Tudor spent years convincing people they needed cold beverages in the summer, teaching restaurants to make ice cream, and underwriting the cost of iced drinks in bars. His persistence paid off, and by the 1820s, he was shipping Wenham Lake ice around the country. The ice trade gave America’s already budding love affair with ice cream wings, and after the Civil War, American ice-cream-making innovation — including Nancy Johnson’s 1843 hand-cranked churn and freezing bucket, and soon after, machines powered by steam and electricity — paved the way for mass production of ice cream on an unprecedented scale.
But there was a dark side to the demand, too. The food industry was unregulated, rife with unhygienic conditions, dairy in particular. In an 1858 exposé of “swill milk,” The New York Times reported that milk from diseased cows fed on fermented swill from distilleries and adulterated with plaster of Paris and chalk was being sold to the public via the growing “ice cream saloon” industry. Nor did the humans involved in the process have it much better. Ice cream street vendors — called “hokey pokey men” — tended to be immigrants who barely made a living wage and were abused on the streets.
Still, by the 20th century, ice cream in America had taken on dimensions of dogmatic patriotism. Anthropologist of the everyday Margaret Visser, writing in her 1986 book Much Depends on Dinner, noted that ice cream was “a symbol almost of national identity.” She could have dropped the almost: Since before the turn of the century, ice cream had been served to immigrants waiting in the purgatory of Ellis Island. The Soda Fountain, a monthly trade magazine to the soda industry, lauded the practice, calling ice cream an “Americanization aid” in a 1921 article and noting that it inculcated American values: “Who could imagine a man who is genuinely fond of ice cream becoming a Bolshevik?”
But what really pushed ice cream to the top of the American dessert list wasn’t patriotism: “The greatest thing that ever happened to the ice cream industry in America is Prohibition,” Weir says. From 1920, ice cream parlors filled some of the void left by closed bars, and a number of brewers, including Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch, reopened their operations as ice cream factories. The Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers could not have been happier — members reportedly sang a chorus at their conventions that went, “[Father] brings a brick of ice cream home instead of beer!” By the end of the 1920s, according to The Atlantic, Americans were consuming more than a million gallons of ice cream a day, astonishing given that home refrigeration was expensive. Those numbers continued to grow even after Prohibition was repealed in 1933.