How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Read online

  Although the Smiths were producing a number of fruits, the famed apples that bear Maria’s name weren’t a part of the crop. Truth be told, with five children and, by that time, grandchildren (hence the granny sobriquet), Mrs. Smith probably wasn’t intently focused on picking or growing in the farm’s early years. But by the late 1860s, Thomas had become infirm, forcing the aging grandmother to take over the business.

  It was during this period that Maria made her discovery, which was, without a doubt, never planned. Smith’s grandson Benjamin Spurway recounted years later that Smith had been given French crab apples from Tasmania by a fruit agent and Granny used them to produce apple pies. She discarded the unused peels and cores through an open window next to the kitchen. Sometime later she noticed a seedling growing near her wall with an odd new apple. Another variation on the story has Granny dumping rotting French crabs beside a nearby creek and discovering a wee new apple tree there.

  In either case, this type of serendipitous creation through open pollination isn’t incredibly uncommon. Still, it rarely produces such a perfect fruit. (The dual purpose Granny Smith apple is great for both cooking and eating raw.) The beauty of the new apple wasn’t immediately identified by all. When she showed some to neighbors in 1868, the apples received little fanfare. Granny died in 1870, but her apples continued on as members of her family began cultivating the new variety. In 1890 they were exhibited at the Castle Hill Agricultural and Horticultural Show. The next year they won top prize for cooking apples at the event.

  Granny Smith apples really gained attention after World War I when Australian industry looked to mass ship its produce abroad. They became popular in the United States in the 1960s and by 1975 Granny Smiths represented 50 percent of all Australian apple exports (and 40 percent of the country’s overall crop). They are also produced in such Southern Hemisphere locales as New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa. The reason for their popularity? Along with boasting excellent acidity and texture when stewed and offering a good combination of sweet and tart, Granny Smith apples also have another key characteristic—they’re tough. The apple remains edible after up to six months in cold storage and it “is nearly as resilient as a tennis ball and holds up well in shipping,” according to food author Roger Yepsen.

  It seems appropriate that the apple that bears Maria Smith’s name would be as hardy as the woman who moved from one side of the world to the other, raised five children, tended to an invalid husband, and ran a farm.

  Rhubarb: Bumbling builders

  Rhubarb, when combined with strawberries, makes such a perfect crumble or pie that it’s often known in foodie circles as “pie plant.” In fact, although rhubarb is a vegetable, the US customs court in Buffalo, New York, broke with reality—and the fact that it’s often used in savory sauces—and decreed it a fruit in 1947 because it was so popular as a dessert stuffing. But it wasn’t always like that. Without a construction mistake, rhubarb might have never truly developed into a good go-to dessert option.

  Humans have been aware of rhubarb for more than two thousand years (some suggest even longer than that). In the wild, it’s common in cool climates. Gatherers in places like Mongolia and Siberia were the first to pull its roots. While some stout Siberians stuck the veggie in pies, most people recoiled at adding early rhubarb to a regular diet. The celery-looking stalks were extremely acidic and not too pleasing to the palate.

  Instead, rhubarb was used for medicinal purposes. Though it can be toxic if you take too much of it (chomping on the leaves can make you really sick), the veggie is full of oxalic acid. Today oxalic acid is used in cleaning supplies, but the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese, and even the more modern British thought it was helpful for such maladies as a persistent cough. Henry VIII supposedly used rhubarb-based medicine for a long stretch late in his life. In the seventeenth century, its dried root was so coveted in England that it cost three times the price of opium. Despite the high street value, I somehow have a hard time seeing rhubarb pushers sneaking around back alleys.

  As a cherished commodity, rhubarb was grown in a small plot at the posh Chelsea Physic Garden in London. Nevertheless, it must not have been too much of a focus because when some workers were brought to the garden to dig a trench near the rhubarb patch in 1815, they didn’t give the vegetable any thought. Rather than dumping the spoil from the ditch into an unused area, they tossed the dirt right on top of the garden’s rhubarb crowns.

