Margaret Thatcher and Soft Serve, Revisited

Daniel Fromson:

For starters, most sources agree that the soft-serve industry arose in the United States, not Britain, and that it preceded Thatcher’s arrival at J. Lyons by about a decade. In 2008, Marian Burros offered a version of the conventional narrative in the Times:

Either J. F. McCullough or Tom Carvel deserves credit as the first soft-serve maker. Mr. McCullough made soft serve in 1938 in Moline, Ill. One August day, he offered it at a friend’s ice cream shop in Kankakee, Ill., and 1,600 people paid 10 cents for all they could eat of his newfangled treat.… Mr. Carvel appears to have stumbled on soft serve about the same time. When his truck carrying ice cream broke down in Hartsdale, N.Y., he sold it from the truck over two days as it softened.

Sam Dean, blogging for Bon Appétit about the Thatcher-soft-serve connection, suggests that this early soft-serve was more like proto-soft-serve, since “it wasn’t the fluffy, creamy stuff you’d expect to get from a Mr. Softee today.” This raises an intriguing ontological question—if ice cream is soft, and looks like soft-serve, is it, in fact, soft-serve?—but also raises further red flags about Thatcher’s bona fides, condemning her, at best, to be a lesser figure in the sort of Talmudic quarrels that have characterized disputes about the origins of the hamburger and other iconic foods. It also doesn’t hurt that McCullough and Carvel founded Dairy Queen and Carvel (and did so before Thatcher arrived at J. Lyons), whereas Thatcher merely went on to be Prime Minister.
Furthermore, the history of the British soft-serve industry in particular does not reinforce the notion that the soft-serve technology developed by J. Lyons & Company, much less by Thatcher, laid the groundwork for Mr. Whippy’s cones. As in the United States, in Britain multiple entities pioneered soft-serve simultaneously. One was J. Lyons—but, according to Steve Tillyer, who is almost certainly the most avid amateur chronicler of midcentury British soft-serve, with several books on the subject to his name, J. Lyons entered the industry by partnering with the American ice-cream-truck brand Mister Softee and opening local franchises using that company’s American machines. “The story of soft ice cream in Britain,” Tillyer writes, “started in the United States.”

The best part is that the Margaret Thatcher invented soft serve meme may have been brought up by the left to attack her policies as being like soft serve compared to real ice cream.