How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Page 8

  Regardless, the product quickly became a nationwide favorite and by 1928, sixty million of the treats were sold. With royalties rolling in, Epperson’s childhood discovery looked to be an annuity for life. Sadly, the Depression changed that course. Being an entrepreneur at heart and always in need of money for his next venture, he ended up selling his stake in his invention in 1929.

  Little did he know that during the Depression, a double-Popsicle with two sticks, which allowed friends to break apart the ice treat and share the cooling confection for very little cost, would become an even bigger hit and cemented the Popsicle’s place in most Americans’ memories of childhood. (In one 2005 survey adults said that the Popsicle—rather than the ice-cream cone or the ice-cream sandwich—was the treat they most often purchased as a child.)

  Later in life Epperson, who died in 1983 at age eighty-nine, would have mixed emotions about his accidental discovery. On the one hand, he clearly regretted his decision to sell out. “I was flat and had to liquidate all my assets,” he once said. “I haven’t been the same since.” But he did always appreciate his place in snack lore—which undoubtedly made him a hit with his more than two dozen grandchildren. “It has given a lot of simple pleasure to a lot of people,” he said in 1973 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Popsicle. “And I’ve enjoyed being part of it all.”

  Potato Chips: Take-no-guff chef

  Sussing out the origins of the potato chip can be as messy as digging your hand into a bag of the ubiquitous snack food.

  For decades one particular story has been the darling of most authors, journalists, and potato chip industry professionals. It revolves around a larger-than-life chef from Saratoga Springs, New York, named George Crum. The son of an African-American father and a Native American mother, Crum was renowned as a top-notch cook in the fancy resort town in upstate New York. During his career, he would serve such luminaries as presidents Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

  In 1853 Crum was working as the head chef at one of the area’s most exclusive hotels, Moon’s Lake House. On one summer evening, a prominent guest—some claimed it was the uber-wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt—ordered french-fried potatoes. Back then these thick-cut slices of the starchy tuber were a dish of the rich. Thomas Jefferson discovered them while serving as ambassador to France in the 1700s and brought them back to the United States, offering the potatoes to company at Monticello. On the night in question, the guest (whether it be Vanderbilt or another well-heeled patron) thought the potatoes were either too soggy or not flavorful enough for consumption and sent them back to the kitchen.

  Even when it came to the well-heeled and famous, Crum was not a man to be trifled with. It was said that he once forced industry barons William Vanderbilt and Jay Gould to wait more than an hour while other guests who had arrived earlier got seated first. Crum was clear about his skills: He could cook a dinner “fit for a king,” but if there was a complaint he could also present “the most indigestible substitutes [he] could contrive.”

  In this case, the complaint from the dining room meant that he was going to provide what he thought would be the latter. He sliced the potatoes so thin that when fried they would come out too crispy to pick up with a fork. He then added so much salt that there could be no complaint about it being bland. The tale concludes with the guest trying Crum’s attempt at indigestible and loving it. From then on, the dish—named Saratoga Chips—was included on the menu as a house special.

  As great as this story is, there is some evidence it’s more legend than reality. While most everyone agrees that the chip did find its start in Saratoga Springs, Crum may have only been a bit player in its invention—and the tale of battling a rich eater apocryphal. Author Dirk Burhans offers a compelling case on this front in his book Crunch! A History of the Great American Potato Chip. Burhans points out that while Crum was not a man short on confidence, he never claimed he came up with potato chips. In fact, that contention didn’t really enter print until the 1940s. As for the upset customer anecdote, it didn’t become popular until the 1970s.

  Still, even if Crum’s lucky run-in with a snotty guest isn’t true, it’s quite possible that the potato chip was an accidental find. Burhans suggests that the “most credible” origins explanation did come from the kitchen of Moon’s Lake House. But it was Crum’s sister, Katie Speck Wicks, who made the discovery. “Aunt Katie,” wrote Burhans, “was frying crullers and peeling potatoes at the same time. A thin slice of potato found its way into the frying oil for the crullers, and Katie fished it out.” Crum saw the chip, took a taste, and was pleased. After Katie explained how it happened, Crum supposedly said, “That’s a good accident. We’ll have plenty of these.” While Crum’s local obituary in 1914 didn’t mention the chip, Katie’s obit three years later credited her with its creation.

