The sundae is called a sundae because it was first called a Sunday. The oldest written record of the dessert is a newspaper advertisement for a “Cherry Sunday” in Ithaca, New York, in April 1892. How “Sunday” became “sundae” is not documented, and a town in Wisconsin says the dish itself is eleven years older than Ithaca’s.
Ithaca: a Sunday afternoon in 1892
The History Center in Tompkins County, Ithaca’s local history museum, tells the story this way. On 3 April 1892, Chester C. Platt, owner of the Platt & Colt pharmacy in downtown Ithaca, served the Reverend John M. Scott a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with cherry syrup and a candied cherry. They called it a “Cherry Sunday.”
The Ithaca author Michael Turback, whose books include A Month of Sundaes, adds the details. The two men met after services at the Unitarian church, where Platt was treasurer. Platt asked his fountain clerk, DeForest Christiance, for two bowls of ice cream, then dressed them up himself. The dish was good enough that the men felt they had to give it a name, and Scott suggested naming it after the day.
What makes Ithaca’s claim strong is paper. Two days later, on 5 April 1892, Platt & Colt advertised the Cherry Sunday in the Ithaca Daily Journal. The History Center calls that advertisement “the oldest primary source evidence of the ice cream sundae anywhere in the world.” Within weeks, it says, the shop was selling Strawberry Sundays and Chocolate Sundays, and by 1894 Platt was trying to trademark the name.
Two Rivers: a dish of ice cream in 1881
Two Rivers, Wisconsin, tells a different story and puts it eleven years earlier. In 1881, according to the Two Rivers version, a customer named George Hallauer asked Ed Berners, who ran a soda fountain, to pour the chocolate syrup he used for sodas over a plain dish of ice cream. The account rests on an interview Berners gave the Two Rivers Reporter in 1929. In it, as quoted by the town’s supporters, Berners recalled protesting, “You don’t want to ruin the flavor of the ice cream,” and Hallauer answering, “I’ll try anything once.”
Berners did not claim the name. In the same telling, he credited it to another ice cream seller, George Giffy, in nearby Manitowoc, who sold the dish only on Sundays until a girl insisted on having one on a weekday.
The trouble with Two Rivers’ claim is that it rests on one man’s memory almost fifty years later. Ithaca’s rests on an advertisement printed two days after the event.
Why the spelling changed
Here the trail goes cold. Both towns used the word Sunday at first. At some point it became “sundae”, and we found no document that explains when or why. One popular explanation is that naming a dessert after the Sabbath struck some people as disrespectful, so the spelling was changed. Two Rivers tells another: a salesman writing up an order for Berners’ canoe-shaped glass dishes misspelled the word. Neither story comes with a source.
What is documented is simpler. In 1892 a pharmacist in Ithaca put cherries on ice cream on a Sunday afternoon and named the result after the day. The odd spelling came later. We could not find who started it.
