Few desserts feel as all-American as a hot fudge sundae: cold vanilla ice cream, warm chocolate sauce sliding down the sides, maybe a cherry on top. It seems like it must have a tidy origin story. It doesn't. Instead, it has a friendly feud and a Hollywood legend.
The short answer is that nobody knows for sure who invented the sundae, and the hot fudge version is just as hard to pin down. The oldest written evidence of a sundae is a newspaper ad from Ithaca, New York, in April 1892. Fudge itself is a 19th-century American candy, and a famous Hollywood ice cream parlor, C.C. Brown's, claimed to have invented the hot fudge sundae.
The Great Sundae War
Several places claim to be the sundae's birthplace, including Plainfield, Illinois; New Orleans; Cleveland; and New York City. But the biggest rivalry, sometimes called the Sundae War, is between Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and Ithaca, New York.
Two Rivers says that in 1881, a customer named George Hallauer asked soda fountain owner Edward C. Berners to drizzle chocolate syrup over ice cream. Berners sold the treat for a nickel, at first only on Sundays. When Berners died in 1939, a Chicago Tribune headline called him the man who made the first ice cream sundae.
Ithaca's backers see problems. Berners would have been only 16 or 17 in 1881, which makes it improbable that he owned a shop, and his obituary actually dates his first sundae to 1899. When Ithaca's mayor proclaimed a day honoring her city as the birthplace, she received postcards from Two Rivers residents insisting otherwise.
Ithaca's Cherry Sunday
Ithaca's story comes with paperwork. On Sunday, April 3, 1892, Unitarian minister John M. Scott and Chester Platt, co-owner of Platt & Colt Pharmacy, covered dishes of ice cream with cherry syrup and candied cherries. They named it the Cherry Sunday, after the day it was made.
Two days later, Platt & Colt advertised the Cherry Sunday in the Ithaca Daily Journal, the oldest known written evidence of a sundae. By May, the fountain also served Strawberry Sundays, and later Chocolate Sundays.
Why the spelling changed to sundae is uncertain. It may have been to sidestep Platt's attempt to trademark the name, to avoid religious objections, or simply to catch the eye. A story from Evanston, Illinois, adds another twist: shops there supposedly served sodaless sodas on Sundays to get around a law against selling ice cream sodas.
Where the Hot Fudge Comes In
Fudge is an American creation from the 19th century, and it became hugely popular at women's colleges like Vassar, where students were making and selling batches in the late 1880s.
The best-known hot fudge claim comes from C.C. Brown's on Hollywood Boulevard. Founder Clifton Brown learned candy making at his father's downtown Los Angeles shop, which opened in 1906, and he tinkered with chocolate sauce recipes for years. The shop claimed to have invented the hot fudge sundae and served its sauce warm in a small ceramic pitcher.
Stars flocked there, including Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley, and Judy Garland once worked there as a waitress. The parlor served its last sundae on June 8, 1996, but a restaurant chain still serves the original C.C. Brown's hot fudge sundae.
So the true inventor of the hot fudge sundae may never be known. That's probably fine. Some mysteries are best enjoyed slowly, with a long spoon.
