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. "Ice cream parlors," solemnly stated Miss Florence Mabel Dedrick in 1910, "are the places where scores of girls have taken their first step downward." Dedrick's remarks appeared in an enormously popular book titled Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or, War on the White Slave Trade, a collection of various crusaders' accounts of combating the alleged criminal conspiracy that trapped scores of unwary white girls into entering a life of prostitution. Her contribution gave her impressions as a rescue missionary working among the denizens of Chicago's red-light district. Innocent country girls, drawn to the big city by its attractions and promise of good jobs, came in contact with the agents of Satan, who lurked inside movie theaters, amusement parks, fruit stores, and, most especially, ice cream parlors. And the danger was spreading, Dedrick said: ice cream was the bait attracting young girls "even in the large country town," where white slavers, the malign agents of a national and international market in prostitutes, had recruiting stations (Dedrick 1910:111).Another contributor to Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, Chicago's federal district attorney, Edwin W. Sims, claimed to have personally examined some 250 victims of white slavery and had documented the peril with multiple confessions from its perpetrators. "One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city," Sims warned, "and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement." When such places are owned by foreigners, the danger is greater, and he alluded to "scores of cases . . . where young girls have taken

Conveying Ćeif: Three Croatian Folklore and Folklife Writings on Bosniak Coffee Culture

“…In this context of the academic face of Freud's narcissism of small differences, Croatian folklore accounts of Bosniak coffee culture can not only reveal what coffee meant to nineteenth-century Bosniaks but also what it meant for Croats interested in learning about, as they imagined them, their "brethren" lost to the Muslim faith. Such a critical lens contributes to recent studies of the nexus between foodways and ethnic/racial/national politics [Appadurai 1988;Chen 2011;Ellis 2009;Jones 2017;Pilcher 1998;Preston-Werner 2009;Williment 2001] by providing a vantage into the discursive paradigms that Croatian scholars employed to discuss a population which they endeavored to depict as simultaneously co-nationals and exotic others.…”