Chapter Three of Four

Chapter Three: On the Scoop

Nobody needs to eat during a film. And yet almost everybody does. The snack is not a distraction from the ritual; it has become one of its oldest parts.

By the Scoopwatflicknestl desk · Approx. 8 minutes

It is tempting to imagine that popcorn and cinema were made for each other, but for years they were kept apart. Early picture palaces aspired to the dignity of the theatre, with carpets and upholstered seats that their owners had no wish to see covered in crumbs. Popcorn belonged to fairs, circuses and street corners, where vendors sold it from carts.

The machine on the street

The street vendor's trade was transformed by Charles Cretors, a Chicago confectioner who developed a steam-powered popcorn machine in the 1880s and presented it to the public at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.¹ His wagons could pop corn in front of customers, and the smell travelled further than any advertisement. Popcorn became the theatre of the pavement long before it entered the theatre itself.

The change came with sound pictures and the Great Depression. Once films talked, audiences no longer needed to read intertitles, which opened cinemas to a wider public, children included. And when money was scarce, popcorn was one of the few luxuries almost anyone could afford. The food historian Andrew F. Smith, in Popped Culture, traces how cinemas that resisted the snack lost custom to those that welcomed it, and how concession stands became an essential source of income.² By the end of the 1930s, the bowl and the screen had become inseparable.

A film watched at home is never only the film. It is the room, the hour, the company, and the bowl going round.

The scoop in the freezer

Ice cream took a parallel path. Intermission ice cream, sold from trays by usherettes, was a fixture of British and European cinemas for much of the twentieth century. In the United States, novelty frozen treats such as the chocolate-coated Eskimo Pie, patented by Christian Kent Nelson in 1922, made ice cream portable and personal.³

At home, ice cream has a particular role. It is the dessert that does not require a table. A tub, a scoop and a stack of bowls can travel to the sofa, and the act of serving it, one scoop each, perhaps a second for whoever chose the film, gives the evening a natural midpoint. Ben & Jerry's, founded in a renovated petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978, built much of its early identity around exactly this kind of indulgent, informal eating.⁴

The rituals of the bowl

What makes the snack meaningful at home is not the food itself but the way it is shared. The single large bowl passed along the sofa makes everyone a participant; the individual bowls, served with a little ceremony, mark the beginning of the film as surely as an usher's torch. Many households have developed small, private rules: the person who makes the popcorn also chooses the seasoning; the last handful belongs to whoever is holding the bowl when the credits roll; nobody opens a crisp packet during a quiet scene.

Making popcorn on the stove, in a heavy pan with a lid, is worth rediscovering for this reason. It takes a few minutes, it fills the house with a smell that announces the evening, and it gives an impatient child a job. The cinema learned long ago that the scent of popcorn is a kind of overture. The kitchen can play the same tune.

Eating with the film

There is a gentle art to matching food and film. Some families theme their snacks to the picture: noodles for a Studio Ghibli evening, a plate of pastries for a Paris-set romance. Others keep to the classics. Either approach works if it remembers the essentials. Food at a film should be quiet to eat, easy to manage in low light, and finished, or at least set down, before the most important scenes.

And a note for hosts: the best snack is the one that lets you sit down. A movie night in which one person spends the second act in the kitchen is a dinner party in disguise. Prepare before the lights go down; the nest is for everyone, including the cook.

With the room arranged and the bowls filled, only one decision remains. It is the hardest. We turn to it in our final chapter.