  Other explanations exist as well. Still, the popular disgruntled patron story has never been definitively disproved, leaving some hope that Crum’s tale of trying to stick it to the rich man may have truly happened.

  Pretzels: Holy rewards

  If author Dan Brown ever needs new grist for a Da Vinci Code–type book, he might consider munching on some pretzels. The snack has Catholic roots shrouded in the fog of food lore.

  One popular story about the pretzel’s religious invention stars a monk in either Northern Italy or Southern France (already we’re getting a bit hazy). It was circa AD 610 and the religious man’s job was making bread. One day, he had excess dough after completing his work and wasn’t sure what to do with it. Giving it just a moment’s thought, he decided to roll the dough into a new shape to make gifts for small children who had successfully learned their prayers. The pretzel’s distinctive design was meant to represent two folded arms. Back then folding arms, rather than clasping or putting hands together, was the common posture for praying. The monk allegedly dubbed his creation the pretiola, which is Latin for “little reward.”

  An alternative to the story ditches the monk and has the dawn of pretzels occurring approximately two centuries earlier. In this one, Roman Christians, who abstained from meat and dairy products during the forty days of Lent, needed a nonoffending food option. The pretzel was made to serve that role and, again, the shape was to remind religious adherents to focus on prayer. The original name in this account was bracellae (Latin for “little arms”). According to the Catholic Education Resource Center, there is a fifth century illustration of a pretzel-like product in the Vatican Library but no recipe to corroborate this early birth (for those of you who want to get on this mystery, check out Codex 3867).

  While those are the most popular tales, others exist. There’s one that says monks made the strangely shaped bread to allow for pilgrims to easily hang it on their walking staffs. An alternative claims a German king decreed loaves of bread be made in a way to allow the sun to shine through them three different ways. Why he wanted this is unclear. Whichever you believe, the pretzel was a popular purchase at the local marketplace in Germany by the Middle Ages. At that point it was known by an Old High German word, bretzitella, and then brezel (or bretzel, depending on who you believe) before transforming into its modern name.

  The Christian storytelling surrounding the pretzel doesn’t end there. It’s said that pretzels saved Vienna from Muslim invaders in 1529. The Ottoman Turks were laying siege to the European capital and devised a plan to dig tunnels underneath the sturdy city walls in the middle of the night. What the Turks didn’t know was bakers labored through the night cooking pretzels in order to have fresh bread ready for morning customers. These men supposedly heard the below-ground commotion and alerted authorities. As a result, the Turks were repelled, preventing Muslim rule in Europe.

  This romantic recounting is very unlikely. It’s true that the Ottomans tried to tunnel under the walls in order to lay mines to destroy the city’s protection, but, according to the book Besieged: An Encyclopedia of Great Sieges from Ancient Times to the Present, it was an Ottoman deserter who warned the Austrians about t
he digging plans.

  So what ties between the pretzel and the Christian faith are worthy of our devotion? Some in Europe, along with members of the Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States, have put pretzels on Christmas trees as decorations and hidden them as prizes at Easter (a la Easter eggs). They have also been used at wedding ceremonies, where the baked good is broken apart in a wishbone-like game. As for the rest of it, I leave it to Dan Brown to figure out how to weave it all together in The Pretzel Code.

  Twinkies: Strawberry afterthought

  Devoted fans of the ubiquitous Twinkie should give praise to the ever-so-wholesome strawberry for the confection’s invention. It was the strawberry’s relatively short season for freshness that inspired the spongy American icon.

