Daily TWiP - National Sundae Day

Welcome to the Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays, historical observances, etc., we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

Here at Daily TWiP, we generally focus on the more obscure observances that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle of the major holidays. Therefore, since much of the media will be writing about Veterans Day today, we are featuring National Sundae Day.

We appreciate our veterans and their sacrifices tremendously, which is why Veterans Day was our featured holiday in this week’s edition of The Week in Preview.

You can read about the origins of Veterans Day (and the shoe store owner who made it possible) by copying and pasting the following link into your browser: http://bit.ly/2YUBtKl. As silly as it sounds to say this, our new online content management system doesn’t have HTML capabilities just yet.

And now, without further ado, we present National Sundae Day.

A sundae is simple yet delightful concoction consisting of ice cream with toppings, which can be anything from flavored syrup to chopped nuts to whipped cream. As simple as the concept is, it’s no surprise that several U.S. cities claim to be the birthplace of the ice cream sundae.

The city with the most historical documentation to back up its claim is Ithaca, N.Y. According to Ithaca’s tale, the first sundae was created on Sunday, April 3, 1892, when Rev. John M. Scott, a Unitarian minister, paid a visit to Platt & Colt Pharmacy. Chester C. Platt, the pharmacy’s co-owner, was the treasurer for the Unitarian church, and he and Scott would frequently meet to talk church business and just generally enjoy each other’s company.

Desiring to create a unique treat for his guest, Platt dished up two bowls of ice cream from the pharmacy’s soda fountain and topped them with cherry syrup and candied cherries.

Both men were so taken with the dessert that they decided it needed a name. It was christened a “Cherry Sunday” after the topping and the day on which the dessert was first made.

Platt published an ad for his new creation in the Ithaca Daily Journal on April 5, 1892. This ad is the oldest written evidence of a sundae known to this day.

The town of Two Rivers, Wisc., Ithaca’s chief rival for the claim to sundae fame, tells a different story. In 1881, George Hallauer made a special request at Berners’ Soda Fountain, asking the owner, Edward C. Berners, to pour chocolate syrup over the dish of ice cream he had just ordered.

Until this time, syrup had only been used to flavor ice cream sodas. Berners was initially reluctant to top Hallauer’s ice cream with syrup, as he felt it would spoil the taste of the ice cream, but ultimately agreed.

Shortly thereafter, Berners was selling this newly popular treat on Sundays for a nickle a piece. He eventually began selling the sundaes during the rest of the week.

There are a few holes in Two Rivers’ tale, however, the largest being that based on Berners’ 1863 birth date, he would have been 17 or 18 in 1881, making it unlikely that he would have been the owner of a soda fountain.

Court records also indicate that Berners was employed at a Chicago mill in 1884 and had been awarded damages for a work-related injury. He did own an ice cream parlor later in life, but it is uncertain as to whether he owned one in the year the ice cream sundae was supposedly created.

While Ithaca and Two Rivers continue to duke it out for sundae supremacy, Evanston, Ill., has laid claim to the word’s unique spelling.

Evanston passed a blue law in 1890 that prohibited the sale of soda water on Sundays, so soda fountain owners worked around the law by selling ice cream sodas without the soda - namely, ice cream topped with flavored syrup.

This treat was called a “Sunday,” but the spelling was changed to “Sundae” to avoid offending local leaders.

Wherever your loyalty may lie regarding the origins of this delectable dessert, we can all agree that it’s worthy of celebration. Forget the food groups and the nutrition pyramid - today is a day to eat dessert first.

Daily TWiP appears Monday through Friday courtesy of The Week in Preview. Check out The Week in Preview online in our Columnists section or read it in print on Mondays in our Nashua and Region section.

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- Teresa Santoski