Tutti Frutti
Picture walking into an ice cream shop in the 1950s and asking for tutti frutti – you’d instantly receive that bright pink, candy-loaded scoop that tasted like pure nostalgia. This flavor went from being ubiquitous to being all but untraceable, though it was once a wildly popular ice cream flavor you could find just about anywhere ice cream was sold. The name literally means “all fruits” in Italian, and the reality lived up to the promise.
Legend has it, the popularity of tutti frutti ice cream was propelled by an ice cream factory owner in Kentucky who had a daughter nicknamed Toodie, and the family’s love for the flavor spread outward to reach the entire nation, culminating in a midcentury tutti frutti frenzy. Little Richard, Pat Boone and Elvis sang about it in the mid 1950s, making it as much a cultural phenomenon as a frozen treat.
Today, while tutti frutti ice cream enjoyed a long run appearing on restaurant menus from 1890 to 1981, you can’t find it just anywhere anymore, with one of the most famous places to still serve it being Leopold’s Ice Cream in Savannah, Georgia. The flavor’s decline might be tied to its resemblance to fruitcake ingredients, which sadly carries a bad reputation among modern consumers.
Teaberry
Made with teaberries, this bright pink ice cream was all the rage in the 1960s but is now hard to find outside of Pennsylvania, though despite the color and the word “berry,” the flavor is closer to mint than strawberry or raspberry. The unusual taste comes from the teaberry plant, also known as wintergreen, which gives the ice cream a distinct herbal note that’s stronger than regular mint and slightly spicy.
In the early 1900s, a Pittsburgh chewing gum maker named Charles Burke invented a new flavor using teaberries, sparking a craze that produced teaberry tea, candies, wine, and ice cream throughout Pennsylvania. The flavor peaked in popularity during the 1960s when curious ice cream lovers would line up at local scoop shops to experience this novelty treat.
The ice cream has a minty flavor and pink hue that has been compared to Pepto Bismol, and while it’s fallen out of favor with younger crowds, it still maintains a small but devoted fanbase. Fans say the flavor makes an interesting alternative to vanilla in root beer floats, while others find it strangely savory or even medicinal. You can still find it occasionally through regional brands like Yuengling’s Ice Cream in Pennsylvania.
Butter Brickle
Among the most American of ice cream flavors is butter brickle – toffee covered in chocolate – which made its earliest known debut at the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1920s. This sweet, buttery treat became synonymous with old-fashioned soda fountain culture, where it reigned supreme alongside other nostalgic flavors.
The Fenn Bros. Ice Cream and Candy Company out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota became known for its butter brickle trademark, and their recipe was eventually sold to Heath Bar manufacturers in 1970, then to Leaf Inc. in 1989, before Hershey took ownership in 1996. This flavor was incredibly popular back in the times of soda fountain shops, but the company who manufactured the flavor went out of business in the ’70s, making it super hard to source the Brickle pieces.
The flavor persists today as inspiration for similar offerings like Heath Bar and toffee crunch varieties. However, butter brickle ice cream is still sold in some ice cream shops and packed into pints by several brands, but it’s no longer easy to find in mainstream grocery stores. Like many vintage treats, it’s been deemed too old-fashioned for modern tastes, despite its rich, creamy texture and satisfying crunch.
Rum Raisin
Unlike tutti frutti and plum ice cream, you can still find rum raisin at some stores, but its stint as one of the most ubiquitous ice cream flavors is long gone, with its history dating back to Sicily in the early 20th century where it was made with marsala-soaked Málaga raisins and gelato. When it reached American shores, the recipe evolved to include regular ice cream with rum-soaked raisins.
Its first wave of popularity in America can be attributed to the end of Prohibition, when Americans were no longer banned from drinking alcohol and added it to just about everything including desserts, and it came back into style in the ’70s and ’80s. The flavor experienced multiple waves of popularity, becoming a symbol of sophisticated adult tastes.
Rum raisin found a resurgence of popularity in the 1980s when Häagen-Dazs began selling it as one of its flavors, and though not as popular as it once was, it had been voted as the preferred flavor of ice cream fans in Florida and Georgia. Today’s younger generations often associate it with their grandparents, making it definitively a “grandma flavor” despite its complex taste profile.
Tiger Tail
The nostalgic Canadian classic tiger tail stands alone, made by adding a swirl of licorice to orange ice cream in a unique combination of flavors that certainly isn’t for everyone, though during the 1950s and ’60s, Canadians were crazy about it and it was downright mainstream. The striking orange and black stripes gave this flavor its distinctive appearance that matched its bold taste.
