How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Page 10

  Now it was up to Janet to make something of this bargain. Marmalade had long been used as a word for a product very different from the spreadable bittersweet confection we know today. The term comes from the Portuguese word marmelada, which means quince paste. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it was a hard paste that could be cut and served as a dessert. By the end of the sixteenth century all types of fruits, including plums, dates, and strawberries, were being used for this purpose.

  Nevertheless, it’s likely that Janet was aware of a new kind of smooth spreadable marmalade that had become popular in Scotland in the years around the time of her husband’s purchase. But she put her own spin on it. Opting to save on the labor normally required to grind down the oranges, she shred the fruits for a more chunky option. “Janet Keiller did not invent orange marmalade,” wrote C. Anne Wilson in The Book of Marmalade (yes, there is a definitive tome on this topic). “But she contributed to the establishment of the ‘chip’ style as Scotland’s very own marmalade.”

  Before long, Janet’s jars were flying off the shelves of the family store. Seeing a business opportunity, the Keillers were the first to establish a factory to mass-produce marmalade (some suggest it was Janet’s son or even later generations of the family who keyed the business’s boom). The working classes liked it because, as a spread on toast, it was an inexpensive form of nourishment. Also, unlike many jams, which were seasonal, the resiliency of the Seville orange meant that marmalade could be produced year-round. From there the delicacy quickly spread and became a must on breakfast tables across the British Empire. By 2010, though, marmalade had transformed into a bit of a relic of a bygone era. One survey found that approximately 80 percent of the spread is sold to people over the age of forty-five. Youthful buyers will have to be found if marmalade hopes to weather the storm once again.

  Mayonnaise: Victory spread

  To the victor goes the spoils and when it came to eighteenth-century French politician and commander Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, the spoils were slathered with an improvised new condiment.

  With the exception of a couple of World Wars, the French and British have been scrapping on battlefields around the world for centuries. In 1756 the two countries were tussling over the island of Minorca, off the coast of Spain. The rock had tremendous strategic value so when duc de Richelieu captured its key city, Port Mahon, the French leader was ready to rejoice.

  Not that it took too much to get the duke in a celebratory mood. Legend has it that he enjoyed eating dinner in the nude. With this level of commitment to meals plus the added pressure of celebrating a huge win, duc de Richelieu’s chef wanted the victory feast to be special.

  But according to some food historians, the cook did not have everything he needed to put together the perfect meal.

  “[E]vidently, he was lacking some cream to mix with the egg yolks and he used oil instead, and the new sauce became mahonaise, which would be a derivation of Port Mahon,” Richard Gutman, curator of the culinary archives and museum at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, told National Public Radio on the 250th anniversary of the tangy condiment’s supposed invention.

  The concoction, which was effectively the local Spanish sauce aioli minus copious amounts of garlic, was brought back to France where it spread throughout the continent as both a base for other sauces and as a dressing. Keeping with the Anglo-Gallic tensions, the British didn’t embrace mayonnaise until around 1841—eighty-five years after it was created—and many Brits insisted on ditching the French moniker and going with the more bland “salad cream” as its name. (Mayonnaise’s migration onto sandwiches would be popularized in the United States, where Richard Hellmann was one of the first to begin selling jars of it for that and other purposes in 1912.)

  Some food experts have credited other moments in history for mayo’s entry into our diets. These have included the town of Bayonne in southwest France (along this line of thinking, bayonnaise was changed to mayonnaise somewhere down the road); ancient French chefs who named it after the old French word moyeu, meaning “egg yolk”; and Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne, who supposedly lost a key battle to—you guessed it—the British in the sixteenth century because he took so long finishing a chicken meal doused in the sauce.

  There are many more alternate origin tales, which begs the question: Why has duc de Richelieu endured as the most popular explanation? Gutman offers this simple reason: “[T]he Richelieu one is compact and nice and the Mahon makes sense.”

