice cream sandwich, then known as a hokey poke or hokey pokey.

Other pushcart sellers soon came up with another idea. They started making wafers — or thin, bland crackers — to go around the ice cream. Selling for just a penny each, the treat became popular with both the working class and the wealthy. Here's the 1899 report published in the New York Mail and Express announcing the new sandwich to the world (via Edible Manhattan): "There are ham sandwiches and salmon sandwiches and cheese sandwiches ... but the latest is the ice cream sandwich. As a new fad the ice cream sandwich might have made thousands of dollars for its inventor had the novelty been launched by a well-known caterer, but strangely enough the ice cream sandwich made its advent in an humble Bowery pushcart, and is sold for a penny."

Yet another pushcart vendor is credited for creating the ice cream sandwich upgrade that still endures today. In the 1940s, Jerry Newberg began selling ice cream sandwiches with exterior layers of thin chocolate cookies at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, home of the Pirates.

In the 1970s and '80s, two versions of the ice cream sandwich began attracting attention on opposite sides of the country. In San Francisco, the It's-It Ice Cream Sandwich, which had been served at a local beach attraction since the 1920s, began to reach a wider audience along the West Coast. The sandwich, now sold nationwide, is made of two oatmeal cookies surrounding vanilla ice cream and then dipped in chocolate. In the same time period, New Yorker Richard LaMotta got a patent for the Chipwich, which places two chocolate chip cookies on each side of the ice cream with chocolate chips along the rim. LaMotta went back to the city's street food vendors to start selling his sandwich, this time for $1 each, and the experiment was an instant success.

Hopefully, the evolution of the ice cream sandwich is far from over, especially since you can make your own ice cream sandwich at home with whatever flavors and ingredients you want (seriously, give toast a try). Each time you take a bite, tip your hat to those ice cream cart vendors whose boring paper-based invention turned into a summertime classic.