Mello Roll ("Up your hole with a mello roll!")

[Barry Popik]

OT: I wonder if you can sue "Balderdash & Piffle" under Britain's
strict libel laws. My "bloody mary" work is on my website and also on
Wikipedia. It was posted first on ADS-L and clearly known to OED. No
one at OED can know this?...Maybe Jessica Seinfeld (famous cookbook
author) can take credit for my food work...Gotta do some work on "wet
burritos" and "saddle-style" burritos. Any OED entry under
"saddle"?...This unpaid, unloved work never ends.
...
Maybe some old New Yorkers here remember "mello rolls" and can help
with the below. There's surprisingly little on the web, and the term
does not appear to be trademarked..."Up your hole with a mello roll"
("Up your nose with a rubber hose") is a shocking omission in the
otherwise brilliant Yale Book of Quotations.
...
...
...
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/mello_roll_or_mell_o_roll_up_your_hole_with_a_mello_roll/
...
Entry from October 19, 2007
Mello Roll or Mell-O-Roll ("Up your hole with a Mello Roll!")
Mello rolls (also sometimes spelled "mello-rolls" or "mell-o-rolls,"
perhaps like "jell-o") were ice cream treats, somewhat like ice cream
cones. They were popular in the Bronx and in Brooklyn; many people
remember them served at Jones Beach in the 1940s and 1950s.

The television show Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979) was based on
comedian Gabriel Kaplan's life, as expressed in his comedy album Holes
and Mello-Rolls. One joke line on the tv show—"Up your nose with a
rubber hose!"—was originally recalled by Kaplan as ""Up your hole with
a mello roll!"


Back in the Bronx:
Celebrating the Experience of Growing Up and Living in the Bronx
(http://www.backinthebronx.com)
Volume III, Issue IX, pg. 10:
Proverbs & Sayings
(...)
14. Charlotte Russe...Sponge cake in a cylindrical body of cardboard
with a lot of whipped cream and as you eat it, you push it up from the
bottom.
15. Mello Roll...Ice cream wrapped in a cylindrical shape that you
peeled off the wrapper and pushed in a special mello roll cone.

Newsday
New Yorkers share Jones Beach memories
(...)
"I have been going to Jones Beach since 1955. I remember Field 9 and
when I hike around out there now, I find pieces of the old parking lot
coming up through the sand. They sold Mell-Rolls at the concession
there—a concession shaped like the pilot house of a ship. Mello-Rolls
were a cylindrical chunt of vanilla ice cream wrapped in paper which
would be unrolled and placed into a wafer cone." —Bill Picchioni
Rockville Centre

Boomer Baby Memories; Food
Mello roll and Charlotte Russe
Growing up in Brooklyn there was a candy store on practically every
corner and a bakery a few blocks away. Two of my favorites were Mello
Rolls and Charlotte Russes. The challenge was to get the Mello Roll
onto the cone without it falling on the floor. It took a lot of
practice but it was worth the effort! --- Jeannie M. South Florida
(formerly Brooklyn) - 1946

6 December 1970, New York (NY) Times, pg. 229 ad:
Complete Mello-Roll Machine and Hardener

11 January 1976, New York (NY) Times, "Comedy Disks From Carlin to
Kaplan to Klein" by Shaun Considine, pg. D17:
A blurb on the cover of Gabriel Kaplan's "Holes and Mello-Rolls"
claims that his hit TV show, "Welcome Back, Kotter," was inspired by
this album.

Internet Movie Database
Memorable quotes for
My Favorite Year (1982)

Sy: We're talkin' future generations here. We're discussing morals.
Alice Miller: [for Herb] You're not qualified to discuss morals, Sy.
Sy: Up your hole with a Mello Roll, Alice! You too, Herb!

Google Books
Loving Women: a novel of the fifties
by Pete Hamill
New York, NY: Random House
1989
Pg. 192:
"Up your hole with a Mell-o-roll, coppers, you ain't takin' me alive!"

12 February 1989, New York Times, "On Language" by William Safire, pg. SM10:
"All my age cohorts [sic—should be "all members of my age cohort"]
fondly recall the fat cylinders of ice cream called Mello-Rolls,"
writes Ruth B. Roufberg of Kendall Park, N.J. "They were wrapped in
two overlapping strips of paper, which, when pulled from opposite
directions, exposed the cylinder and neatly deposited it into the
ice-cream cone."