Nowadays, it’s mostly confined to the Ontario area and is by no means the region’s most popular flavor, even if ice cream parlors still keep it around out of respect for its history, and despite how popular it was, its origin story is a mystery and its precise formula is challenging to replicate. The polarizing nature of licorice likely contributed to its eventual decline outside of Canada.
This big cat color scheme inspired mix of licorice swirled throughout orange-flavored ice cream rightfully dubbed tiger tail had mostly fallen out of favor by the 1970s, but experienced a nostalgic resurgence in recent years, particularly in Canada where ice cream lovers continue to clamor for the classic. For those brave enough to try it, the combination creates an unforgettable taste experience that’s either loved or despised.
Black Walnut
Black walnut ice cream seems to have been a little more prevalent, with several major brands carrying black walnut varieties at some point in time including Häagen-Dazs, Blue Bell, and Baskin Robbins, though while you can find advertisements for the flavor dating to the 1950s, today this ice cream flavor is a little more difficult to find. The rich, earthy flavor of black walnuts provided a sophisticated alternative to regular vanilla or chocolate bases.
Unlike regular English walnuts, black walnuts have a much stronger, more distinctive flavor that some describe as almost wine-like or musky. This intensity made the ice cream a polarizing choice – you either loved the robust nuttiness or found it overwhelming. The nuts themselves are notoriously difficult to harvest and process, requiring special techniques to crack their incredibly hard shells.
Multiple Reddit threads asking for assistance can attest to the difficulty in finding authentic black walnut ice cream today, with most helpful respondents reporting that brands known for having it have either discontinued it or only sell it intermittently. Many older consumers remember the authentic taste from the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that modern versions just don’t compare to the original recipes.
Date Nut
When Baskin-Robbins originally opened in the 1940s with their plan to have one flavor for every day of the month, they included date nut among their original 31 flavors, as dates were typically cultivated in arid climates like the American Southwest where Arizona ice cream parlors featured the flavor as early as 1908. The natural sweetness and caramel-like quality of dates made them perfect candidates for frozen desserts.
Dates are an ancient fruit cultivated as early as 4000 B.C., but before the 1900s they were mostly unheard of in the United States, until the sugar rations of the 1940s when Americans looked for alternative sweeteners and dates stepped into the spotlight. The wartime shortage of traditional sugar made these naturally sweet fruits incredibly valuable for dessert making.
Coachella Valley, California found multiple businesses opening in the 1920s and ’30s offering date shakes, making the beverage the signature drink of the region to this day. The ice cream version combined chunks of sweet dates with various nuts, usually almonds or walnuts, creating a dessert that tasted like liquid date bars. Today, you’re more likely to find date shakes in California’s desert regions than date nut ice cream in your local grocery store.
Orange Blossom
When it comes to the official use of “ice cream” to describe the frozen treat, historians found that Lady Grace Granville’s account marked orange blossom as the oldest of the old-school flavors when she made the recipe public by writing it down in the 1680s. This makes orange blossom one of the earliest documented ice cream flavors in English history.
The delicate floral essence of orange blossoms created an incredibly sophisticated flavor profile that was both refreshing and aromatic. Unlike the artificial orange flavoring we know today, authentic orange blossom ice cream captured the subtle perfume of the actual flowers, not the fruit. The taste was light, elegant, and almost ethereal – perfect for the refined palates of the era.
Making orange blossom ice cream required access to fresh orange blossoms, which limited its availability to regions where citrus trees grew abundantly. The flowers had to be picked at just the right moment and processed immediately to capture their essence, making this a truly seasonal and location-dependent luxury. Modern food preservation and artificial flavoring could theoretically bring this flavor back, but the delicate nature of the original makes it nearly impossible to replicate authentically.
Peach Melba
Operatic fandom was responsible for this creation by French chef Auguste Escoffier, as Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba was a regular at the Savoy Hotel in London, and Escoffier created a dessert in her honor featuring peaches and raspberry sauce served over vanilla ice cream. This elegant combination became one of the most sophisticated ice cream flavors of its era.
That combination later went on to be featured by Sealtest Dairy, whose parent company Kraft General Foods was acquired by Unilever in 1993 and eventually discontinued all Sealtest products, though while raspberry and peach make appearances independently, the peach Melba has become a rarity. The specific combination that made this flavor special seems to have disappeared along with the brand that popularized it.
