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Read more: Restaurant owner says Come Dine With Me win puts town on map Why are 99 ice creams called 99s if they don't cost 99p?
In the interwar period of the 20th Century, Italian immigrants in Britain opened ice cream parlours across the country, including the North East. Examples include Notarianni, which opened in Sunderland in the 1930s and Mincellas, which started as a pitch in Boldon Colliery and is still a thriving business today in Ocean Road, South Shields. Cadbury's press bumph repeats the fallacious but appealing story that a former king of Italy had a private army of 99 elite soldiers, and that the Italian immigrants who pioneered the 20th century British ice-cream trade used "99" as a corresponding symbol for quality and prestige. The OED briskly deems this tale "without foundation", and the theory was comprehensively exploded by Victoria Coren's BBC show Balderdash & Piffle. I naturally favour the noble tale of Edinburgh ice-cream maker Stephen Arcari, who in 1922 allegedly named the 99 after his shop at 99 Portobello High Street. So now you know - and if you wanted to know more, if you add two flakes to an ice cream it is called Bunny Ears, while a Flake with strawberry sauce is known as Monkey's Blood. A 99 Flake, 99 or ninety-nine [1] is an ice cream cone with a Cadbury Flake inserted in the ice cream. The term can also refer to the half-sized Cadbury-produced Flake bar, itself specially made for such ice cream cones, and to a wrapped product marketed by Cadbury “for ice cream and culinary use”. A 99 is nothing without a Flake. That shattering finger gives depth and body to the scummy, foamy ice-cream and desiccated cone. The Flake emerged around 1920 when a clever worker at Cadbury's Bournville factory noticed that chocolate overflowing its moulds fell and set in appealing ripples. People seem to have spotted its affinity with ice-cream almost immediately. By 1930, Cadbury's was selling half-length Flake "99s" specifically for prodding into Mr Whippy, or his equivalent.
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When I was growing up, I always assumed that the 99 Flake was so called because it cost 99p. Indeed I think it did for most of my childhood, in what seemed an unusually sensible way for grown-ups to have done things, and perhaps also a nifty reminder of how much to cadge off them to get hold of one. While Cadbury admits the invention of the 99 ice cream "has been lost in the mists of time", it does have evidence that County Durham-based Italians could be the creators of the 99. Eventually, those wafer ice cream sandwiches with Flakes morphed into the sugar cones we eat today. Small Cadbury Flakes were marketed for ice cream cones by the 1930s, according to the Guardian. There are other theories too about how the 99 got its name One origin story suggests 99s came from Scotland, home to many Italian ice cream families. One says the treat was invented in Portobello, and named after the number of the shop.
The early "99 Flake" was a wafer "sandwich", not a flake bar inserted into a cone of ice cream. It consisted of a small chocolate flake inserted between two servings of ice cream and placed between two wafer biscuits.
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Dunkerleys of Gorton, Manchester claims to have created the Flake at their shop 99 Wellington Street. But Cadbury says that, while the origin may be unclear, the name was created to appeal to Italian vendors. To this day, the Acari family of Edinburgh claim to be the true inventors of the 99, Edinburgh Live reports. Another suggestion is that the initials of ice cream - IC - translate as 99 in Roman numbers.
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