On October 29, 1929, America took a hard turn down a very rocky road.
That day, known as Black Tuesday, marked the final and most devastating leg of the stock market crash that brought the Roaring Twenties to a screeching halt and ushered in the Great Depression.
The numbers from that awful time are staggering.
By 1932, 25% of all American families did not have a single employed wage earner in the household.
One year later, the U.S. unemployment rate had climbed to an astonishing 24.9%, meaning 12.8 million people were entirely without work.
“Once I built a railroad, now it’s done,” Bing Crosby sang in 1932. “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
Average worker wages plummeted by 42.5% between 1929 and 1933, while roughly 75% of those still working were reduced to part-time schedules. Between 1930 and 1933, roughly 9,000 banks collapsed across the nation.
Breadlines and soup kitchens sprang up in cities, but they were regularly overwhelmed.
“Ten men in our Country could buy the World, and ten million can’t buy enough to eat,” humorist Will Rogers wrote in his Aug. 16, 1931, newspaper column.
‘Hoover Stew’ and ‘Slumgullion’
But people had to find some way to eat, and they resorted to desperate measures to put food on the table.
Standard fare in working-class neighborhoods included “Slumgullion,” a cheap stew of meat, macaroni, and tomatoes, and “Hoover Stew,” sliced hot dogs cooked with macaroni and canned tomatoes, which was sarcastically named after President Herbert Hoover.
In 1930, James Dewar, a baker at Continental Baking Co., found himself with idle baking equipment when strawberries, a key ingredient in the company’s Little Shortcake Fingers, went out of season.
Dewar filled the shortcakes with banana cream, which was more accessible and had a longer shelf life, creating what would become the Twinkie.
Kraft introduced its macaroni and cheese in 1937, and it became an instant hit since one box could feed a family of four for just 19 cents.
That same year, Hormel introduced Spam, combining pork shoulder with ham to create a cheap product that didn’t need to be refrigerated.
And then there was ice cream.
When Prohibition took effect in 1920, many saloons, bars, and breweries had to change their businesses to survive.
Some turned to soda fountains, while major breweries including Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch (BUD) moved into ice cream production to keep their workers employed.
The Depression slowed ice cream production and consumption compared with the 1920s, but the frozen treat endured.
Maybe people couldn’t spare a dime, but a nickel could buy a scoop of ice cream, giving them an affordable indulgence and perhaps a way to take their minds off all that Slumgullion and Hoover Stew.
Rocky Road is said to have gotten its name during these turbulent times, but like so many origin stories, the truth is difficult to pin down.
One popular version says Rocky Road was created in March 1929 by William Dreyer, co-founder of Dreyer’s Ice Cream, in Oakland, California, just months before the stock market crash.
Competing origin stories
At the time, ice cream was commonly sold in three basic flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
Dreyer added walnuts, later replaced with almonds, to his chocolate ice cream. He then used his wife’s sewing shears to cut marshmallows into bite-sized pieces and created the first batch of Rocky Road.
Dreyer and his partner, Joseph Edy, eventually gave the flavor its now-famous name “to give folks something to smile about in the midst of the Great Depression.”
However, another Oakland business has a different story.
Fentons Creamery claimed Rocky Road was developed by George Farren, a candy maker at the company who turned a candy bar into the ice cream flavor.
Farren was friends with Dreyer and Edy, who had an ice cream shop on Grand Avenue in Oakland. According to Fentons, Dreyer soon began making Farren’s recipe for his own customers, using almonds instead of the English walnuts in the original Fentons version.
“Like so much food history, and especially ice cream history, the story of Rocky Road isn’t clear,” said Hannah Spiegelman, creator of A Sweet History. “The first published recipe for Rocky Road was in a Kansas recipe book.”
That recipe appeared in the 1920 edition of Rigby’s Reliable Candy Teacher, published in Topeka, Kansas, nearly a decade before the Oakland origin stories.
It called for chocolate ice cream topped with honey cream whip, almond macaroons, walnuts, pecans, and a cherry.
Then there’s a story from Down Under, with some accounts tracing Rocky Road to the mid-19th century, when damaged sweets arriving from England were supposedly repackaged and sold to travelers and gold seekers.
Australian food historians have questioned that account. Myer department store in Adelaide advertised “Rocky Roads” in 1933, describing them as a combination of chocolate, coconut, and marshmallow.
We may never know the real story behind Rocky Road, but whoever came up with this flavor created a keeper.
Today, Rocky Road ranks 17th on the list of America’s favorite ice cream flavors, just behind blueberry and ahead of Moose Tracks, according to Statista. Chocolate, butter pecan, and vanilla occupy the top three spots.
The connection between Rocky Road ice cream and the Great Depression was such a hot topic recently that it was a heavily trending question on Google and social media on Sept. 2.
“I don’t think there is any concrete evidence that Rocky Road was named for the tough times, but it is a great story,” Spiegelman said. “Whether that was true or not, the flavor today allows people to explore that time in history.”
So, one scoop or two?
