The Disputed Origins Of The Banana Split

If you've got a hankering to find out where the banana split was invented, the answer is ... it depends on who you ask. More than one American city stakes a claim to the iconic dessert featuring the perfect freckled banana lined with scoops of ice cream and toppings like fudge or strawberry syrup. There is general consensus that it was created in the early 1900s, not long after the banana first became widely available in the U.S. It was around the same time that the sundae was invented due to a bizarre law that prohibited soda sales on Sundays. (Sundaes eliminated the soda found in soda fountain floats.) Bananas became the perfect topping.

The city with the best-accepted claim to inventing the banana split is Latrobe, Pennsylvania. The story goes that student pharmacist David Strickler regularly made ice cream desserts at work (back when drug stores sold soda and ice cream). One day, a customer asked him to create something new and he obliged. Strickler made use of the novel banana by cutting it lengthwise and wedging a scoop of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream in between. Then he topped that with strawberry and chocolate syrups, whipped cream, and cherries. (Some also say Strickler added pineapple, with others suggesting that there were nuts and marshmallows, but the foundation remains the same across most stories.) In his honor, Latrobe has erected a large banana split sculpture where the drugstore stood and hosts a banana split festival each year.

Latrobe, Pennsylvania isn't the only city to consider itself the home of the banana split. A few hundred miles west, Wilmington, Ohio makes a similar claim and also used to throw an annual celebration in honor of the dessert. This story involves a friendly battle between staffers at Ernest Hazard's restaurant, tasked with drumming up some buzz to draw in the off-season crowd. But even though Hazard won the contest he allegedly sponsored (notwithstanding any dubious "insider scooping"), reports suggest that Hazard's banana split featured mere minor differences to the Latrobe version: He stuck with just vanilla scoops topped with pineapple, chocolate and strawberry syrup. From there, it picked up in popularity.

Since communication was much slower at the time, these kinds of conflicting claims were pretty common. (Even though it came decades later, the origin of Buffalo wings is still up for debate). It's possible that two places came up with similar ideas independently. But it also could be that somebody happened to lift the idea only to "invent" it later. Either way, it's tough to prove. There's yet another claim that the banana split debuted in Boston at an ice cream convention in 1905, although the city seems to agree that the banana split was probably invented in Latrobe. Ultimately, Latrobe appears to have the edge because it was first to the table with the banana dish — in 1904 — compared for Wilmington's reported timeline dating to 1907.