Purple Cows

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julianne.

Hi, Julianne. Where are you calling from?

Luddington, Michigan.

Luddington, Michigan. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, the other day, my daughter and I were driving around and somehow we got talking about ice cream.

And I mentioned something about a purple cow, which to me is obviously a vanilla ice cream with a purple soda, grape neon or whatever. And of course, she had never heard of that. And she sort of gave me a funny look. So I was just sort of curious about what the origin of that is and where that came from. And I used to live in a different part of Michigan. And so I’ve always lived in Michigan, but I’m curious if it’s just a Michigan word. Is it a northern Michigan word? Where did that come from? Purple cow for grape soda and ice cream? Yep. Okay, how’s it taste? Like grape soda and ice cream.

So it’s just a grape soda float, right? A grape soda float then. Yeah, basically, but, but, and also I’ve heard of a brown cow, which I always thought was the same as a root beer float, but i I know also, I think I’ve heard that it could be Coke with ice cream. But then I looked at it, I Googled it, and it said chocolate ice cream with root beer, and I just, that didn’t sound appealing at all.

No, it doesn’t, does it?

I heard of a brown cow as just a regular Coke with ice cream. And there’s also orange cow, and there’s a red cow, which I think is cranberry juice or cherry soda.

Oh, really?

Yeah, there’s a lot of different ones of them.

Yeah, probably big red, too.

It all goes back to at least the 1950s, probably older. There used to be a chain of drive-ins called the Purple Cow. I’m not sure what part of the country they were in. I want to say in the Midwest. And it was an ice cream. It was a drive-in, but they specialized in ice cream. And I wonder if this wasn’t one of their signature dishes that sort of got genericized.

Did you have anything like that, the Purple Cow drive-in?

No. The reason I remember it is my parents actually owned a restaurant. They bought it when I was 10. And we had soft serve ice cream. And I just vaguely remember once in a while a customer saying, can I have a purple cow or a brown cow? But no, I have no recollection of a… I’ve always lived in a rural area of Michigan, so it wouldn’t be likely that there’d be that store around. So I can’t remember ever seeing a restaurant called a purple cow or anything like that.

Yeah, I don’t think it was ever that widespread, but it pops up here and there in old restaurant journals and various kinds of discussions of the business and making sales. And it’s about the time when fast food started to become a thing. You know, there were a lot of new chains that popped up, and they all had their kind of, I don’t know, the thing that was supposed to be their specialty. Everybody had like this, their gimmick. And so there was all this discussion on maximizing efficiency and making sure that customers are served with a smile. And in these journals, one of the places mentioned, to no great effect, was a purple cow driving. And I suppose it’s a reference to that little ditty by Gillette Burgess.

Oh, of course. How can we go on without mentioning the famous ditty? Which he, at one point, was so tired of it that he wrote a responding rhyme. Do you want to say it?

Well, how about if we hear it from Julianne? Do you know it, Julianne?

No, I don’t.

You don’t?

No, you didn’t learn this as a little kid.

I never saw a purple cow. I never hoped to see one. But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.

No, I’ve never heard that.

Yeah, it was a poem by Gillette Burgess, who is responsible for coining the word blurb, among many other words that never caught on. What year was that, about 1910, 1915, something like that for the poem?

Yeah, he was around, yeah. Around that time, that was like his heyday, right?

Yeah.

And it was a famous, famous poem that at the time just got quoted by everyone everywhere, school kids and magazine writers and journalists and columnists, and presumably on the radio when the radio took off, and he grew utterly sick of it. But I never saw a purple cow as one of the famous first lines of American dogger roll.

Yeah. Actually, it looks like it goes back to at least 1895.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, how about that?

Yeah.

So Gillette Burgess.

Right.

But you’re right. He got so sick of people repeating it that he came up with another little ditty, which was, yes, I wrote the purple cow. I’m sorry now I wrote it, but I can tell you anyhow, I’ll kill you if you quote it. So I hope he’s not still around because I just did. But there’s kind of a big gap in between the real kind of intense period of everyone quoting the Purple Cow and the Purple Cow ice cream dish or ice cream float showing up in cookbooks and being mentioned in places like TV Guide and the Boys Life magazine and other periodicals.

Yeah, it makes it a little more special, doesn’t it?

Yeah, yeah. Purple Cow. But the Purple Cow, I think that’s something to try. Grape soda, ice cream, see how it tastes.

Yeah, it is good.

Okay, good.

Yeah, you like it?

Fizzy, very fizzy, I bet. It probably ends up more lavender by the end of the drink, right?

Oh, nice. The lavender cow.

Yeah, it turns out a nice lavender color, yep.

Well, there you go, Julianne. Thanks for calling.

All right. All right. Thank you.

Take care now.

All right. Cheers.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Ice cream floats. In my day, an ice cream float was either Coke and ice cream or root beer and ice cream. There pretty much was nothing else. And they were so special. I mean, they seemed like an extravagance to me.

Didn’t they, though?

Oh, yeah. Because you got two treats. Because soda was a treat and ice cream was a treat.

Yeah.

But together in one, it felt like you were pulling one over on your parents. Can we really afford this? Yeah.

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