Not Vanilla, Chocolate, Or Pistachio — This Loaded Ice Cream Flavor Was A Depression-Era Staple

The Great Depression was a time of poverty and desperation the the United States. The Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929 and eventually came to an end in 1939 with both the help of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs and the ramping up of production at the beginning of World War II. During this decade of global economic downturn, people would eat whatever the could manage, stretching foods so there was no waste and making the best of relying on canned soup. Out of all the foods people ate during the Great Depression, there's one sweet treat that came out of that difficult period you might not expect.

Rocky Road ice cream flavor was invented during the Great Depression in Oakland, California, but the exact origins of the flavor are still disputed. If you've never had a scoop, Rocky Road ice cream is a chocolate ice cream with marshmallows and nuts mixed in. The nuts can be whole or chopped, and they are usually almonds, but sometimes walnuts or even pecans will make an appearance instead, depending on the ice cream maker. According to Edy's (known as Dreyer's on the West Coast), in 1929, candy maker Joseph Edy and ice cream maker William Dreyer "wanted to create a a special new flavor to make folks smile," so they created the new flavor by adding cut up marshmallows and almonds to chocolate ice cream.

However as with many food origin stories, there is another, smaller ice cream maker that also claims to have originated the flavor. Not far from Dreyer and Edy's ice cream shop was Fentons Creamery, which still operates in Oakland and is one of the oldest ice cream parlors in the US. At the time, there was a popular candy bar named rocky road which originated in Australia in the 1850s that had marshmallows and walnuts in it, which supposedly served as the inspiration for the new ice cream flavor. Melvin Fenton, the grandson of the founder of Fenton's, supposedly worked with candy maker George Farren to turn this candy bar into an ice cream flavor. Farren claimed that Dreyer and Edy, his friends at the time, stole this new flavor idea for their own ice cream shop, swapping walnuts for almonds.

Whoever is indeed the true inventor of rocky road ice cream may forever be up for debate, but we can at least know for sure that the ice cream flavor has a sentimental inspiration behind it. Even if the flavor did originate from Fenton's, there's no doubt that Dreyer and Edy's success overall as an ice cream company was what brought rocky road ice cream to the masses over the years. Before the invention of Rocky Road flavor, most ice cream choices were limited to the basics: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate. The addition of mix-ins was a game changer and an exciting development in the world of frozen treats.