US National Sundae Day
<p>On Sunday, 3 April 1892, a Unitarian minister named John M. Scott walked into Platt & Colt Pharmacy in Ithaca, New York, and was handed a dish of vanilla ice cream that the co-owner, Chester Platt, had drizzled with cherry syrup and crowned with a candied cherry. Two days later, on 5 April, Platt placed an advertisement in the <em>Ithaca Daily Journal</em> for his “Cherry Sunday” — the oldest known written record of an ice cream sundae. US National Sundae Day, marked each 11 November, celebrates that dish of cold cream, sticky sauce and a cherry on top, a treat whose precise origin remains one of the most cheerfully contested questions in American food history.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-day-comes-from">Where the day comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The observance itself has no documented founder; like other American food days it accumulated over time rather than being decreed. What it commemorates, though, is unusually well attested. The sundae is not a vague folk invention but a dessert with paper trails, lawsuits and rival civic claims attached to it — which is exactly why it makes such good company for a calendar entry.</p>
<p>The broader backdrop is the rise of the American soda fountain, which spread through pharmacies from the mid-nineteenth century. Carbonated water had been sold as a health tonic, and druggists began flavouring it with fruit syrups; the addition of ice cream produced the ice cream soda, recorded in Philadelphia at the 1874 semi-centennial of the Franklin Institute and credited to Robert McCay Green. The sundae emerged from this same fizzing, syrup-stained world — a sibling of the soda rather than a wholly separate invention — which is why so many of its origin stories revolve around what a fountain man did when he set the soda water aside.</p>
<h2 id="the-sundae-war">The Sundae War</h2>
<p>Two towns have spent more than a century arguing over the sundae’s birth, in a feud genuinely nicknamed the “Sundae War”. Ithaca rests its case on the Platt & Colt advertisement of April 1892, the only claim backed by a dated primary document. Two Rivers, Wisconsin, counters with the story of George Hallauer asking Edward C. Berners, owner of Berners’ Soda Fountain, to pour chocolate syrup over a dish of ice cream — supposedly in 1881. The trouble is that Berners would have been only sixteen or seventeen in 1881, making it improbable that he owned a fountain then, and his own obituary places the first such dish nearer 1899. Historians who have weighed both stories give Ithaca the title of first <em>documented</em> sundae, while acknowledging that no claim can be proved beyond doubt.</p>
<p>A persistent thread in the wider folklore is that the sundae owes its name and its existence to Sunday-observance laws. By this account, ice cream sodas — fizzy, frivolous, faintly disreputable — fell foul of local rules restricting Sunday indulgences, so soda-fountain men dropped the carbonated water, served the cream and syrup alone, and called the result a “Sunday”. The spelling is usually said to have shifted to “sundae” to avoid offending the religiously minded. The Ithaca evidence complicates this neat tale, since Platt’s dish was named simply for the day it was first served, but the soda-law theory captures something true about the period: the sundae arose in the buttoned-up, fountain-counter culture of late nineteenth-century America, where dessert and propriety were quietly negotiated across a marble slab.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The sundae deserves its day less for its ingredients than for what it reveals about how everyday foods are made and remembered. Here is a dessert assembled from three humble parts whose origin is argued over by rival towns, defended with newspaper clippings, and tangled up with the moral anxieties of a particular American moment. It is a reminder that the history of food is rarely tidy and almost never anonymous: somewhere behind the most ordinary treat there is usually a named person, a specific shop and a specific year, even if the records contradict one another.</p>
<p>There is also the matter of the soda fountain itself, the institution that produced the sundae. For roughly half a century these counters were the social hub of small-town America, a place where teenagers met, prescriptions were collected and a glass dish of ice cream was a small public ceremony. Prohibition, from 1920, only strengthened their position: with saloons shuttered, the fountain became a respectable alternative gathering place, and some former bars reinvented themselves as ice cream parlours. The soda jerk — the young man working the taps and scoops, named for the jerking motion of the soda lever — became a recognisable figure of the era, with his own slang for orders. The sundae outlived the fountain, but it still carries the atmosphere of that vanished room.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>In Two Rivers, the dispute is taken seriously enough to be commemorated: the town maintains a recreated Berners-style soda fountain at its Washington House museum, where visitors can order a sundae in period surroundings, and local pride in the claim remains undimmed. Ithaca, for its part, has marked anniversaries of the 1892 advertisement and leans on its documentary evidence whenever the question resurfaces in the press. Elsewhere on 11 November, ice cream parlours run specials, diners revive the tall fountain glass, and home cooks build their own — the format is forgiving enough that the celebration mostly looks like people eating sundaes and arguing amiably about toppings.</p>
