In the 1800s, ice cream was eaten off of plates, not out of bowls.
Really rich people would flavor it using ambergris, but for most people the popular flavorings were pumpkin, strawberry, and, uh, orange flower water?
Alexander the great is usually cited as the first world-famous fan of ice cream, but this is a bald-faced lie spread by actual retards, because let me tell you somethin', buster. Not even the Romans had the technology to cream their ice until they became Italy. Alexander the Great basically ate snow cones with wine or honey in them. The actual invention of ice cream is incredibly dubious and depends entirely on what you think counts as ice cream, as well as just who the fuck you're willing to believe on the subject. If you google it you'll often get articles mentioning a medieval Arabian thing called "Sharabt" which is often englified to "Sherbert".
Now, this might make sense to your puny modern manlet brain, because Sherbert and Ice Cream are pretty similar, right? But no, you're also an actual retard because for most of history, the distinction between ice cream and sherbert was for an actual reason. These days, if you walk into any given place and ask for a sherbert, you'll just get ice cream that's flavored after one or more of the 4 citrus fruits deemed edible in our society. But if you walked up to a fancy city in cowboy times and sidled up to the soda fountain and asked for a sherbert... They might not know what the fuck you're talking about, but they WOULD know what you're talking about if you asked for a lemon, lime, orange, or grapefruit-flavored ice cream.
So what the FUCK is a sherbert, you might ask? Well I'll tell you. A sherbert is an icy milk drink flavored with fruit. Way back in the day it was usually cherries, or pomegranate, or whatever the fuck a quince is, as well as whacky stuff like sandalwood and flower petals and shit. (Though sandalwood and flower petals and shit were also used in other desserts all over the world before we decided that things other than fruit and fruit accessories were weird and icky things to put in a dessert. And I mean let's be real here, if somebody was like "I made this candy out of rosewater please try it" and you didn't know what rosewater was, and then somebody told you what rosewater was, you would think they were actually legitimately extremely mentally autistic and probably call the police. I mean I only just learned what rosewater was, and if people hadn't been eating that shit ever since like 5 minutes after the first human found roses, I'd probably have slapped them for being a weird hippy eating shit out of random plants.)
"But Sent," You're probably saying, "That's just a fruit milkshake" and to you I say fuck off you stankous cuntgargler, Modern English wasn't even a twinkle in its father's balls yet. You're a fruit milkshake.
There is also Syllabub which is only tangentially related as another cream-based drink, which was usually a sort of sweetened whipped cream froth with wine poured over it. The heavy wine would of course sink to the bottom, and the whipped cream would float up to the top, and you would get sort of a root beer float kinda thing except with booze and it was usually lemon flavored.
Anyway I saw this as tangentially related to the coke thing since in the 1800s, the delicacy we know as ice cream was often used to promote the opening of the newly invented insulated ice-houses, which were majestic inventions that brought the power of COLD from canada all the way to the wild, wild west. In the tradition of Syllabub and Sharabt and other chilly milk beverages, ice cream sodas became a staple treat in the aforementioned soda fountains from that day forward, but these were viewed as sinfully rich by some asshole priest or something, so the Soda Jerks (that's actually what the guys who work behind the bar at a soda fountain are called) swapped out the carbonated water for just... More ice cream, and left the syrup in. And that is one of many disputed stories behind why the fuck we call it an Ice Cream Sundae.