Tuesday/ Häagen-Dazs’s history

Here’s my little reward for Tuesday, the IMG_0282 smsmallest serving of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, barely a big scoop packaged in a tiny tub.   Even so, it still packs 45% of one’s daily saturated fat allowance! And I learned today that Häagen-Dazs was actually established by Reuben and Rose Mattus in the Bronx, New York, in 1961.  Coffee was one of the three original flavors (vanilla and chocolate the others).

For some reason I have always assumed it’s a German brand .. but here is a full explanation from Wikipedia : Mattus invented the “Danish-sounding” “Häagen-Dazs” as a tribute to Denmark’s exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. The name, however, is not Danish, which has neither an umlaut nor a digraph zs – ä is used in Finnish, Swedish and German, but Danish uses æ for the corresponding sound (both of these are contractions of “ae”), and zs is used in Hungarian – nor does it have any meaning in any language or etymology before its creation. Mattus felt that Denmark was known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the U.S.  His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the PBS documentary, An Ice Cream Show (1999), that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.

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