  In 1930 James Dewar was working as a Hostess bakery manager in Schiller Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Times were tight and the company wanted to come up with a low-priced product that would appeal to Depression-starved consumers. Cue the strawberry. Dewar’s factory used them as part of a little finger cake product they were selling. But the problem was strawberries would only stay sweet for six weeks so the cakes came and went quickly. As a result, the bakery molds used for the strawberry treats sat idle for most of the year.

  Looking to maximize those pans, Dewar, a longtime bakery man who entered the business in 1920 as a wagon driver, concocted the Twinkie. He named it after a billboard he saw for a company called Twinkle Toe Shoes on a trip to St. Louis. (“I shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids,” he said.) The new cakes, which went on the market at a nickel for two, weren’t like the yellow wonders we taste today. Dewar originally kept with the fruit theme, creating a creamy banana filling. The key: unlike strawberries, fresh bananas could be found throughout the year.

  The Twinkie was an immediate success, but it needed another unexpected turn to reach its full height of popularity. During World War II rationing made it impossible to source enough bananas to keep the production lines going. With little choice, Hostess was forced to come up with an alternative—the creamy vanilla-flavored insides used today. After the war, there was no need to return to the banana flavor as the new center proved more popular than its predecessor. Nowadays some 500 million Twinkies are sold annually. As for the banana cream, it has been used in limited runs with much success.

  Sure enough, over the years, the Twinkie has become a foundational item in American pop culture. Archie Bunker described it as “WASP Soul Food” on the hit 1970s TV show All in the Family, and there are even Twinkie recipes for such varied dishes as Twinkie Pancakes and Twinkie Sushi. Not surprisingly considering his then-penchant for sweets, President Bill Clinton included a package in a 1999 time capsule celebrating the millennium. While some may think disposable Twinkies are an odd addition for a time capsule, think again. A Maine teacher once claimed he kept a perfectly good-looking Twinkie next to the chalkboard in his classroom for thirty years (Hostess sort of ruins that party, asserting their cake really only has a shelf-life of about twenty-five days). The treat’s darkest hour—beyond when nutritionists take potshots at it—came when Dan White, who murdered San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, said his intake of junk food was evidence of the depression that led to the killings. The media dubbed it the “Twinkie Defense.”

  Yet, through it all, Dewar stood by his strawberry-inspired (or lack thereof) creation. “Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things,” he said decades after the invention. “I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my fifteen grandchildren. My boy Jimmy played football for the Cleveland Browns. My other son, Bobby, played quarterback for the University of Rochester. Twinkies never hurt them.” As Dewar lived to the ripe old age of eighty-eight on a diet that regularly included the spongy treat he may very well have been right.

  Additives and Extras

  Alka-Seltzer: Newspaper discovery

  The biggest story a journalist at the Elkhart Truth ever broke never made it into print. In December 1928, the small northern Indiana town of Elkhart was hit by a countrywide cold and influenza epidemic. Businesses in the area were barely staying open with so many employees calling in sick.

  One day during the outbreak, Andrew H. “Hub” Beardsley made a trip over to the Truth, a local community newspaper, to have a friendly chat with its managing editor Tom Keene. Hub and his brother Charles ran Dr. Miles Medical Company, a local business specializing in remedies. Their big seller was something called Dr. Miles’ Nervine, which allegedly treated such “nervous” ailments as headaches, backaches, epilepsy, and sleeplessness. They also sold Dr. Miles’ Cactus Compound for heart ailments (it might have helped the heart, but with its main ingredient being 23 proof alcohol, it’s unclear what it did to the rest of the body). Despite some success the Beardsley brothers were really looking for a bubbling concoction, known as an “effervescence,” that could be a cure-all.

  While Hub wasn’t searching for his answer when he walked into the Truth that day, he did notice something peculiar. None of the newspaper’s employees were absent. Shockingly, they all seemed to be working away as if the flu scourge had passed them by. Hub was intrigued and asked Keene how this was possible. Keene delivered the monumental scoop: He pulled out a mixture of aspirin, bicarbonate, and lemon juice and explained that whenever an employee began feeling sick, he’d just mix up the bubbly combination. Instantly Hub knew he’d found the product he’d been searching for.