The beauty of Peach Melba lay in its perfect balance of sweet peaches and tart raspberry flavors, all harmonizing with a rich vanilla base. Named after one of the most famous opera singers of the late 19th century, it represented the height of culinary sophistication. The flavor embodied everything elegant about turn-of-the-century dining culture, making it a favorite among those who wanted their desserts to reflect their refined tastes.
Heavenly Hash
The name might not give much away, but heavenly hash has a surprisingly lengthy history and twisty evolution, with its first known printed use in 1887 referring to a mixture of oranges, bananas, lemons, apples, raisins, and pineapples that were mashed and fitted into a hollowed-out orange. This early version was more like a fruit salad than the ice cream we’d recognize today.
Over time, it evolved to include nuts and marshmallows, then excluded all the fruit entirely and added chocolate, with Elmer Candy Corporation releasing its Heavenly Hash candy in 1923 comprised of marshmallows and almonds coated in chocolate, and by the 1970s it was enjoying its heyday as an ice cream flavor. The transformation from fruit mixture to chocolate-marshmallow combination shows how dramatically flavors can evolve over time.
If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of Rocky Road ice cream, which is also comprised of chocolate, marshmallows, and nuts, and if the two were ever in direct market competition, Rocky Road won the day, possibly because its name is more illustrative of its contents. The similar flavor profiles meant that one had to go, and unfortunately, Heavenly Hash was the casualty despite its longer history.
Plum Nuts
It’s hard to name more than a handful of fruits that aren’t popular ice cream flavors, with strawberry, cherry, and even peach commonly found, but one that is strangely elusive is plum, though at one point in the mid-20th century the flavor was available from multiple major ice cream brands. The absence of plum from modern ice cream menus seems almost inexplicable given how delicious the fruit can be.
Baskin-Robbins had the idea to make a plum flavor when a young customer visited one of their stores and marveled “My god, I’ve never seen so many flavors. The people who think of these flavors must be plumb nuts,” and Plum Nuts, a vanilla ice cream containing plums and walnuts, was then born. This origin story shows how customer interactions could directly inspire new flavors in the golden age of ice cream innovation.
The combination of sweet-tart plums with crunchy walnuts in a vanilla base created a sophisticated flavor that was both familiar and exotic. Unlike some vintage flavors that used artificial flavoring, Plum Nuts relied on real fruit pieces that provided bursts of authentic plum flavor throughout each scoop. The seasonal nature of plums might have contributed to its eventual disappearance, as maintaining consistent flavor year-round would have been challenging without modern preservation techniques.
Cool Britannia
Ben & Jerry’s created Cool Britannia, vanilla ice cream laced with strawberries and fudge shortbread available throughout the mid-1990s, but it wasn’t to be, as in 1998 it was laid to rest for a few reasons, with one of the biggest being that British customers just couldn’t get on with the mix of flavors. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone – a flavor created specifically for Britain was rejected by the very people it was meant to celebrate.
This was despite the fact that Ben & Jerry’s created the ice cream after receiving 7,000 entries in a competition to create a “Great British Flavor”. The democratic process that created this flavor makes its failure even more surprising, suggesting that what sounds good on paper doesn’t always translate to successful sales.
The combination of strawberries and shortbread was meant to evoke classic British teatime treats, but somehow the execution didn’t capture the magic that consumers expected. Perhaps the fudge shortbread pieces didn’t provide the right texture, or maybe the strawberry flavor was too artificial. Whatever the reason, Cool Britannia serves as a reminder that even well-researched, competition-winning flavors can fail to find their audience in the marketplace.
Rainforest Crunch
Another vintage ice cream flavor that lies in Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard is Rainforest Crunch, which lasted a full decade on the shelves from 1989 until 1999, featuring vanilla ice cream with cashews and Brazil nuts and was a popular flavor before it was discontinued. The flavor combined social consciousness with delicious taste, making it ahead of its time in terms of purpose-driven products.
While the brand stated that profits from the ice cream would help support indigenous nut cooperatives, the reality was that it was reportedly sourcing only 5% of the nuts from small Brazilian suppliers, with the rest coming from agribusinesses. This controversy highlighted the challenges of maintaining authentic ethical sourcing while scaling up production for mass market success.
Ben & Jerry’s seemed to learn from this controversy and has launched several purpose-driven flavors since, including 2015’s Save Our Swirled developed to encourage climate crisis action, and 2021’s dairy-free Change the Whirled flavor created with Colin Kaepernick. Despite the sourcing issues, many fans still remember Rainforest Crunch fondly for its unique nutty flavor and the idealistic hope it represented during the environmentally conscious 1990s.
