How the 1904 World’s Fair Showcased New American Foods | HISTORY (2024)

Nearly 20 million people poured through the gates of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, which commemorated the centennial of theLouisiana Purchase. While hungry ticket holders could order off a global menu at more than 125 eateries, a distinctly American cuisine emerged at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Hand-held items—and fast-food precursors—proved popular with busy fairgoers who ate on the go.

The 1904 World’s Fair “changed how the Western world ate and snacked,” food historian Elizabeth Abbot writes inSugar: A Bittersweet History. Many visitors to St. Louis had their first tastes of foods and beverages that would become American staples such ashot dogs,hamburgers, iced tea and the following fare:

Cotton Candy

The fair’s Palace of Electricity housed not only the world-changing innovations ofThomas Edisonbut an invention that harnessed cutting-edge technology to create a sweet concoction: cotton candy. Visitors watched with curiosity as the Electric Candy Machine Company’s device created sticky strands of candy by forcing liquefied sugar through small holes in a heated bowl spinning 2,200 times a minute. The machine had been co-patented by candy maker John C. Wharton and an unlikely collaborator, dentist William Morrison.

Although many hesitated to sample the company’s “fairy floss” until they were reassured it was truly candy and not cotton, the fluffy treat became one of the fair’s biggest hits. In addition to a prize for “novelty of invention,” the Electric Candy Machine Company sold tens of thousands of cotton candy boxes that were decorated with colorful lithographs of the fairgrounds and designed to be mailed to friends and family as souvenirs.

The boxes broadened the cloud-like confection’s popularity well beyond the fairgrounds. After the exhibition, the Electric Candy Machine Company capitalized on the publicity by installing machines in drug store windows around the country, and cotton candy quickly became a perennial fairground staple.

Peanut Butter

Some food historians credit cereal pioneerJohn Harvey Kelloggwith developing modern peanut butter at his Battle Creek Sanitarium. Others assert that St. Louis snack food maker George Bayle was the first to manufacture and sell the product in 1894.

A decade later, Missouri farmer C.H. Sumner arrived in Bayle’s hometown to exhibit his nut butter varieties and recipes at the World’s Fair. Sumner touted nut butters as protein-rich food sources for those unable to chew meat or concerned about thesafety of American meat products. “Whether considered from the standpoint of nutrition, economy or hygiene, it is quite evident that nuts are superior to meats for food,” he wrote in theWestern Fruit-Grower.

Using a pioneering grinding machine, Sumner was peanut butter’s lone concessionaire at the exhibition. Fairgoers collectively spent just over $700 at Sumner’s stand, and the treat’s popularity soon spread as Beech-Nut launched the first nationwide brand of peanut butter later that year. American peanut butter production exploded from 2 million pounds in 1899 to 34 million pounds in 1907.

Ice Cream Cone

Prior to the fair, vendors soldice creamin glass cups or dishes called “penny licks” that were returned, rinsed and reused. During the exhibition, however, theSt. Louis Globe-Democratnoted a novel sight—fairgoers were eating ice cream out of “an inverted cone of hard cake, resembling a coiled-up waffle.”

Proving the adage that “success has many fathers,” several peopleclaimedto have invented the ice cream cone at the 1904 World’s Fair, including Ernest Hamwi. As a 16-year-old recent immigrant fromSyria, he soldzalabias—waffle-like pastries from the Middle East—at the “Constantinople on the Pike” exhibit. According to Hamwi, when a neighboring ice cream concession ran out of dishes, he rolled azalabiainto a funnel shape for use as an edible container.

“This idea seemed to go over big,” he told a St. Louis newspaper decades later, “and soon the ice cream concessions all over the fair purchased the rolled waffles from us and sold them with the cream and called them ‘cornucopias.’” After the fair, Hamwi worked as a traveling salesman for the Cornucopia Waffle Oven Company before starting his ownice cream conecompany in 1910.

Although the ice cream cone may not have been born in St. Louis—an Italian immigrant inNew York City, Italo Marchiony,patenteda mold to make 10 ice cream cones at a time in 1903 and claimed to have served them since 1896—the World’s Fair quickly made it a popular novelty at seaside resorts, county fairs and amusem*nt parks. “Being new and toothsome, it is said to be the best money-maker for fairs and public gatherings yet devised,” theRoanoke Evening Newsreported in 1905. Given its historical connection to the fair, the ice cream cone became Missouri’s official state dessert.