The Bumpy History of Rocky Road to Statement Sweet

The year is 1997. I’m eight years old and the recess bell has just elicited a Pavlovian drooling response in me. I’m moments away from unzipping my school backpack and indulging in homemade rocky road, a rare treat for a child more acquainted with vegetable sticks and rice crackers. But Australian summers are hot and cruel, and the ziplock bag in my lunchbox now contains little more than a gooey mess of melted chocolate and marshmallow. It bypasses the bin, but is mentally deposited into the too-hard basket. By the time I get home, it’s solidified back to something curiously similar to its original form.

This is supposedly how rocky road was invented. In the mid-19th century, confectionery that didn’t survive the trip across the ocean from England to Australia was glued together with sub-standard chocolate and repackaged as rocky road. Some sources say the name refers to the “rocky road” of the journey, others the perilous path traversed by hopefuls in search of gold.

In the United States, rocky road is better known as an ice-cream flavour. It differs from the Aussie version in that it doesn’t contain coconut and usually features almonds in place of peanuts. Two competing creation stories are based in Oakland, California in 1929.

One says William Dreyer, the co-founder of Dreyer’s ice-cream, reportedly cut up marshmallows with his wife’s sewing scissors and folded them into ice-cream with almonds. The other claims Melvin Fenton of Fentons Creamery, a historic ice-cream parlour in Oakland, California, made a similar product using walnuts. The name came later that year when Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression took hold. Rocky road ice-cream became an affordable luxury that encouraged people to, “ Share a scoop, share a smile.”

In Australia, confectionery company Darrell Lea is credited with making rocky road popular in Australia, following company founder Harry Lea’s 1935 recipe featuring toasted marshmallow and roasted peanuts, hand-mixed with milk chocolate. Even still, a Myer department store in Adelaide was advertising “Rocky Roads” as early as 1933.

These days the Rocky Road we’ve come to know and love still commonly contains peanuts, but is available both as a confectionary and as ice-cream. Connoisseur’s Rocky Road Ice Cream sticks are a neat new example of the latter: a centre of marshmallow flavoured ice cream has been swirled with syrup made from Derwent Valley raspberries and encased in peanut-studded chocolate ice cream, with the entire thing then coated in milk chocolate with more peanuts. It’s a slick re-imagination of a classic flavour.

There are also similarities between rocky road and the British chocolate tiffin cake – famously Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite afternoon tea treat. That no-bake recipe consists of crushed biscuits mixed through with any combination of dried fruit, nuts and sometimes marshmallows.

Whatever the provenance of the sweet treat, one thing is true: in a relatively short amount of time, rocky road has gone from a melted mess in my lunchbox to pimping decadent milkshakes, doughnuts and even pizzas. It doesn’t matter if it was invented to give candy another life, or which American dynasty first mixed the components with frozen dairy, rocky road’s combination of chewy marshmallow and sparks of salt to balance its sweetness has proven a formula that can stand the ages.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Connoisseur Gourmet Ice Cream’s new Rocky Road ice-cream, part of its new Laneway Sweets range, available now.