sundae

In the 1890s, many American towns enforced blue laws prohibiting the sale of soda water on Sundays, which local temperance groups deemed too festive for the Sabbath. Ice cream parlors found a practical workaround: serve ice cream with flavored syrup but skip the carbonated water, and call the result a treat rather than a soda. This stripped-down dessert circulated under various names before the spelling settled into its familiar form.

Two towns claim invention rights. Two Rivers, Wisconsin, says Edward Berners first served chocolate sauce over ice cream in 1881, at the request of a customer named George Hallauer. Ithaca, New York, counters with an 1892 account from druggist Chester Platt, who doused vanilla ice cream with cherry syrup at a Unitarian Church benefit and recorded the dish in his ledger under the date of the serving.

The spelling sundae displaced Sunday by the late 1890s to sidestep religious objections to naming a commercial food after the Christian Sabbath. Illinois and Wisconsin newspaper advertisements from 1897 and 1898 show the variant spelling in commercial use, and by 1900 it was standard in trade journals. The deliberate misspelling is one of the more candid pieces of product naming in American food history: the dish kept its origin story while losing the offense.

Soda fountain chains standardized the format through the early 20th century. Walgreens, which opened its first store in Chicago in 1901, served hot fudge sundaes in the tall footed glass that became the canonical vessel. By the 1920s the sundae was a fixture of American drugstore culture, and the sundae glass itself was being manufactured to specification by glassware companies in Ohio and Pennsylvania.