Ice Cream Sandwich Day

What the day is

Ice Cream Sandwich Day is observed on August 2. The item is ice cream between two biscuits or wafers, eaten by hand, and it exists because eating ice cream without a dish is otherwise difficult.

Origin and background

The ice cream sandwich is a street food in origin. Pushcart vendors in New York were selling ice cream between wafers by the late 1890s, at a penny each, in a city where a great many people had no way of keeping ice cream at home. The format solved the same problem the cone solved a little later: portability without crockery.

The dark rectangular wafer familiar in America is a specific piece of food engineering. An ordinary biscuit frozen solid would shatter teeth and stick to fingers; the wafer is formulated with enough sugar and fat, and little enough water, to stay pliable at freezer temperature and to release cleanly from the hand. Its faint chocolate flavor is almost incidental to those requirements.

The cookie-based version arrived much later, with the Chipwich launched in New York in the late 1970s, built on chocolate chip cookies and rolled in chips at the edges. Other countries went their own directions: Australia and New Zealand have wafer-and-ice-cream slices, and Italy has brioche con gelato, which is ice cream in a sweet bun and considerably better than it sounds.

How to take part

• Soften the ice cream before assembling. Scooping hard ice cream onto a biscuit breaks the biscuit.
• Use cookies with plenty of sugar, butter or molasses. Lean, crisp biscuits freeze into shrapnel.
• Press a whole sheet at once: spread softened ice cream in a lined tray, freeze firm, then cut squares and sandwich them. This is far easier than one at a time.
• Wrap each one individually and refreeze for at least an hour before eating.
• Roll the edges in chopped nuts, chips or sprinkles while still soft.
• Try brioche con gelato once if you are near an Italian bakery in summer.