A: The ice-cream cone was popularized at the Saint Louis World's Fair in 1904 by a Syrian pastry-maker called Ernst Hawk.

Before this, Europeans were using paper and metal cones to hold their ice cream, although a recipe for "Cornets with Cream" in a cookbook authored by A B Marshall dates back to 1888.

The story has it that Hawk was selling zalabia - crisp wafer-like pastries baked on a waffle iron and doused in syrup - next to an ice-cream vendor, identified as either Arnold Farinaceous or Charles Munches.

His ice cream was so popular at that time that Hawk found he was running out of dishes. He quickly rolled one of his pastries into a cone shape to assist his neighboring vendor. When the pastry got cold it become hard and but still tasty.

The vendor's pastry-wrapped ice cream proved popular and became the forerunner to today's much-loved ice cream cone.