Funny how so many people miss Mello-Rolls. "When you licked the ice
cream," explains Patricia Maloney Bernstein of Great Neck, L.I., "the
roll shape caused it to turn round in its cone, so as the ice cream
melted it did not run down the outside of the cone, but rather melted
within the cone, running down into the hollow in the handle."

31 December 1989, New York Times, "Looking Back at a Disappointing
Decade" by Marcia Byalick, pg. LI14:
For me the last decade had no memories as sweet as charlotte russes or
mello rolls.

18 October 1992, Chicago (IL) Daily Herald, section 7, pg. 6, col. 2:
"And Mello Rolls in a cup with sprinkles. Mello Rolls were sort of ice
cream cones, but they weren't scoops, they were more oval-shaped."
(Review of the book When You're From Brooklyn, Everything Else is
Tokyo by Larry King with Marty Appel—ed.)

Daily (University of Washington Student Newspaper)
January 25, 1996
Welcome Back, Kaplan
Another show, another time
Hans Ruegamer
Daily Staff
(...)
Part of the show's living legacy is the number of catch phrases it
developed. Ranging from Lawrence Jacobs' deep-voiced "Hi, there" to
Ron Palillo's high-pitched "Oooo!"

"Most of the stuff came from my high school," Kaplan said. "The real
phrase was 'Up your hole with a Mello roll.' A Mello roll was a like
an ice cream they sold in New York and that was a standard catch
phrase on the street. If you insulted anybody, you said something like
that or something about their parents. And that became part of the
beginnings of the show and then we got away from that."

"We had to change it of course for television - to 'Up your nose with
a rubber hose.' And then one show the censor got upset about us saying
that and he said, 'You have to say, "Up your nose with a garden
hose."'

"I said, 'Why,' just out of curiosity, and he said, "Well, you can do
a lot of damage to someone with a rubber hose.' They had these weird
censorship things. And after the next week they said we could say
rubber hose again. But there's one show where we say 'Up your nose
with a garden hose.'"

BronxRoots-L
From: Mike < kombucha at ticnet.com>
Subject: Re: Mello-Roll
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 15:05:19 -0600

References: <20010328203751.24626.qmail at web1301.mail.yahoo.com>
Marc et-yoozal,

The mello-roll cone was of the "waffle" variety, and not of the
"sugar-cone" variety which was crunchy. The stem of the cone had a
flat bottom instead of a point. On the top it had a rectangular
opening about 2.5 inches by about 1.25 inches which nested the
mellow-roll. The ice cream was a cylinder a bit larger than a
flashlight battery, and it had a paper wrapper with a tab that ran
along it lenghtwise. There was an art to placing the roll in the cone,
and then pulling the paper off as the roll rotated. I remember
vanilla, but am not sure if it cam in other flavors.

It was a favorite cuss to say… "Up your nose with a garden hose, and
up your hole with a mello-roll!"

Food of the Eighties
Shayne Genoway - May 04, 2007
I was trying to find information about Mello-Roll ice cream with not
too much luck. Try explaining the concept to your grandchildren and it
becomes a task in futility, and much laughter on their part. They
can't grasp the concept of ice cream that came wrapped in something
that looked like the center cardboard roll on our toilet paper, with
ice cream stuffed inside. That was the only way I could think of
explaining it to them. You then had to unravel the cone around the ice
cream which sat inside a cone that was also round so the ice cream sat
neatly into the cone. Weird, isn't it, just trying to describe it. I
remember them well because my dad had a variety store at the time, and
I remember him serving them to the kids coming into the store. He
would pull a part of the paper off, and fit the exposed part of the
ice cream into the cone. When he figured it was in tight enough, he
unrolled the rest of the paper off and handed the cone to the
customer. The Mello-Roll ice cream could be handled with his hands at
all times because it was protected by this paper. It was about the
size of the inside cardboard roll of toilet paper, and that's exactly
what it looked like standing on end inside the cone. For it's time it
was convenient for the store keeper, he didn't need to worry about a
scoop, just reach in pull one out, and unwrap it. Simple, easy, and
efficient when I think about it now. It'd sure be nice if someone came
up with a picture of one from somewhere.

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