Recyclable Ice Cream Cones of the Sleepy Past

Mmmm, upside-down soft serve

If you are not interested in reading about the FAKE HISTORY AND ORIGIN of ice cream cones, ie, another of my food related dreams, then you might want to take the day off from CAC.

Overnight, in my sleep, I took a trip to the beach with some old good friends.

In the dream, we swam at the beach, and then when it was evening, we realized that it was time for ice cream cones.

But this was a special ice cream trip because during it, THE HISTORY AND ORIGIN of ice cream cones became evident.

We realized that the cones we know and love — the sugars, the wafers, the waffles — were not the original cones, but rather edible facsimiles of what our ancestors long ago did with ice cream.

Edible facsimiles? Huh? Of what?

Of conch shells. You know, those large twisty fancy pinkish shells that Caribbean sea snails create to live in, because they are more aesthetic and industrious than the rest of us. Look at the picture. Those are conch shells.

When they are awake, people use conch shells for many things: honking wind instruments, conduits of oceanic noise, weighting paper.

So, how do conch shells relate to ice cream? Well, while sleep vacationing, my friends and I realized that to eat ice cream in an old-school way, you (or more likely, some ancient ice-cream professional) would take a conch shell and line the inside with a sort of delicious sugary crispy crumb. Then these smart ancestors would add ice cream, and hand you the glorious shell, dripping and cold.

It seems almost royal to eat ice cream this way.

How do you get ice cream in there? I don’t know, how do you get snails in there? Or out of there?

You would eat the ice cream and crumb combo out of the cone / shell item. And so when the cone was gone, it was just the inside that was gone, and the outside would be used again and again.

How environmentally sound!

Excuse me, I must go back in time and also to the Virgin Islands, immediately, to figure the rest of this mystery out.

Thanks to smallislander on flickr for use of the beautiful pic!