Tag: penny licks

The Penny Lick

We tend to imagine the Victorians were all top hats, stiff collars and serious faces, but it’s a fact that they also had a sweet tooth. By the late 1800s, ice-cream had become the ultimate street food. For just one penny, you could enjoy a refreshing scoop from a colourful street cart on a hot day. Enter the penny lick.

The idea was simple. Vendors would place a blob of ice-cream into a thick little glass with a shallow dip at the top. You’d lick it clean (hence the name), hand the glass back, and off it would go to the next eager customer. Sadly, the Victorians were not so aware of the importance of hygiene or the existence of germs. This, combined with lack of pasteurised milk ( yet to be a legal requirement ) and the prevalence of common diseases like cholera and tuberculosis, meant passing around the same unwashed glass turned out to be a recipe for disaster.

The penny licks were banned in London in 1899 after a medical report linked the re-use of unwashed glassware to the rise of tuberculosis. Along came a much better idea: the edible cone. Not only was it safer, it was also tastier and you got to eat the container as well as the ice-cream.

The Ice-Cream Cone

But who invented the ice-cream cone? As usual, the story is not clear cut. One idea is that Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian immigrant in New York, improvised an ice-cream from a Syrian pastry, called zalabia, in 1904. Another theory credits the invention of the cone to Italo Marchiony, an Italian immigrant in New York, who created ice-cream containers made from dough, although they were more cup-shaped than actual cones.

Another earlier contender was Agnes Marshall, who ran a cookery school in London and published The Book of Ices in 1885. The publication comprised 170 sweet recipes with ice-cream figuring prominently. A later offering, her Book of Cookery in 1888, made reference to an edible cone and was called a cornet. Although the cornet was actually designed to be eaten using cutlery, Agnes Marshall is also regarded as a pioneer of ice-cream cornets. In 1894 the follow-up to The Book of Ices arrived, namely Fancy Ices – see book cover above.

So next time you’re happily munching on a ice-cream, spare a thought for the Victorians.  Without their dodgy glassware, we might never have had the immense joy of the cone. Are you an ice-cream lover?