HENDLERS: The Velvet Kind, An Image Gallery Part 3

Article by Rachel Kassman. Originally published in Generations 2011 – 2012: Jewish Foodways.

Missed the beginning? Start here.


Flavors of the Month!

Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry were big business for Hendler Creamery, but that didn’t stop them from experimenting! When Chase and Sanborn introduced the concept of dated coffee, Hendler Creamery  gained permission to use the phrase and invented a whole new flavor of ice cream – coffee with dates!  The company also made specialty flavors for particular customers, like ginger and peppermint for Hutzler’s department store and tomato sherbet for the Southern Hotel. But perhaps the best remembered specialty flavor was Hendler’s Egg-Nog ice cream. Hendler’s was the only ice cream company in the United States to have a liquor license (for blending liquor into ice cream) so that the Egg-Nog ice cream could be flavored with pure rum.

A calendar of monthly flavor specialties, provide by Hendler’s to various ice cream vendors.
Anonymous Gift. 1998.47.
This billboard shares Hendler’s preferred recipe for a holiday egg nog! Anonymous Gift, 1998.47.13.17.

Christmas Charity

December wasn’t just a month for Egg-Nog ice cream. L. Manuel Hendler started a company tradition of sending free ice cream to orphanages and to children in hospital wards. Advertisements in the paper invited institutions to participate and the list of beneficiaries grew each year. Hendler’s also sent ice cream to the penitentiary and even once, during World War II, to American prisoner-of-war camps!

Billboards advertising the Hendler Christmas donations of ice cream. Photos by Harry B. Leopold. Anonymous Gift, 1998.47.10.1, 11.31, 11.33.

Conclusion

Baltimore has long played an important role in America’s ice cream industry – after all, Mr. Jacob Fussell, the “father of wholesale ice cream manufacturing,” was a Baltimorean. L. Manuel Hendler was the chairman of the Ice Cream Industry’s National Centennial Committee, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Mr. Fussell’s feat here in Baltimore in 1951. But the Hendler Creamery Company will forever reign supreme as “The Velvet Kind” of Baltimore memory.

Check out the crowd at the Ice Cream Centennial luncheon! Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Boltanksy, 1996.152.3.

~The End~

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