  Nutella: Post–World War II austerity

  Turin is Italy’s chocolate capital. “Every chocolatier has his very own chocolate, his own secret recipes, passed down through the generations,” one local chocolate maker told a reporter in 2004. “In other cities, chefs get up and make croissants in the morning. In Turin, we get up and make chocolate.”

  Along with its sweet tooth–inducing industry, the Piedmont region where Turin is located is also known for hazelnuts. The Oxford Companion to Food calls the “famous” Tonda Gentile Delle Langhe variety grown in this area Italy’s best.

  One would assume that these two popular elements—chocolate and hazelnuts—would be a perfect marriage blended for every conceivable use (chocolate-hazelnut pasta anyone?). Think again.

  Nutella, the wildly successful hazelnut spread (if you’re unfamiliar, just head over to Costco where you can find vats of it), wasn’t the result of someone thinking the two would be a natural mix. Its birth was all about necessity.

  Hazelnut-infused chocolate is said to date back to the days of Napoleon, but the first commercial combination of the two products came in the mid-1800s when Italians faced quotas on such luxury items as cocoa beans. To overcome the shortage, chocolatiers Paul Caffarel and Michele Prochet replaced some of the pricey cocoa with hazelnuts to create a new type of chocolate. They named their creation Gianduiotto and it became a standard part of the Turin chocolate scene.

  Despite the success of Gianduiotto, the chocolate-hazelnut mix didn’t yield any major new products until world events intervened. Following World War II, Italy was in short supply of chocolate. At the same time, the war had limited the country’s exports and Piedmont warehouses were overflowing with hazelnuts that hadn’t found a home. It was the first matter that concerned Pietro Ferrero, a local chocolate maker. He either didn’t have enough or couldn’t afford enough chocolate to fill his shelves. So he turned to the second matter—excess hazelnuts—to solve his problem.

  In 1946 he combined toasted hazelnuts with cocoa butter, vegetable oil, and cocoa powder to create his own hazelnut confection. This innovation was sold in loaves so pieces could be cut off (like cheese) and put on bread. Ferrero called it pasta gianduja (pasta for paste and gianduja after a famed Piedmontese carnival character). According to one source, he sold an impressive 660 pounds of his creation in one month that year. Initially spurred by limitations on ingredients, Ferrero was now sold on hazelnuts. In 1949 he rolled out a new extra-creamy, spreadable rendering of his invention. He named this version supercreama gianduja.

  The spread became a must-have at stores where kids would pay to get their bread slathered with the stuff. (In a sort of horror-esque side note, these stores would call their service “The Smearing.”) In 1964, as it became popular throughout Europe, the name was changed to Nutella. According to the book Why Italians Like to Talk About Food, the name came from “the Piedmontese add[ing] the sweet Italian suffix—ella to the American root ‘nut.’ Sweet sound, sweet taste.”

  Tabasco Sauce: Civil War epic

  One has to wonder whether Edmund McIlhenny had a Scarlett O’Hara moment before he invented Tabasco Sauce. McIlhenny’s route to the popular condiment was shaped by the Civil War in a tale nearly as epic as Gone with the Wind. Before the conflict between North and South, McIlhenny was a successful banker in New Orleans. And while he loved spicy foods, he probably gave little thought to the production of pepper sauces. But his destiny began ta
king shape in 1862 when the Union army entered the Queen City, forcing McIlhenny and his wife, Mary, to flee to Avery Island, a strange little piece of land jutting up from the Louisiana Marshes. Mary’s family owned a plantation and salt mines there and the couple thought it would be a safe place to wait out the hostilities. Bad call. The Union army quickly comprehended that Avery Island’s salt deposits were perfect for preserving meat for its soldiers. Not long after taking New Orleans, the northerners laid siege on Avery Island, capturing the salt mines and forcing the McIlhennys to flee again for their lives—this time to Texas.

  When the war finally ended, Edmund and Mary made the arduous trip back to their plantation and just like Vivien Leigh’s character on the big screen found nothing but devastation. The family mansion had been sacked and the crops plundered. But there was at least one edible that survived. During the Mexican-American war a business associate had supposedly given McIlhenny some capsicum peppers, an herb that is indigenous to Mexico. McIlhenny had planted a small crop on the plantation and given it little thought. Now it was one of the only things left to the family’s name.

