Friday, May 30, 2008

It was just an accident - The story of Ice cream cone

This story is a perfect example of serendipity, and a single chance encounter leading to worldwide repercussions. It's also rather sweet.

Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasn't until the world's fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together.

At this particularly sweltering 1904 World's Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were qucikly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn't doing so well, selling Zalabia a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into code shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born - and it doesn't look like dying out any time soon. :-)