Every summer ice cream social has a link to Duluth

By Ken Buehler

It’s Sunday afternoon. The morning sermon was too long for the warm weather and sunshine. But after the service, in the churchyard, under the cool shade of oak and maple trees, the lemonade is cold and the Lady’s Aid Society is holding their Sunday Ice Cream Social.

As their parents sit at tables on the lawn, the youngsters play hideand-seek around the church grounds. The teenagers walk off as couples, hiding behind the trees.

This bucolic scene reminds me of John Gieriet, a man born in Tajetch, Switzerland in 1829. Always a small town, its population today is less than 1,500 and there are 1.4 men for every woman.

Maybe that’s why John left his boyhood home and moved to France.

He was mesmerized with the French, especially their culinary skills. To better understand their cooking, he learned the language and spoke it fluently. In 1884 he came to America and was put in charge of the kitchen at the White House during the administration of President Franklin Pierce. But what John Gieriet wanted most was to own his own hotel and restaurant.

A year later, in 1885, Gieriet seized on just such an opportunity and moved to Duluth.

The New Commercial Hotel, at 501 West Superior Street, one block up from our train station, was for sale. It was a bargain because the older hotel was about to be dwarfed by construction of the newer and much larger Spalding Hotel going up next door. The Spalding opened in 1889 in anticipation of the Northern Pacific’s new Union Depot under construction across the street. Today the Depot is the home of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum and the Spalding was where the Duluth Public Library is today.

Gieriet had big ideas. He turned the New Commercial Hotel’s bar into a restaurant and the laundry room into a kitchen and applied his knowledge of French cuisine. He renamed the hotel to match the menu. Welcome to the Hotel la Perl.

On March 26, 1885 the Duluth Daily Tribune published an ad for an opening night gala and grand feast at the Hotel la Perl. It featured French pickles, oysters, French peas, Lake Superior trout and, for dessert, Chef Gieriet warmed up his homemade blueberry pie and served it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. In keeping with his Frenchthemed dinner, he invented a new name for his new dessert: Pie à la Mode.

The basis of all church ice cream socials ever since, Pie à la Mode was invented and the name coined here in Duluth. Its creation is documented in John Gieriet’s 1912 obituary printed in the New York Times.

Pie à la Mode wasn’t Gieriet’s only invention. Several years later he joined with Joseph Stephan from Fargo, North Dakota, and received a patent for a device to improve ventilation for enclosed spaces. Gieriet already held a patent for an improved fire escape.

The new ventilation idea used a unique corkscrew method that the inventors claimed would distribute outside air evenly through an enclosed structure without blasting occupants on one side of the room while those on the other side suffered without fresh air. The “Ventilation System for Railroad Passenger Cars” was patented on June 20, 1889. So you see, if you work it hard enough it all comes back to the railroad.