Whispers in an Ice Cream Parlor: Culinary Tourism, Contemporary Legends, and the Urban Interzone

Abstract

A contemporary legend active in 1910 held that white women were at risk of being abducted into involuntary slavery if they visited an ice cream parlor. This article grounds this legend in the emergence of ice cream into everyday American foodways, a trend paralleled by the growing economic impact of Mediterranean immigrants and by the increasing practice of “warehousing” potentially marriageable women of Western and Northern European descent in big-city colleges and technical schools. The ethnic-owned ice cream “parlor” thus became a liminal interzone in which single women engaged in culinary tourism in a way that was seen as dangerous to their ethnic identity.