In 1897, if you wanted a job in the new industry of dispensing soft drinks at a “soda fountain”, you might study a book. The book was the Modern Guide for Soda Dispensers by W. A. Bonham, and it had all sorts of useful information.
One important part of the book was recipes. Here’s an example: “Peach Sundae. Ice cream, vanilla or peach, 5 ounces. Crushed or sliced peaches, 2 ounces. Serve with a spoon. Pear, orange, raspberry and other fruit sundaes are made by adding the syrup or fruit to the ice cream.” If you were angling for a job in your town’s brand-new soda fountain, some of this might have been fairly new to you — particularly the word “sundae.”
“Sundae” was a new word for everyone in the late 1800s. It was probably coined somewhere in the northeastern US, but there’s a bit of a dispute about just where it happened. It could very well have been in Ithaca, NY, where in 1892, Platt & Colt’s Famous Day and Night Soda Fountain placed an ad in the Daily Journal for a “New 10 Cent Ice Cream Specialty.” The ad went on to describe the “specialty” as “ice-cream served in a champagne glass with cherry juice syrup and candied French cherries on top”, and called it a “Cherry Sunday.”
Another bit of evidence bolstering Ithaca’s claim to the word “Sundae” is the story told by DeForest Christiance, who had been behind the soda fountain counter on Sunday, April 3, 1892. According to a letter Christiance wrote in 1936, in walked the Reverend John M. Scott. Scott was a VIP in Platt & Colt’s Famous Day and Night Soda Fountain, because Chester Platt, who owned the place, was the treasurer of the church where Scott preached. Scott and Platt were also friends.
With all that on the line, the entire staff of the soda fountain (at the time, that probably amounted to just DeForest Christiance himself) wanted to present the Reverend Scott with something special; something out of the ordinary — something to show that this was a customer so important that a simple dish of ice cream, like everyone else got, was just not good enough. So the quick-thinking Christiance poured some cherry syrup over the ice cream. He would have had an ample supply of the syrup, because as he would have known from his diligent study of the Modern Guide for Soda Dispensers, you mixed carbonated water and one of a number of flavored syrups to make “sodas.”
There were some candied cherries available too, so Christiance topped his creation with one of those. Scott was duly impressed, and according to the letter Christiance wrote (a mere forty years later), suggested that it be called a “Cherry Sunday” because it was, at the time, Sunday.
Christiance wrote that this happened on April 3, 1892. Charles Platt, clearly a titan of both the soda fountain business and church treasuries, acted with such dispatch that the ad in the Ithaca Daily Journal appeared on the following Tuesday, April 5. And that was all it took. The “ice cream Sunday” quickly became the rage in Ithaca and spread like wildfire (or possibly like cherry syrup) far and wide. By May, the ads were touting further innovations, including the ground-breaking strawberry Sunday. In 1894, Platt applied for a trademark on his ice cream innovation, but he had possibly waited too long, there were too many copycats, and it was no longer clear what the true origin was.
It’s still not all that clear. All we have in the way of evidence for this particular claim amounts to some newspaper ads and a letter written forty years after the fact. And as to the shift from “Sunday” to “sundae,” well, nobody has a clue. By the early 1900s the spelling had become “sundae,” but where and when that further innovation was introduced isn’t known. Once again, whoever came up with it probably just waited too long to bring in the lawyers to write trademark applications. By then everybody was probably too busy enjoying their ice cream specialties.
