Jim Bradshaw
Ice cream in a block or angel food light?
With the temperature climbing higher every day, it was welcome news in Crowley in the early summer of 1923 that the town’s first ice cream plant would soon be ready for business. Until then, local vendors there and in most other south Louisiana towns had to make their own, usually in a hand-cranked freezer, which was time consuming and produced uneven results.
There were a few bigger plants in south Louisiana who churned out ice cream that they claimed was not only good, but good for you, but it was still an infant industry.
P. L. Farrell, the proprietor of the new Crowley plant, said two ice cream freezing machines were being installed in a building on Second Street, “between George Lovell’s automobile salesroom and the Service Garage.” He said each machine could freeze 10 gallons in about 12 minutes, “making it possible for the plant to turn out hundreds of gallons” every day.
“Most of the cream will be sold wholesale to drug stores and confectioneries,” the Crowley Signal said.
Several weeks later the Signal reported, “The ice cream factory is now furnishing a good trade with ice cream that is the equal in quality of any … thanks to “machinery representing an investment of thousands of dollars and labor receiving pay that is spent in Crowley.”
Besides ice cream, the factory was churning out butter that was “popular in local stores.”
Farrell was not the first to catch on to the idea that south Louisiana summers made ice cream something really easy to sell, and not only because it was cold and tasty. Ice cream makers said it was an essential food for healthy kids.
The Lafayette Bottling Works described itself as the place “where the manufacturing of Ice Cream and Carbonated Beverages is an art and service is a pleasure.”
In a 1921 ad, the company urged mothers to “give that Boy and Girl of Yours all the Ice Cream they want. Ice Cream is rich in Vitamine [sic], that essential which makes the difference between a strong, healthy child and a sickly one.”
Another 1921 ad, this one in the Iberville South, promoted the “Astounding Food Values of Ice Cream.” It said Drs. Hart and McCullen of the Wisconsin Experiment Station, “through a series of remarkable experiments” found that children needed the butterfat in ice cream to be healthy, wholesome, and strong.
Proprietors of the Candy Kitchen in Opelousas thought people would travel to enjoy ice cream’s great taste and good benefits. They ran big ads in several newspapers, including St. Martinville and Ville Platte, urging buyers to get out of the heat in “the brightest … [and] coolest place” with “eight ceiling fans in motion.”
Under the whirling fans you could enjoy ice cream with strawberries, cherries, pineapple, or pecans for 15 cents; an Eskimo pie or ice cream soda for a dime; or brick ice cream for only a nickel, which would also buy two ice cream cones.
In 1930, the Abbeville Meridional pointed out that ice cream made business sense for Vermilion Parish dairy farmers as well as the people who made it. The newspaper quoted O. E. Reed, chief of the U. S. Agriculture Department’s Bureau of Dairy Industry, who said, “This food, which was once regarded as a luxury … now holds a well-established place in the American diet.”
But everyone knew that regulations were sure to follow once a Bureau in Washington took notice of something. That brought a nostalgic lament in 1930 from a newspaper editor who, after seeing a man turning his own old-fashioned ice cream freezer, was “reminded of the time that each refreshment parlor served its own distinctive ice cream” and “the law governing ice cream had not yet begun to function.”
“With all due to the law which governs butterfat content and weight per given bulk of ice cream,” he said, “we still hanker for a dash of homemade ice cream with the liberal allotment of cream turned in the freezer until it fluffed up like angel food cake.”
The thought of ice cream that light and fluffy also gives me a hankering, especially after I read those ads reminding me that the more of it I eat, the healthier I will be.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