  McIlhenny took the juicy peppers and seized the other commodity primarily at his disposal: the deposits of salt that still remained on the island. He threw in a little vinegar, poured the mixture into an old small cologne bottle and liked what he tasted. He initially wanted to call his stuff “Petite Anse Sauce,” after Avery Island, which was also known as Petite Anse. When Mary’s father balked at using the family property’s name for such a venture, McIlhenny went for something a little more arbitrary: He dubbed it “E. McIlhenny Tabasco Pepper Sauce.” Though there are conflicting reports on why he used Tabasco, it was likely taken from the title of a region in Mexico. Whatever the case, he simply liked the word.

  McIlhenny, who undoubtedly never saw himself entering the condiments game before the war, started slowly with his new invention, initially putting together 350 two-ounce bottles. From the start, McIlhenny was a savvy marketer. So much so that at least one author claims some of his widely accepted story of success was borrowed from another New Orleans businessman to bolster his narrative. According to Jeffrey Rothfeder’s Tabasco history, McIlhenny’s Gold, an epicure named Maunsel White (who died the same year that the McIlhennys fled from Avery Island) actually received the original pepper seeds from a Mexican-American veteran, producing a pepper sauce that gave McIlhenny his inspiration to plant seeds following his return from Texas. Rothfeder also claims McIlhenny never used discarded cologne bottles for his original product.

  Either way, Tabasco was undoubtedly an unintended product of Civil War looting and today enjoys sales of fifty million two-ounce units annually in America alone. All of which ensured that McIlhenny (and generations of his relatives to come) would never go hungry again.

  Whipped Cream: Student’s failed hypothesis

  Have you ever tried to whip cream by hand? It’s slow, arduous work. So there’s little doubt that when Charles Getz invented an aerosol can that could instantly dispense sweet, fluffy, light cream, it put a smile on lots of faces (and not just dazed ones from wayward teens looking for a hit of the nitrous oxide used in the dispensers).

  Although Getz had worked as a soda jerk and knew what a drag it was to manually whip cream, he never intended to save ice-cream sundae makers some hassles. It was the Depression and such an endeavor would have seemed frivolous. In 1931 Getz was a student at the University of Illinois, and like most college folk of the era (or any era for that matter) he needed to work to stay in school.

  As a chemistry major, Getz was able to line up a part-time job at the college’s Dairy Bacteriology Department. His goal in the gig was to come up with better ways to sterilize milk. Getz’s best idea was to store milk using high gas pressure, which he believed would repel bacteria. He began running experiments and while his hypothesis proved a loser, it did offer an interesting by-product—nicely whipped milk.

  Getz figured that whipped cream could be an excellent application for his discovery and, luckily, he had just the right professor to help encourage further development. Along with teaching analytic chemistry at the University of Illinois, G. Frederick Smith had established a small chemical company in 1928. Smith saw the practical applications for Getz’s find and also had the infrastructure to nurture it.

  A big early hurdle was coming up with the right gas to create the whipped cream. Most options left an unpleasant taste. After trial and error, Getz happened upon nitrous oxide—the odorless and (more important) tasteless gas used by dentists.

  In April 1935 at the American Chemical Society, the pair unveiled their findings to much fanfare. Using a siphon bottle put under pressure, they were able to force carbon dioxide into cream, transforming it into the whipped variety in about a minute. The gadget also produced three times the volume compared with what hand-whipped efforts could offer. Wrote one enthralled journalist: “Yes, the chemists, who figure out the problems of war and industry and medicine . . . have even invaded the kitchen to solve the housewives’ cares.”

  Named “Instantwhip,” the new product was advertised as “Economical. Inexpensive. Convenient.” Over time other brands would flood the market, leading to a slew of patent lawsuits. In a missed marketing opportunity, Instantwhip required users to refill their containers when empty. This opened the door for Reddi-wip, which gained a competitive advantage by offering disposable cans. Still, Getz’s inadvertent discovery ushered in the aerosol age—leading to sprays for everything from hair products to cleaning solution. Not a bad resumé filler for a college kid just trying to pay his way through school.

