What does hokey pokey have to do with ice cream? The answer’s at the end of the research rabbit hole!

Time for a quick trip down the research rabbit hole. You didn’t think I could possibly get through a series like this without a few bunny trails, did you? I did have over 200 pages of research notes for this project after all. (Yeah, seriously I did. I know, but graduate school did this to me and there’s no fixing it…)

In any case, I always thought of Hokey Pokey as this silly song/dance sort of thing we used to do at the roller skating rink when I was—well back in the dark ages anyway. Imagine my surprise, nay shock, to discover it had a far more interesting history!

Ice Cream Vendors in London

As it turns out, Hokey Pokey has a long association with food. Food historians tell us that it traces back to Italian street vendors who sold inexpensive ice cream in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term seems to come from an English interpretation of an Italian phrased used by the vendors: O che poco. Translated, it means “Oh, how little”, a reference to the low price of their goods.

Hokey pokey venders generally peddled their wares on city streets and in places people went for recreation like amusement parks, boardwalks, and resorts. They used small vehicles from hand carts, bicycle carts to goat-pulled wagons. Show owners who sold ice cream were often contemptuous of their competition, using Hokey Pokey as a derogatory term for cheap goods and those who sold them.

What was Hokey Pokey?

 Hokey pokeys were hefty slices cut from ice cream bricks. Think about slices cut from the rectangular boxes of ice cream sold today. In this case though, the bricks were generally about foot and a half long, a foot wide, and two and a half to three inches deep. Not insubstantial by any means! They were usually layered with three different flavors of ice cream, and each crosswise slice would reveal all three, a bit like the Neapolitan ice cream we think of today, but the flavors were not nearly so predictable.  Whole bricks were also available, sold to ice cream shops to be sliced and served, and to home consumers, who would have to rush home to serve them before the ice cream melted. (Quinzio, 2009)   

Hokey Pokey Recipes

The recipes below offer some insight into why hokey pokey was so cheap. The confection included no cream, which was expensive. Instead they were thickened with corn starch and gelatin, far cheaper alternatives. It is interesting to note that neither recipe calls for any flavoring in particular, allowing for the use of whatever ingredients might be on hand, or be the cheapest at the time, to flavor the hokey pokey.

Hokey Pokey
“Make a custard composed of 3 eggs, 1 quart of milk, 2 tablespoonfuls of corn starch, 6 ounces of pulverized sugar and sufficient of any desirable extract to flavor it. Bring the milk to the boil; mix the corn starch, 6 ounces of pulverized sugar and eggs; beat these smoothly together with a little cold milk and add it to the boiling milk; stir all till the mixture begins to thicken, then add and stir in the flavor. Now immediately remove it from the fire, and when it becomes cool stir it together and put it into your freezer and freeze till solid.” (Stradley, 2017)

Another recipe “Dissolve three ounces of corn starch in one quart of milk, also soak two ounces of gelatin in the little milk or water. Place three quarts of milk and one pound twelve ounces of sugar in a tin or porcelain-lined pan, set on the fire until boiling, then pour it over the dissolved starch and gelatin, set on the fire again and bring to a good boil, stirring constantly with the egg beater, then add one can of condensed milk, strain, cool and freeze. Flavor at will.” (Stradley, 2017)

I don’t know about you, but now I’m hungry—for ice cream! Guess where I’m off to now, at least once I climb out of this rabbit hole! Thanks for joining me on this trip!

For more on Ice Cream in Jane Austen’s World, click HERE.

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