Guest Episode: Rocky Road with Science Diction

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It's summer where I am, and summer means ice cream.

And when I was a kid, ice cream meant Rocky Road.

Interesting.

I was never a huge Rocky Road fan.

Cynthia, sometimes I cannot understand you.

Marshmallows, chocolate, nuts?

What's not to love?

Well, a lot of Gastropod listeners certainly share your love, and this is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber, and I'm Nicola Twilley.

And this week, we're bringing you a special guest episode all about Rocky Road, created by our friends at Science Diction.

Science Fiction is a great podcast by the folks at Science Friday and WNYC Studios and it's all about words and the science stories within them.

They answer questions like what does the word meme have to do with evolutionary biology and why do we call it the Spanish flu when it wasn't from Spain?

Right now Science Fiction is doing a series on food words and this episode is all about Rocky Road.

Grab a spoon and enjoy.

We'll be back in just one week with our regularly scheduled gastropod episode.

A few years ago, Alyssa Greenberg was sharing an ice cream Sunday with some friends at Fenton's Creamery in Oakland, California.

They have the kind of Sundaes that are like dripping down the sides and are like covered in fudge and whipped cream and like that are like almost obscene.

Fenton's is an Oakland institution, leans really hard into the nostalgia factor.

Vinyl booths, an old-fashioned soda fountain, black and white photos hanging on the wall.

So Alyssa picked up the menu.

And on the little blurb in the back of the menu for Fenton's, it says the birthplace of Rocky Road.

Rocky Road was invented here.

And I was like, wait, what?

The Rocky Road.

Chocolate ice cream, nuts, mini marshmallows.

Inventing this American classic?

Truly a claim to fame.

And then I googled it and Google said that Dryers invented Rocky Road.

And I was like, ooh, the game is afoot.

So it's Dreyers, this major ice cream brand now owned by Nestle, versus Little Fenton's Creamery, both claiming that they were the ones who invented Rocky Road.

And I get why companies would want to claim Rocky Road as their own.

It's not just the flavor, because anyone could take nuts, chocolate, marshmallows, throw them all together in an ice cream, and call it muddy street or poorly paved driveway.

but it probably wouldn't inspire the same devotion.

There's something about that name, Rocky Road.

It is just that good.

And there's science to that.

From Science Friday, this is Science Fiction.

I'm Johanna Mayer.

Today, we're talking about Rocky Road and why it just sounds so dang delicious.

Both Fentons and Dreyers have pretty straightforward stories for how they invented Rocky Road.

In Dreyer's version, it was William Dreyer himself who one day in 1929 decided to make an ice cream with nuts, chocolate, and marshmallows.

But at the time, marshmallows did not yet come in small versions.

They came in sheets.

So he took his wife's pinking shears and cut the marshmallows into four pieces and then stuffed them in the ice cream.

And taba, Rocky Road was born.

Dreyer says the name was meant to, quote, give folks something to smile about in the face of the Great Depression.

According to Fentons, it was a candy maker on staff who came up with it.

Story goes, one day he was making a candy bar with, you guessed it, nuts, chocolate, and marshmallows.

And he was like, you know what would be a great idea is if I put this candy bar in the ice cream.

And he did it, and it was a hit, and the end, the rest is history.

For over two years, Alyssa tried to find out whose story was true.

She turned up an alleged confession, a denial of that confession, just a whole lot of ice cream-fueled drama.

More on that from Alyssa later, because it turns out that people have a lot of feelings about Rocky Road.

Would Weird Al do a tribute to vanilla?

I love Rocky Road.

No, because vanilla is the definition of boring, and it has a boring name to go with it.

But Rocky Road sounds fun, playful, even somehow delicious,

which it shouldn't.

It is a road with rocks in it.

But when it comes to food names, it's not just what the word means, it's how it sounds.

It's something that linguists and food marketing types seem to understand very well.

I was at my little grocery store here in San Francisco in my little neighborhood of Bernal Heights.

Dan Jarafsky is a linguist.

He wrote a book called The Language of Food.

And I was just scanning the cracker aisle and I noticed that every single cracker name had an I in it.

And I was like, something's going on here.

So I started really from the cracker side, and then I thought, well, what's the opposite of crackers?

Well, that would be ice cream.

Dan decided to run a little experiment.

He went online, downloaded 81 ice cream flavors from brands like Ben and Jerry's and Haagen Dah's.

Then he went to a diet website, downloaded 600 cracker brand names, and he noticed a pattern.

It had to do with the vowels.

I just counted how many of these ice creams versus crackers, you know, know, which one had more front vowels like e or e, and which one had more back vowels like ooh or ah.