  He went back to his laboratory and charged his chief chemist, Maurice Trencer, with putting the elements of the Truth’s magic elixir into a tablet. Within a week, the scientist had created Aspir-Vess, which was later renamed Alka-Seltzer. (The new name combined “alkaline,” a term for an acid-repelling element, with the popular fizzy drink “seltzer.”) While the product was marketed for a number of ailments, including such far-flung problems as exhaustion and a bad temper, from a food-and-drink perspective it became a go-to item for upset stomachs and hangovers.

  But more than even its medicinal qualities, Alka-Seltzer became a triumph in marketing. Hub’s brother Charles invested heavily in sponsoring radio shows, which gave the product a huge bounce. Later, their television commercials proved to be classics. There was Speedy, the tablet’s cartoon spokesperson, who whisked around with a wand making people feel better. An ad depicting a man offering the post-meal lament “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing” was a huge winner in the 1970s and the mantra “plop, plop, fizz, fizz/oh what a relief it is” became ubiquitous in the 1980s. The catchphrase “That’s a spicy meatball” was also part of an Alka-Seltzer campaign.

  In large part, the success of Alka-Seltzer made Elkhart a very prosperous locale. At one point, the town reportedly featured forty millionaires—or approximately one in every thousand residents. Alas, Alka-Seltzer and its parent company, which were purchased by Bayer AG in 1977, have since moved the main office. In 2009 Elkhart earned the dubious distinction of having the fastest increasing jobless rate in the United States, jumping from 4.7 percent to 15.3 percent in a single year. Sadly, there are some ills that even a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets cannot cure.

  Artificial Sweeteners: Sloppy scientists

  You’d think that rule number one when working with chemical compounds in a lab would be don’t taste anything unless you’re absolutely certain what you’re putting in your mouth. After all, we even tell little kids on the playground to follow that rule. But for those who can’t get through the day without a Diet Pepsi or a Coke Zero, it’s fortunate that apparently many scientists aren’t too worried about following that childhood missive.

  Each of the original holy trinity of artificial sweeteners—saccharin, cyclamate, and aspartame (aka NutraSweet)—was discovered by researchers who just didn’t think to wash their hands. As for the most recent, and today’s most popular, artificial sweetener, sucralose (known on the street as Splenda), it has its own different but equally accidental origin story.

  Sacc
harin was the original sugar substitute. In 1879 one of the century’s most revered chemists, Ira Remsen, was doing research on coal tar derivatives. (If you wonder why saccharin has that awful aftertaste, coal derivatives might give you some sense.) During research, an associate, Constantin Fahlberg, accidentally spilled some of a substance he was preparing on his hands. Overcome by intellectual curiosity—rather than common sense—he took a lick and found it to be incredibly flavorful. It turned out that the mixture was 300 times as sweet as basic sugar. He named it saccharin after the Latin word for sugarcane, saccharum.

  While saccharin went on the market as an alternative to sugar, its bitter aftertaste did somewhat limit its value. What was needed was another sweetener to mix with it that could lessen the bite. Cyclamate, which was discovered in 1937, wasn’t as sweet as saccharin, but proved to be its potential partner (though some studies have indicated the combo can cause cancer). Yet again, its discovery came from another messy scientist.

  Michael Sveda was a student at the University of Illinois working on some sulfamates that were expected to have promising pharmacological properties. He got his hands dirty—so to speak—mixing these compounds and didn’t think anything of it when he went for a cigarette break. After taking a long drag from his smoke, he noticed something very odd: Chemicals on his hands from the experiments had soaked into the cigarette creating a sweet taste.

  Proving that scientists don’t always learn from the past, James M. Schlatter had his own unclean story when it came to finding the combination that led to Equal and NutraSweet. In December 1965, after getting some aspartame powder on his hands, he licked a finger in order to help pick up a piece of paper. He noticed the strong sweet taste (some 200 times greater than sugar).