Hokey-Pokey

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“I suppose they gave it that name because it isn’t real, good, genuine ice-cream—just sort of a sham. You know, a ‘hocus-pocus’ is another word for a ‘hoax,’ or trick. So hokey-pokey ice-cream is a cheat. It’s cold and tastes sweet, but it isn’t good, clean wholesome food.” – Modern Physiology Hygiene and Health primer, 1921

Summer has caused me to once again revisit the storied history of Baltimore snowballs. As I have mentioned, the snowball endured many waves of health code threats. Luckily, nostalgia won out and snowballs have become something of a sacred cow when it comes to licensing crackdowns.

At the turn of the 20th century, there was an also-ran summer confection that didn’t fare quite as well.

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Hokey-pokey first appeared on the streets of London in the mid-1800s, sold by Italian vendors. The name is believed to be a variant of “hocus pocus,” or -some say- derived from vendors calling out “ecco un poco”: “here’s a little.” Unless that is a popular street-vendor call in Italy, I’m skeptical.

Hokey-pokey quickly made its way to New York, to beach towns like Long Branch New Jersey, and eventually to Baltimore.

For something so wildly popular, very few people ever knew just what hokey-pokey actually was. A traveler from Buffalo New York visiting London described a hokey-pokey vendor “taking from an ice-cream freezer a little square of something that looked like a slice of white castile soap” in 1879. The Hamlin, Kansas News Gleaner claimed in 1880 that “the hokey-pokey is made largely of corn starch and milk.” In 1889, the Hampshire Telegraph in England wrote that “it is difficult to say, nowadays, what is ‘hokey-pokey’ and what it is not.”

Even some would-be vendors were themselves not entirely sure. A 1902 classified ad in the Baltimore Sun read: “WANTED—A Man Who Understands How to Make Hokey-Pokey Ice-Cream.”

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Few recipes for hokey-pokey exist, but they tend to contain varying quantities of milk, sugar, eggs, gelatin and/or cornstarch. These are all acceptable dessert ingredients, but hokey-pokey got a bad reputation. A syndicated column in 1891 declared that love is not like ice cream – it is like hokey-pokey ice cream:

“You lay down your penny; you demand your square. It’s given to you on a piece of brown paper; it looks fascinating… At first it is delightful. The second mouthful is cool, but suggestive of oleomargerine; the third is waxy and sticky; and then you take the last with a wry face and are disgusted for buying it; feel that it has upset your heart[/stomach] and that you never want any more again.“

The Milwaukee Weekly Wisconsin described the flavor of hokey-pokey in 1890 as “a mingled taste of paregoric, petroleum and tallow.” They did concede that it was a bargain at 2 cents a bar.

When the newspapers weren’t looking down on the quality of hokey-pokey, they were wringing their hands over its safety. With an unsettling dose of anti-Italian sentiment, hokey-pokey ice cream was declared to be a danger to children.

Of course, it was a dangerous time for food in general. Ice cream in particular was often suspected to be a source of deadly food poisoning.

In 1904, several children’s deaths were attributed to hokey-pokey in New York. The Baltimore Sun picked up one story of a Harlem girl who died after eating three hokey-pokey ice cream sandwiches. A child in Manhattan died from “some kind of poison,” which the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported was “presumably” from hokey-pokey, which the boy had been fond of. The persistence of this summer treat was under threat of being banished from cities.

Ultimately, it was the ice cream lobby who encouraged a crackdown. When the Maryland Ice-Cream Manufacturers Association met at the Emerson in 1913, they declared that they only intended to “raise the ice cream standard,” not to drive the hokey-pokey men out of business. Nonetheless, health commissioners were asked to help “exterminate” hokey-pokey carts, and they soon began to fade from memory in Baltimore.

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In 1921, Hokey-Pokey was still apparently enough of a menace elsewhere to receive lengthy censure in “The Play-House,” a children’s schoolbook designed to teach about hygiene and health. The book’s author, Mary S. Haviland, was the research secretary of the National Child Welfare Association. She wrote the book in the form of a story with lengthy dialogue where children improbably lecture one-another about the finer points of safety and food purity. In addition to learning to avoid poison ivy, to keep gasoline away from open flame, and to regularly brush their teeth, schoolchildren were warned to avoid the sweet allure of hokey-pokey.

While stating the apparently foregone conclusion that “the hokey-pokey men are usually dirty,” the book explained the concept of the invisible germs to be found within the ice cream itself.

In truth, hokey-pokey never went away. While street vendors were no longer likely to manufacture the cheap ice cream in their homes, that practice was bound to die off anyway. In the early 1900s, Baltimore already had at least two factories that manufactured hokey-pokey. In the hands of corporations, hokey-pokey took other forms, including one popularized by the original hokey-pokey vendors: the ice cream sandwich. The hokey-pokey name lent itself to a popular song. Men who pushed carts to pick up trash for the city were later referred to as “hokey pokey men.”

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In 1966, brothers James and Elmer Mason reminisced in the Baltimore Sun about their hokey-pokey selling days, when they had to arrive by 8am to “Mr. Winn’s” factory at Sarah Ann & Pearl Streets. Each day, the brothers would sell 100-200 hokey-pokey blocks for a penny apiece around Lexington Market, among a sea of pushcarts. Other vendors included the “white-aproned oystermen,” banana carts, and vendors selling steamed and fried crabs. Organ-grinders would send monkeys up the drainpipes of apartment buildings to collect pennies from people who enjoyed their organ music. Like the hokey-pokey men, these ‘hurdy-gurdy men’ were considered “a sure sign of spring.”

Spring becomes summer, which ends all too soon. In October of 1906, an anonymous poet used Baltimore’s street-vendor culture to note the passing of seasons:

“The hokey-pokey man has fled,
The soda flows no more;
But the roasted-chestnut man is here—
Let the winds of autumn roar!“

Recipe:

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“Dissolve three ounces of corn starch in one quart of milk, also soak two ounces of gelatin in a little milk or water. Place three quarts of milk and one pound and twelve ounces of sugar in a tin or porcelain-lined pan, set on the fire until boiling, then pout it over the dissolved starch and gelatin, set on the fire again and bring to a good boil, stirring constantly with the egg beater, then add one can of condensed milk, strain, cool and freeze. Flavor at will.”

Note: I chose a recipe with no eggs because I figured it would be closer the cheaper quality hokey-pokey. I used cherry flavoring but didn’t have any food coloring.

Recipe from “The Dispenser’s Formulary, Or, Soda Water Guide,” D.O. Haynes, 1915

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