<h2 id="variations-on-the-theme">Variations on the theme</h2>
<p>From the basic scoop-and-syrup the sundae has branched into a small dynasty. The banana split, generally credited to David Strickler, a pharmacy apprentice in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1904, splits a banana lengthwise beneath three scoops and three sauces, and originally sold for the then-extravagant sum of ten cents. The hot fudge sundae depends on the contrast of warm, thickened chocolate against cold cream — a deliberately engineered clash of temperatures that the <a href="/specialdate/us-national-hot-fudge-sundae-day/">hot fudge variant</a> celebrates in its own right; the version popularised at C.C. Brown’s on Hollywood Boulevard, opened in 1906, became a Los Angeles institution. The <a href="/specialdate/us-national-strawberry-sundae-day/">strawberry sundae</a> keeps things simpler, letting fruit and syrup do the work.</p>
<p>Other regional creations multiplied the form. The “Tin Roof” pairs vanilla, chocolate sauce and salted peanuts; the turtle sundae layers caramel, chocolate and pecans in imitation of the chocolate of the same name; the “CMP” of the American Midwest stands for chocolate, marshmallow and peanuts. New England diners produced the “frappe” and the elaborate frozen showpieces that crowded fountain menus. Each is a recognisable child of that first Ithaca dish, and each has acquired its own partisans who will defend their preferred construction with surprising heat.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-traditions">Symbols and traditions</h2>
<p>The cherry on top has long since escaped the dessert to become a figure of speech for any finishing flourish, which tells you how thoroughly the sundae embedded itself in the language. The maraschino cherry that usually plays the role is itself a piece of history: originally a Croatian and Italian liqueur-soaked variety made from the marasca cherry, it was reinvented in early twentieth-century America as a sweetened, brightly dyed, alcohol-free version better suited to soda fountains and to Prohibition-era sensibilities. The tall, footed glass and the long-handled spoon are the other inheritances of the fountain era, designed for a layered dessert eaten slowly in public. Building a sundae remains a small ritual of choices — which ice cream, which sauce, whipped cream or not, nuts or not — and sharing one with several spoons turns a private treat into a sociable act.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The earliest documented sundae was advertised as a “Cherry Sunday” in the <em>Ithaca Daily Journal</em> on 5 April 1892 — note the original spelling, <em>Sunday</em>, not <em>sundae</em>.</li>
<li>Two Rivers, Wisconsin, takes its rival claim so seriously that it has built and maintains a museum soda fountain dedicated to the story.</li>
<li>The banana split is credited to a twenty-three-year-old pharmacy apprentice, David Strickler, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1904, and originally sold for ten cents.</li>
<li>The popular theory that the sundae was invented to dodge laws against Sunday ice cream sodas is widely repeated but undercut by the Ithaca evidence, where the dish was simply named for the day it appeared.</li>
<li>The sundae and the spumoni-style layered ice cream desserts of Italian-American shops share a fountain-era heyday, when <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">moulded and layered frozen treats</a> were a counter showpiece.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>What is striking about the sundae is how much argument three ingredients can sustain. No one fights over who first poured chocolate on cream because the act seems too obvious to own — and yet two American towns have spent over a century doing exactly that, marshalling obituaries and advertisements as if defending a patent. Perhaps that is the real lesson of 11 November: the foods we treat as timeless and authorless almost always have a date and a name hiding inside them, and the pleasure of a dish is not diminished by knowing that someone, somewhere, once stood at a counter and made it up.</p>
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