  Worcestershire Sauce: Forgotten barrel

  John Lea and William Perrins knew how to keep a secret. In the mid-1800s, these chemists (British-speak for pharmacists) created one of the Victorian Era’s most enduring condiments: Worcestershire (pronounced woos-TER-sheer) sauce. Beginning in 1837, Lea and Perrins convinced ship stewards to pack bottles on long voyages. The argument: Their sauce kept incredibly well and its strong, tangy flavor was particularly adept at covering up the taste of meats that spoiled during extensive journeys.

  The sales pitch was a winner as the sauce sailed around the globe. It was used by gold miners in Northern California and sheep herders in New Zealand. The condiment even popped up in the forbidden city of Lhasa in Tibet. True to Lea and Perrins’s word, the sauce did possess amazing resilience. Case in point: A Worcestershire bottle found on a boat shipwrecked in 1918 was still edible when discovered in 1989.

  With such success, the inventors seriously safeguarded their formula. For years, Lea and Perrins were the only two who knew all the details necessary to manufacture the sauce. Even about 150 years after the condiment’s invention only four people at the company’s main plant in Worcester, England (about 125 miles northwest of London), knew the full roster of ingredients.

  When it came to the origins of their sauce, the chemists also worked on a need-to-know basis. The bottles simply stated that it came from the “recipe of a nobleman in the county” of Worcestershire. From that, stories have been built. For years, executives who took over Lea and Perrins’s company after their deaths embraced one anecdote starring a local military man named Lord Sandys. According to the tale, Lord Sandys had served as the governor of Bengal and upon returning to England wanted a curry similar to the kind he found in India. He approached the two plucky chemists, who strove diligently to do the lord’s bidding. But much to their dismay, the men failed and placed a bin of their botched work in their cellar. Sometime later, looking to clean house, the pair planned to discard their woebegotten experiment when one of them (or a clerk) took a taste and found it very pleasing. The time spent fermenting in the cellar had turned the inedible into an indelible sauce.

  It’s a great story but one that’s lacked the staying power of the actual product. In 1997 a company employee named Brian Keogh wrote The Secret Sauce—A History of Lea & Perrins. In the book, he pointed out that a Lord Sandys was never governor of Bengal an
d “as far as available records show, ever in India.” This led one Lea & Perrins manager to concede, “We have had to say that the saga of Lord Sandys may not be God’s own truth.”

  An 1884 edition of New Zealand paper the Star offered a plausible alternative. One day Elizabeth Caroline Grey, who was a prominent Worcestershire author, visited the lord’s wife, Lady Sandys. The noblewoman commented that she longed for some good curry powder. Mrs. Grey said she had a recipe, which her uncle, the former chief justice of India, had relayed to her. She recommended Lea and Perrins as excellent chemists who could produce a sauce from her uncle’s instructions. Whether the chemists struggled is unclear. It is said that they originally made the sauce in 1835—some two years before selling it publicly. So the accidental element could have occurred. Still, as the tight-lipped Lea and Perrins are long gone, this is a secret that may never be revealed.

  Drinks

  Champagne: Devil’s bubbly and a timely pilgrimage

  If you’ve ever enjoyed a good bottle of champagne, you may believe it’s more an act of nature than a drink. Just ask eighteenth-century nobles in Europe’s royal courts. For them, the bubbly liquid was the tonic that propelled many an amorous tryst. France’s Philippe II d’Orléans was a huge fan. “The orgies never started until everyone was in a state of joy that champagne brings,” said one regular at the French palace when Philippe was in charge. Russia’s Catherine the Great was also known to use the beverage to get her sexual conquests in the mood as well.

  With the drink’s ability to put people into an otherworldly state of mind, it probably makes sense that original sparkling wine was not invented by any human. But considering its properties, it may be surprising that it was initially uncovered as an unwanted by-product.