The Complete History of Ice Cream Cones

by: Ganna ElSorogy

Classic American food item, however, whose origins truly are linked to the 1904 world fair: The Ice Cream Cone.

Before the Cone

People had been eating ice cream from various cone-like containers for decades, they just didn’t eat the containers themselves.

Way back in 1807, Culinary historian Robin Weir claims that the first pictorial evidence of an ice cream cone was “oddly spiral-shaped utensil, containing ice cream”.

As ice cream grew in popularity in the 19th century, the roving vendors began selling ice cream in cups and containers including the cone-shaped glass.


This photograph, 1877, contains a group of children enjoying ice cream taste on a vendor’s cart in London. After serving ice cream in glasses, the ice cream glasses had been reused by the next customer without even washing it, which potentially caused spreading disease.

Mrs. A.B. Marshall’s Cookery Book (1877) includes instructions for making “Cornets with Cream”, cone-shaped vessels made of a sweet paste of blanched almonds and flour, rolled around cornet molds, baked and filled with sweetened vanilla-flavored whipped cream. These cornets are also filled with ice cream or water ice. Future innovators were inspired by the creative instructions of Mrs. Marshall’s

In 1901, Antonio Valvona, an Italian citizen living in Manchester, England, had innovated a machine for baking Biscuit cups for Ice Cream. The device was designed for baking dough or paste with the same material that biscuits or cookies are manufactured by. These cups can be sold by the venders of ice-cream in public.

The following year, Valvona collaborated with Frank Marchiony, an Italian immigrant in New York, to found the Valvona-Marchiony Company, which produced the biscuit cups and the ice cream sold in them. Valvona founded the firm’s factory in the UK, while Marchiony ran the American operations from the lower East side of Manhattan and the in Brooklyn as trade grew.

By 1904, Marchiony had advanced from a solo street cart to “two big wafer and ice cram factories” operation. According to a newspaper profile at this time, said that he also had launched 200 ice cream carts. Although these carts were too famous all over Manhattan, they had plenty of competition on the streets. Including in competition, Marchiony’s cousin, Italo Marchiony, who worked for the Valvona-Marchiony Company, but by 1903, he had established a rival ice cream firm.

Italo`s innovation is that its design forms biscuit pastes with ‘‘special and unusual shapes” that were previously impossible due to the delicacy of the formed substance and the difficulty of forming and extracting it from the mould. Unlike Valvona's two-part form, which had a hinged top and bottom that closed like a bivalve, Italo's Marchiony device consisted of his three-part form.

And that’s two things stood on the eve of the St. Louis World’s Fair. People were eating ice cream from containers, but nothing that anyone today would consider an ice cream cone.


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