And there was a striking difference.

All right, so front vowels.

The e

in cheese, the i in mint.

Feel how your tongue moves when you make those sounds.

You're kind of lifting it toward the front of your mouth.

Cheese, mint.

Now say chocolate, mousse.

Those words are full of back vowels.

Pay attention to your tongue again.

Chocolate, mousse.

This time it's pulled more towards the back.

Dan discovered that the cracker names had nearly all front vowels, full of ease and is.

So that's your Cheez-Ips and wheat thins and crispy triscuit crisps and chicken and a biscuit.

But the ice creams.

That's your back vowels.

That's your jamoca almond fudge, your chocolate, your caramel, your cookie dough, your coconut, and your Rocky Road.

So, why would marketers choose to give back vowels to ice cream names and front vowels to crackers?

Well, people seem to have these vowel taste associations in their brains.

You present people with hypothetical ice creams, either named like Frisch or Frosch, and you see which one people like better.

And they all seem to like the O one better than the I one for ice creams.

So, Dan thinks we have this association.

Back vowels, rich, creamy, perfect for ice cream.

Front vowels, light and airy, just like crackers.

Researchers have turned up all kinds of weird associations like this.

That lemonade named B-lad sounds more bitter than one named Bolad.

Or that words with z just sound like they taste kind of bad, according to some studies anyway.

This phenomenon, it's called sound symbolism, where particular sounds conjure up particular meanings.

And it doesn't just happen with sound and taste.

It can happen with sound and vision.

The most famous case is called the Buba-Kiki effect, discovered by a psychologist in the 20s.

So when you show people two different shapes, one blobby and amoeba-like, the other kind of spiky, sort of like the pow symbol in cartoons, and then you ask them to say which one of those two shapes is booba and which one is kiki, upwards of 90% of people will say that the blobby one is booba and the spiky one is kiki.

The results are astonishingly consistent, even across languages.

We're not sure why our brains make these kinds of connections.

Maybe we all have a little bit of synesthesia, that neurological phenomenon where the lines between our senses become kind of blurry.

Like some people see musical notes as colors.

But whatever the reason, our brains do this kind of thing pretty often.

So, do companies think about sound symbolism when coming up with enticing product names?

Absolutely.

They can't help but.

It has totally ruined my ability to look at names in the way that a normal person does.

I talked to Will Laban.

He used to teach linguistics at Stanford.

He's also the former director of linguistics at a company called Lexicon Branding.

And Will's company is responsible for some of the biggest household names.

BlackBerry, Febreze, Swiffer.

So you know what?

Swiffer is a sweeping product.

I am very familiar with Swiffer.

Just think about the sounds of it.

First, Swiffer sounds like sweeping.

Swiff, swift swiff.

If you swapped out the F for, say, a V, it doesn't work, okay?

It just has the wrong sound for the name.

Swiver?

Yeah, no, that is not going to clean my floors.

Or, you know, Dasani water?

Lexicon branding named that too.

And they chose that in part because it just sounds relaxing.

N is just totally smooth.

N's one of the smoothest sounds in the language.

Will and I talked about all kinds of sounds.

Zippy sounds, daring sounds, sounds that are luxurious, and sounds that are somehow insecure.

And I had to know, what did Will think of the name Rocky Road?

Rocky Road's a really amazing name for a bunch of reasons.

First, those creamy back vowels.

Then there's the hard k interrupting the flow.

It almost sounds like a bump in the road.

Rocky.

And road sounds smooth.

So those two words together capture that combination of crunchy nuts and smooth, creamy bass.

They chose really well.

They were daring.

They made made a choice that caught on very quickly and has lasted almost a century.

But who was this daring genius?

Alyssa Greenberg was determined to get to the bottom of these two competing claims.

Who invented Rocky Road?

Was it Fenton's, the beloved Oakland Creamery?

Or was it Dreyer's, the beloved corporate ice cream behemoth?

Which one was the marketing genius who came up with this mouth-watering name?

Well,

it was neither of them.

Remember Fenton's story was that their in-house candy maker invented it by basically sticking a candy bar in ice cream?

That candy bar was called Rocky Road.

You can still buy it today.

It's made by a company called Annabelle's, and they say that their founder invented it as early as 1918.

Annabelle's, by the way, seems to be steering totally clear of this whole ice cream drama.

I think they're just like, whatever, you guys, you know, do whatever you need to do.

We'll just be over here making delicious candy bars.

And you know what?

I'm not so sure they can claim the name Rocky Road either, because in Australia, there's a popular dessert, also called Rocky Road.

