A new book shows how cones made ice cream popular among customers in the 1900s despite health scares

In fact, so cone-crazy were Americans that they were estimated to have consumed 245 million ice cream cones just two decades after they first appeared at the St Louis fair. Meanwhile, the cone fad helped fuel overall us ice cream consumption. In 1900, annual consumption per capita was about a quart (950 ml). By 1915, that figure had quadrupled, according to the International Association of Ice Cream Vendors. By 1929, the year of the stock market crash, Americans were downing 365 million gallons (1.38 billion litres) of ice cream a year, up from 280 million gallons in 1916.

And the ice cream cone was widely acknowledged to be the engine propelling the ice cream industry’s meteoric growth. According to Walter W Fisk, a Cornell University dairy professor, “the years from 1900 to 1910” were “epoch making” when it came to the ice cream trade. “The cone sold many a gallon of ice cream and made many a dollar for those engaged in the business”, he concluded.

Not surprisingly, ice cream cone production soared. At first, cones were produced by hand, but by 1909, an automatic cone roller came on line, and by the 1920s, the process was fully mechanised. Batter was dispensed...

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