The Iconic Frozen Midwest Treat That Was Actually Invented Nearly 1,000 Miles Away

If frozen custard makes you think of Wisconsin, that's fair enough – Milwaukee has spent the better part of a century making this treat its own. It's only logical that one of the states with the most dairy farms would come up with this creamy, delightful treat, right? The thing is, trace frozen custard back far enough and you land nowhere near Wisconsin, not even a cow. Instead, it originates from a boardwalk in Brooklyn, New York.

In the summer of 1919, the three Kohr brothers were working as milkmen in York, Pennsylvania. They'd haul bottles of fresh milk door to door, and sell ice cream they'd made using a gasoline-powered machine. One day, their uncle suggested they take their ice cream maker to the shore, so they decided to start a stall on the boardwalk at Coney Island. By the end of their first weekend, they'd moved over 18,000 cones.

But it wasn't all smooth sailing. The brothers realized that the salt air wafting off the Atlantic was murder on their product, and it would often melt before people could finish it. The brothers tinkered with the recipe and eventually found that adding egg yolks resulted in stiffer, creamier ice cream that could survive a walk down the boardwalk in the summer heat. The trio decided that the original name of their treat, "Frozen Dessert," sounded too generic and failed to accurately describe their new invention, so they came up with one that has since gone down in culinary history: frozen custard.

In the early 1930s, a handful of Milwaukee brewers idled by Prohibition had begun bottling soda and packing ice cream to stay afloat. They didn't have to look far for ingredients, as Wisconsin dairies were producing more milk than the state could drink. Frozen custard might have remained a New York beach treat indefinitely if not for the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago, where attendees were got their first unforgettable taste of the dessert. 

Wisconsin was perfectly positioned to catch what New York started. Producing the newly popular dessert was simple for the brewers, and Milwaukeeans did the rest of the work by popularizing the treat. Gilles, Milwaukee's first frozen custard stand, came first in 1938. Leon's and Kopp's followed within the next 12 years, and all three are still thriving in their original spots. Milwaukee leaned into the dessert hard enough to call itself the "Frozen Custard Capital of the World," and depending who's counting, it may still have more custard stands per person than anywhere on Earth.