Did You Know?
The ice cream sundae was invented in the 1890s to get around blue laws that banned the sale of soda water on Sundays. By substituting syrup for the carbonated water, soda fountain owners created an entirely new dessert — and spelled it 'sundae' to avoid religious controversy.
It began with a law that nobody much liked. In the 1880s and 1890s, many American towns enforced "blue laws" — Sunday restrictions rooted in religious tradition that prohibited all manner of commercial activity on the Sabbath. In some communities, this included the sale of ice cream sodas, which were considered frivolous, pleasure-seeking indulgences unsuitable for the Lord's Day.
The soda fountain owners of small-town America faced a dilemma. Sunday afternoons were prime business hours. Families strolled the streets after church, children had pennies in their pockets, and the weather in summer was exactly the kind that made a cold, sweet drink irresistible. Something had to be done.
What they came up with was an act of culinary ingenuity that would outlast the blue laws by more than a century. If you couldn't sell a soda, you could still sell ice cream. And if you put the syrup on top of the ice cream instead of mixing it into carbonated water — well, that wasn't a soda at all. That was something new. That was a sundae.
The Great Origin Debate
Few American foods have inspired as much civic pride and historical argument as the ice cream sundae, and the reason is simple: at least three towns claim to have invented it, and each has documentation to support its case.
Two Rivers, Wisconsin makes the earliest claim. According to local legend and a historical marker, a man named George Hallauer walked into Edward Berner's soda shop on Washington Street in 1881 and asked Berner to pour chocolate sauce — normally used only in sodas — directly over a dish of ice cream. Berner obliged, the combination was a sensation, and the sundae was born. Two Rivers has been celebrating this claim for decades, and the town's Washington House Hotel still serves sundaes from a vintage soda fountain.
Ithaca, New York counters with newspaper evidence. The Ithaca Daily Journal from April 5, 1892 contains an advertisement for a "Cherry Sunday" — ice cream topped with cherry syrup — sold at Platt & Colt's pharmacy. The Ithaca claim has the advantage of a contemporary written record, which is more than Two Rivers can produce.
Plainfield, Illinois adds yet another thread to the story, pointing to a pharmacist named Charles Sonntag who introduced the dessert at his soda fountain in the early 1890s. Sonntag's surname — German for "Sunday" — lends a certain poetic symmetry to the claim.
The truth, as food historians generally agree, is probably that the sundae was invented independently in multiple places around the same time, as different soda fountain operators hit upon the same solution to the same problem. What matters more than the precise origin is what the sundae became.
The Anatomy of a Perfect Sundae
By the early twentieth century, the ice cream sundae had evolved into an art form. The basic formula — ice cream plus syrup plus toppings — admitted infinite variation, and soda fountain operators competed fiercely to create the most spectacular versions.
The banana split, invented in Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1904, split a banana lengthwise and laid three scoops of ice cream in the groove, each topped with a different sauce: chocolate, strawberry, and pineapple. Whipped cream, chopped nuts, and a maraschino cherry completed the construction. It was, by any measure, a magnificent excess.
The hot fudge sundae — warm, thick chocolate sauce poured over cold ice cream so that it hardened slightly on contact — became a staple at ice cream parlors across the country. The contrast of temperatures and textures, the way the fudge pooled at the bottom of the dish and mixed with the melting ice cream, was a sensory experience that no other dessert could replicate.
The classic presentation mattered as much as the ingredients. A proper sundae arrived in a tall glass dish — the "sundae dish" — with the ice cream scooped generously, the sauce poured in a slow, deliberate stream, the whipped cream applied with a flourish, and the cherry placed with care at the very top. It was theater as much as food.
The Maraschino Cherry Question
No element of the ice cream sundae has a stranger history than the maraschino cherry. The original maraschino cherries were a luxury item — real cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, imported from Croatia and Yugoslavia, served as an after-dinner delicacy in fine restaurants. They were expensive, flavorful, and genuinely delicious.
What ended up on top of American ice cream sundaes was something else entirely. During Prohibition, the alcohol-soaked originals became unavailable, and American producers developed a substitute: cherries bleached with sulfur dioxide, then dyed bright red with food coloring and sweetened with sugar and almond flavoring. The result bore little resemblance to the original but became so ubiquitous that it defined the sundae experience for generations of Americans.
Today, the original maraschino cherry is making a quiet comeback in craft cocktail bars and artisan ice cream shops. But for anyone who grew up in the 1950s or 1960s, the bright red, artificially flavored cherry on top of a sundae is inseparable from the memory of the thing itself.
Watch: The Fight to Claim the Sundae's Name
The Sundae Today
The ice cream sundae never really went out of fashion. It survived the rise of soft-serve, the invention of the Dairy Queen Blizzard, and the artisan ice cream movement. Every generation rediscovers it and makes it their own.
What endures is the essential idea: that ice cream, good as it is on its own, becomes something transcendent when combined with warm sauce, cold cream, crunchy nuts, and the small, perfect sweetness of a cherry on top. It is a dessert designed for celebration, for sharing, for the kind of afternoon that deserves to be marked with something special.
The blue laws that inspired it are long gone. The soda fountains where it was perfected are mostly memories. But the sundae itself — that glorious, impractical, utterly American creation — is as alive as ever. Some things are simply too good to disappear.
Craving a taste of the past? Browse our Soda Fountain Memories collection for more stories from the golden age of the American soda fountain.
Photo Credits: "Soda Jerk Passing Soda Across Fountain" (1936) — Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (public domain, no known restrictions on publication). Zaharako's Ice Cream Parlor interior — Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (public domain, no known restrictions on publication).
