It's the 100th birthday of the ice-cream cone.

Date published: 12/10/2003

"ISCREAM, YOU SCREAM, we all scream for ice cream"-- some 1.6 billion gallons of it annually, in fact, lightening Americans' pockets by about $20 billion a year.

Ice cream was a secret recipe when Charles I of England made it a regular part of the king's menu in the 1600s. Thomas Jefferson reportedly fancied vanilla ice cream, and George Washington paid almost $200 for a recipe. Nancy Johnson of New Jersey made the dessert readily available to the common man by inventing the hand-crank ice cream maker in 1846.

But like peanut butter without jelly, what's ice cream without a cone? It took another 50 years to make the connection. Italo Marcioni sold ice cream from a cart on Wall Street, but the glasses he served it in tended to break or disappear. He initially substituted paper tubes, but then came up with an edible alternative: the waffle cone. He got the patent for it on Dec. 15, 1903. A few months later, the hand-held dessert earned a firm spot in American cuisine at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

So Happy 100th to the ice-cream cone. It made a sweet deal even better.

Date published: 12/10/2003