I Scream You Scream – part 1

Ice cream sodas (which contain soda water) and ice cream floats (which contain root beer, cola or another flavoured soda) are another one of those summer things. A big plus, they don’t run all over your hands while you eat them.

So what’s the backstory on ice cream sodas? There are several people who claim to have invented the ice cream soda. But I think we have to give the nod to Robert McCay Green.

In 1874, Robert McCay Green was working in Philadelphia at an exposition at the Franklin Institute demonstrating a soda fountain for a New York manufacturer by serving sweet cream sodas. He couldn’t obtain the large soda fountain he needed for the exposition, however, so he decided to use a smaller second-hand soda fountain in the larger space. From this point, there are two different versions of the story.

Version one has Green running out of the sweet cream he was using to make the sodas. He was in a bind. His stand was popular and he had a line-up. He came up with the idea of adding ice cream instead of sweet cream – thinking that melted ice cream would be the same as sweet cream – but people were in too much of a hurry to eat the ice cream sodas.

The second version of the story holds that when Green set up his smaller soda fountain in his space, he was near a very swanky, larger exhibitor who was also selling sold sweet cream sodas. Like any good sales person, he wanted his product to stand out from the competition and wanted to do something a little different. He decided to add ice cream instead of sweet cream to his sodas. He came up with 16 different sodas (so I guess he also created the ice cream float!) to add to the vanilla ice cream. Day one sales were a bit slow, but then word of mouth took over (what we had before Instagram) and business took off.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. A star was born! So much so that by the end of the exhibition Green was making $400 a DAY in ice cream soda sales. (This is 1874, remember, so this was a huge amount of money – roughly $8,220 per day in 2017 dollars!)

So linked was Robert McCay Green with the ice cream soda that his will specified that his tombstone be engraved “here lies the originator of the ice cream soda”.

Tuesday, June 20 is National Ice Cream Soda Day. To celebrate, I have teamed up with my very creative Alaskan friend and Instagrammer, Carissa Pearce, “The Fermented Alaskan“. Tune into Travel*Food*Cool and Carissa’s blog The Fermented Alaskan on Monday June 19 for some adult versions of the ice cream soda.

Since last week’s posts on Exploring Oslo and Maaemo were so long, I thought I’d go easy this Monday morning with a short blog!

Please note, all photos that appear in today’s post are stock photos.