  The rhubarb was then forgotten until it was time to fill the trench again (what work was being done isn’t known). Once the spoil was cleared, the garden’s curator William Anderson made an unexpected discovery. Instead of the normal cherry-red-stalked rhubarb, up popped a paler, more tender variation of the vegetable. Anderson must have taken a taste and found the flavor to be far mellower than rhubarb’s normal eye-watering tang. He started testing the discovery and in 1816 sent off his findings to the Royal Horticulture Society. It turned out that when rhubarb was packed in extra soil (and fortified with manure) it thrived. Special pots were created to help the process.

  An area of Yorkshire in northern England—dubbed “the rhubarb triangle”—developed into the center of its cultivation. Over time, those exacting gardeners up north learned that a little additional luck probably further aided the London discovery of the far more edible rhubarb. It turns out that not only is a load of dirt needed for what is now known as forced growth rhubarb, but temperatures also have to be just right (approximately 55°F to 65°F). Though the weather can be notoriously temperamental in London, it must have stayed just constant enough at the Chelsea Physic Garden following the worker’s flub to ensure that we have the finest rhubarb-strawberry pies today.

  Tarte Tatin: Ditzy sister

  The history of the popular French dessert tarte Tatin is a tale of two sisters. In 1888, Stephanie and Caroline Tatin inherited the Hotel Tatin from their father. Located in the Loire Valley in the small town of Lamotte-Beuvron, the hotel, which also featured a restaurant, was a success under the sisters’ stewardship.

  There were two key reasons why it thrived. The first was the bounce the hotel received from Napoleon III. The monarch owned an estate not far from the hotel and stocked the area with game. As a result, hunters flocked to this part of the Sologne region. With the hotel strategically located across the street from the train station, it picked up tons of patrons. The second reason was Stephanie was a really good cook. While the younger Caroline—nicknamed “the little princess of Sologne”—was a socially adept hostess, the older Stephanie showed exceptional talent in the kitchen, while also having a reputation as somewhat of an airhead.

  It was the combination of these factors that many claim led to the invention of the tarte Tatin. One day during the height of the hunting season in the 1890s, the hotel’s restaurant was incredibly crowded. Stephanie was trying to keep up with demand, but the scatterbrained chef neglected a pan full of apples she’d left simmering in butter over a fire. Alternatively, some believe that she had planned to line the pan with pastry dough before putting the apples on but neglected to do so in her rush. Whatever the case, many cooks might have been unsure about what to do with the seemingly wasted apples, but proving her space cadet reputation may have been a bit unwarranted, Stephanie improvised by putting a pastry shell over the now caramelized fruits and shoving the combination into the oven. When it finished baking, she turned the pie upside down and, voilà, the tarte Tatin was born.

  Serious foodies hate this story. Many have pointed out that similar tarts—some with apples and others with pears—were popular in the Sologne region before Stephanie’s supposed mistake. One particularly inspired Tatin-ologist has argued that a chef from the estate of a local count was the actual inventor of the dessert. This claim suggests that the Tatin family was given the recipe details and Stephanie simply followed the directions. But nothing has been proved conclusively and, as Florence Fabricant pointed out in The New York Times Dessert Cookbook, the tarte Tatin—probably thanks in
part to the fun accident story—has received “excellent PR” over the years.

  By the 1920s word of the invention story and the fantastic new recipe had reached Paris. Maurice-Edmond Sailland, who was known by his pen name Curnonsky and was considered the “Prince of Gastronomy,” discovered the tarte Tatin and included it in his influential survey of French cuisine, La France Gastronomique. The famed Parisian restaurant Maxim’s would soon include the dessert on its menu, leading to another popular (though likely apocryphal) tale that the happening Paris hot spot sent a spy posing as a gardener to the Tatins’ restaurant to snatch the recipe.