It's a chocolate bark with nuts and marshmallows, and according to completely unverified internet lore, Australians invented it in 1853.

So really, neither Fentons nor Dryers can claim credit for the name Rocky Road.

But Rocky Road ice cream was admittedly a pretty brilliant invention.

At the time, ice cream just came in three old flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.

Might seem obvious in retrospect, but back then, throwing in crunchy, chocolatey, gooey bits, truly a stroke of genius.

And Alyssa Greenberg really, really wanted to find out just whose genius it was.

The two alleged inventors were long gone, and tracking down an original, dated, forensically authenticated recipe from the 20s just didn't quite pan out.

Investigative ice cream journalism is just woefully underfunded.

But she forged ahead.

And in her research, it seemed that all roads led to a guy named Ken Cook, who became president of Dryers.

Pretty flashy fellow.

Italian suits, alligator shoes,

a miniature golf course in his backyard that he named after Rocky Road, and a Cadillac with a vanity plate that read R-C-Y-R-D.

And the story goes that one day Cook decided to share something with the guy who now owns Fenton's, Scott Widden.

Widden says that Cook came to him and said, again,

all alleged, Fenton's invented Rocky Road, and I capitalized on it in our marketing because Fenton's was not capitalizing.

Which sounds like an astounding confession that Dreyers did steal credit for this legendary ice cream.

But Widden himself doesn't actually see it that way.

He was great friends with Ken Cook.

Way he sees it, Cook was just a showman telling a good story, even if that story happened to be untrue.

Cook died in 1991, so he can neither confirm nor deny.

But when Alyssa asked some former Dreyer's employees about this, hmm, not a great reaction.

When she called up one guy, he said, he's full of.

He said, I knew Ken Cook as well as anyone in his career, and he had too much respect for Bill Dreyer.

to do something like that, basically.

And then not long after that, he hung up the phone on me.

Yeah.

He was not pleased.

And that was it.

Alyssa never got her answer.

Maybe she just didn't care enough.

Because Rocky Road, she doesn't get it.

I mean, it is good.

I guess I don't

love nuts in ice cream.

I think I love a good sort of ripple more than like I feel like.

Alyssa, are you not hearing that irresistible combination of creamy back bells, crunchy K's, and playful alliteration?

Rocky Road is scientifically, linguistically delicious.

Baby, I love Rocky Road.

So won't you go and see

Peekas?

Science Fiction is hosted and produced by me, Johanna Mayer.

Ella Fedder is our editor and producer.

We had story editing from Nathan Toby.

Daniel Peterschmidt wrote our music and helped edit audio.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, who, by the way, questions whether the name Rocky Road truly sounds delicious.

We also have fact-checking help from Dania Abdel Hamid.

Mixing and mastering by Chris Wood.

Our chief content officer is Nadia Ortelt, who encouraged us to launch this show in the first place.

And it was a hit, and the end, the rest is history.

Before we go, a little story.

At Fenton's Creamery, the walls are covered in black and white photos, part of that old-timey vibe.

And there's this one picture that everyone seems to notice.

It's a picture of a little boy, and he's like

looking with extreme, sort of like awe and overwhelm at a huge ice cream sundae that is as big as his head.

Scott Widen, the owner of Fenton's, told Alyssa that all the time, without fail, people claim to recognize this kid.

And they're like, oh yeah, I know that kid.

He's my son.

He's my grandson.

He's my like neighbor.

Like, isn't that a weird coincidence?

They actually know exactly who the boy in the picture is.

He's the son of one of the waitresses at Fenton's.

But Widen lets it slide.

He chooses not to correct them because it's like all about the nostalgia nostalgia and storytelling that's inherent in ice cream.

Ice cream is sort of about the stories we tell each other.

The Fentons vs.

Dreyers Rocky Road origin feud.

It's a pretty dang good story.

Too bad it was really me who invented it.

Me.

Yes, one day in 1925, I was walking down the street enjoying a chocolate ice cream cone when I was struck by literal lightning.

Knocked me right down to the pavement, sending bits of gravel and gum into my creamy dessert.

In that moment, it hit me that with a few substitutions, this thing could be downright delicious.

A rocky road indeed.

And voila, the perfect taste-sounding combination flavor was born.

Sounds credible, right?

I mean, who's gonna correct me?

Ice cream's all about the stories we tell each other.

You're basking on a beach in the Bahamas.

Now you're journeying through the jade forests of Japan.

Now you're there for your alma mater's epic win.

And now you're awake.

Womp, womp.

Which means it was all a dream.

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.