"like pickles and ice cream"

[Garson O'Toole]

I guessed that a television show like "I Love Lucy" with a
high-profile pregnancy might have helped to propagate the pickles and
ice cream meme. While searching for evidence I found a thread at the
Straight Dope website:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=351794

01-02-2006, 06:51 PM
Walloon Join Date: Apr 2000
During Lucy Ricardo's pregnancy on I Love Lucy (1953), she has a
craving for some ice cream, hot fudge, and sardines in the middle of
the night. In the Broadway comedy Susan Slept Here (1956), Susan is
thought to be pregnant when she's seen eating pickles and
strawberries. (Turns out she just likes them.)

samclem Moderator Join Date: Aug 1999 Location: Akron, Ohio
Pickles and ice cream, as a combination, was usually thought of in the
1900-1950 period as something that gave you a bellyache. It was
stereotypical of that.
The first specific print cites that I can find for "pickles and ice
cream" related to pregnant women are in the 1960's. Walloon's
excellent memory is right. Strange food combos were there well before
the 1960's, but not specifically ice cream and pickles.


Apparently, Jon's research is recapitulating some earlier work by Sam
Clements. (I have not yet tried to check the interesting assertions
about I Love Lucy or Susan Slept Here by Walloon.)

In the (unverified) 1941 citation given in the previous message an
"ice cream cone at two o'clock in the morning" and an "insatiable
craving for pickles" are used as contrasting elements to show the
range of possible food cravings.

However, television sit-coms in the 1950s posed different demands. To
heighten the comedic valence of the scenario the pregnant character is
depicted with simultaneous cravings for discordant food items.
Garson


On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "like pickles and ice cream"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Garson's finds are a valuable background to this story. Still, "memic"
> "pickles and ice cream" doesn't appear till the '50s. After that,
> increasingly, the phrase appears to be just one of those automatic
> connections that the average person assumes to be timeless.
>
> Like so many other linguistic phenomena, there seems to be no rational
> explanation for this fact.
>
> I won't quibble with Victor's distinction between "proverbial" and
> "paradoxical," but I think that the "paradoxical" must be well on its way to
> becoming proverbial as well.
>
> JL
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 3:35 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:
>

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