  Neither Stephanie, who passed away in 1917, nor Caroline, who died in 1911, was alive to see their confectionary namesake make it to the big time. The sisters never even called the dish the tarte Tatin and reportedly never wrote down the recipe. Accident or not, the caramelized, buttery treat was proudly prepared for all the patrons who came to their hotel. The restaurant, which still exists today, continues to have one rule about the dessert: It has to be served hot out of the oven.

  Candies and Snacks

  Cheese Puffs: Rabbit food

  Junk food haters who say cheese puffs—aka cheese curls—aren’t fit for human consumption may be unconsciously referring to the product’s origin. Best known by such brand names as Cheetos and Cheez Doodles, this powdered mess of a snack got its start from a machine that manufactured food for animals.

  In the 1930s the Flakall Company based in Beloit, Wisconsin, ran a successful business creating corn-based livestock feed. The company’s machine was particularly useful because it broke down dangerously sharp corn hulls by flaking the grain into easily digestible small pieces. The feed became popular, particularly for rabbits, who were the first to indulge in the mashed-up food. With demand high, the equipment, known as an extruder, would often run continuously. This was an intense process and parts could get extremely hot during the flaking procedure. To solve the problem, workers would pour moistened corn kernels into the extruder to cool things down and ease clogging.

  One day a Flakall employee (most say his name was Edward Wilson) noticed an interesting by-product from the cooling efforts. The moistened kernels were turning into long white ribbons of cornmeal as they moved through the machine. Once these strips exited, they would harden and become puffy. Wilson was intrigued by this unintended creation and took home a bag of the fluff. There, his wife fried up the puffs, added a dash of salt, and shared them with neighbors. This being Wisconsin, the locals asked that a little cheese be added to the mix. The snack was dubbed the Korn Kurl.

  In 1942 Flakall secured a patent for a machine dedicated to churning out these corn puffs. Undoubtedly recognizing the contraption’s animal-food roots, the instrument’s inventors made sure to point out in their patent application that “[w]hen streamlets are discharged from the processing apparatus they are prepared for human consumption.” The machine was good to go, but hungry mobs outside of Beloit would have to wait to get their cheese puff fix. During World War II, the government put a halt to the production of any nonessential food. Somehow, the Korn Kurl fell into that category (partying teenagers, if they’d known about the product, would have let out a collective groan at that decision).

  Following the war, a company called the Adams Corporation became the first to use the machine for commercial use. Not long after, in 1948, the San Antonio–based Frito Company introduced Cheetos nationally. And in the 1950s, a New York–based company, called Old London Foods, began marketing Cheez Doodles, reaching stores across the country by the mid-1960s.

  The snack has flown off convenience store shelves ever since. Cheetos alone produce four billion dollars in annual sales worldwide and, if you were to put the yearly output of Cheez Doodles end-to-end on the ground, it would span approximately seventy-two miles. Moreover, even with its beastly beginnings, the cheese puff has appealed to the more refined palate. Proving that point, Cheez Doodle inventor Morrie Yohai took great pride in one particular possession: a photo of gourmet TV personality Julia Child with her hand deep in a bag of Cheez Doodles.

  Chewing Gum: Deposed dictator and a nosy accountant

  If you think gnawing on a hard piece of gum must be the equivalent of chewing on a rubber tire, there’s a reason for that. Americans can attribute the invention of the jaw chomping diversion to a man who initially thought gum would be great as a rubber substitute.

  The basis for the first chewing gum was a substance known as chicle. A milky sap taken from the Mexican sapodilla tree, the substance made its way to the United States in a most unexpected way from a famously dubious character.

  Antonio López de Santa Anna is best known as the Mexican general and politician responsible for the massacre at the Alamo. With Texas settlers trying to secede from Mexico, Santa Anna commanded his army to lay siege to the Alamo, ultimately slaughtering those defending the fort, including such notables as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett. The Texans would eventually prevail against Santa Anna. While many of the Mexican leaders involved were executed for their part, Santa Anna was allowed to immigrate to America where he moved to Staten Island in New York (now that’s a change of scenery!).

  Not long after settling in, Santa Anna met an inventor named Thomas Adams, who observed how the former Mexican power broker liked to chew on these small pieces of chicle. Adams didn’t really see the value in that. In the United States at the time, paraffin wax was the chew of choice. Instead, Adams sent away for a crate of chicle with a different goal in mind. He thought that with the right combination of chemicals Santa Anna’s gummy substance could be transformed into a synthetic rubber. Adams failed in that endeavor, but between the former dictator’s chewing and Adams’ own son Horatio supposedly picking up the habit, he relented and began marketing his supply of chicle in 1871 as unwrapped balls. He called his creation “Adams New York Gum—Snapping and Stretching.”

  Chicle-based chewing gum became established by the start of the twentieth century, but it stretched to another level in 1928 when an unlikely source mistakenly created bubble gum. That individual was Walter Diemer and he wasn’t an inventor like Thomas Adams or even a scientist. He was an accountant. Nevertheless he was an accountant at the right place for this sort of creation. He worked at the Fleer Chewing Gum Corporation and after being asked one day to keep an eye on some gum manufacturing while a colleague had to answer the phone, he became intrigued by the business. He developed such an interest that during down time he’d mess around with some of the product. This odd decision by the accountant shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as Diemer was somewhat eccentric. Late in life he was known to ride around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on a large-scale tricycle.

  With no formal background, Diemer threw all sorts of things in his batches of gum. The company had previously made gum supple enough to blow bubbles, but the problem was the chewy substance would either be too sticky or would break apart. The cliché goes if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with typewriters and give them enough time they’ll produce the great American novel. It seems that it only took one accountant and a handful of months to produce just the right bubble blowing consistency. His secret: latex. “It was an accident,” Diemer told the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer Journal in 1996. “I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles.”

  After whipping up a batch, he decided he wanted to add a little color. For whatever reason, the only food coloring the Fleer plant had in stock was pink. For that fact alone, pink became the iconic color of bubble gum.

  Fleer dubbed it Dubble Bubble and in the first year on the market it did $1.5 million in sales, surpassing the Tootsie Roll as the most popular one-cent candy. To this day, chewing gum has not lost its flavor: Americans spend some $2.5 billion on about a half-billion pounds of gum every year. And, in sweet vindication for Thomas Adams, many modern gums use synthetic polymers like styrene-butadiene rubber, which is also in—you guessed it—car tires.

  Doughnuts: Seafaring captain

>   It should come as no surprise that more than one person has taken credit for the design of the modern doughnut. After all, who wouldn’t want to be responsible for such a satisfying treat? To quote the always sage Homer Simpson (who does not stake a claim): “Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?”

  These fried cakes were first produced in sixteenth-century Holland and were called olykoek (translation: “oil cake”). They were made of sweetened dough and sometimes sugared. Early American connoisseurs of olykoek included Dutch settlers in New York and, despite their austere lifestyle, the Pilgrims in New England. They called the treats “dough nuts” because they were originally small—some were even walnut-size.

  The big breakthrough came with the invention of the hole in the middle. The problem with the old school version of the pastry was that it would not fry uniformly and, inevitably, the center of the treat would become soggy with excess oil. With a hole in the center, surface area increased and the doughnut became all the more perfect.

  So who was the genius who invented nothing? This important question was one that required serious debate. In 1941 the Doughnut Corporation of America set up a confab at the swanky Astor Hotel in New York City to address this very issue. The company convened a three-person panel of celebrity judges: quiz show host Clifton Fadiman, journalist Franklin Adams, and gossip columnist/professional hostess Elsa Maxwell. Their job was to determine the following, “Who put the hole in the doughnut?”