Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (75 page)

Almonds
. One of the two nuts mentioned in the Bible (the other is the pistachio), the almond was cultivated in ancient Mesopotamia, where its sweet-smelling oil served as an early body moisturizer, hair conditioner, and perfume. As early as 2500
B.C
., almonds were grown in Greece, and seeds have been found in the palace at Knossos on Crete. A favorite dessert dish for the Greeks, the almond was called
amygdale
, and by the Romans
amygdala
, which today is the anatomical term for any almond-shaped body structure, such as the tonsil.

Almonds are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world. In the United States, the earliest almonds were harvested from trees originating in Mexico and Spain, whose seeds were planted by missionaries to California. Most of those early trees, however, died off when the missions were abandoned. The current California crop is based on trees brought from the East in 1843. Today the state’s groves produce more almonds than all other locations in the world combined.

Pistachio
. Indigenous to Persia and Syria, the pale yellow-green pistachio—
pistah
in ancient Persian—was widely cultivated throughout the Near East, and its trees were planted in the royal gardens of Babylonia during the eighth century
B.C
. The nut was exploited for its oil, as well as being eaten fresh and used in Persian confections. Pistachios fetched high prices in ancient Rome as delicacies, eaten at the conclusion of a meal as dessert. In Gaul, dessert was synonymous with nuts, and the origin of our word “dessert” is the Old French verb
desservir
, “to clear the table,” signaling the serving of the nut course.

Cracker Jack: 1893, Chicago

Billed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as “Candied Popcorn and Peanuts,” Cracker Jack was the brainchild of a German immigrant, F. W. Rueckheim. He concocted a confection that combined the proven popularity of candy with Americans’ growing acceptance of popcorn and peanuts as snack foods.

With a savings of two hundred dollars from farm wages, in 1871 Rueckheim opened a small popcorn stand in Chicago. The successful business eventually led him to expand his fare to include peanuts, caramels, marsh-mallows, and molasses taffy. In the early 1890s, the confectioner reasoned that if customers so enjoyed popcorn, peanuts, and molasses taffy individually, they might prefer a combination of the three. This succotash of sweets was not entirely original and daring, for molasses-coated “popcorn balls” had been a candy favorite in the Northeast since the 1870s. Peanuts, though, a salient ingredient in Rueckheim’s creation, were a novelty circus snack at the time.

Company legend has it that a friend tasted Rueckheim’s new confection, exclaimed, “That’s crackerjack!” and the product’s name was born. It’s a likely possibility. In that era, “cracker” was a Northeastern vernacularism meaning “excellent”; “Jack” was a breezy address for a man whose name was unknown; and both “crackajack” and “crackerjack” were abbreviated expressions for the approving phrase “Cracker, Jack!”

A box of Cracker Jack did not always include a prize. At first, a box carried a discount coupon toward a subsequent purchase; a child’s prize in the form of a trinket entered the box in 1913. Three years later, a sailor boy, Jack, and his black-and-white dog, Bingo, began to appear in product advertisements, then as the company trademark. The real-life “Jack,” the inspiration for the logo, was Rueckheim’s grandson Robert, who at the age of eight died of pneumonia. The sailor boy image acquired such meaning for the founder of Cracker Jack that he had it carved on his tombstone, which can still be seen in St. Henry’s Cemetery, Chicago. Today every ounce of machine-packaged Cracker Jack contains exactly nine peanuts, fewer than Rueckheim prescribed in 1893, when the circus nut was something of a novelty.

Hot Dog: 1500
B.C
., Babylonia

The history of the hot dog begins 3,500 years ago with the Babylonians, who stuffed animal intestines with spiced meats. Several civilizations adopted, modified, or independently created the dish; the Greeks called it
orya
, the Romans
salsus
, the origin of our word “sausage.”

Homer, in the
Odyssey
, sang the gastronomical praises of sausage, its first reference in literature: “As when a man beside a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted…”

The decline of the sausage preceded that of the Roman Empire. According to the oldest known Roman cookbook, written in
A.D
. 228, sausage was a favorite dish at the annual pagan festival Lupercalia, held February 15 in honor of the pastoral god Lupercus. The celebration included sexual initiation rites, and some writers have suggested that sausage served as more than just a food. The early Catholic Church is known to have outlawed the Lupercalia and made eating sausage a sin. And when Constantine the Great, the fourth-century emperor of Rome, embraced Christianity, he, too, banned sausage consumption. As would happen in the twentieth century with liquor prohibition, the Roman populace indulged in “bootlegged” sausage to such an extent that officials, conceding the ban was unenforceable, eventually repealed it.

The evolution of the broad sausage to a slender hot dog began during the Middle Ages. Butchers’ guilds in various European city-states coveted regional sausage formulas, producing their own distinctive shapes, thicknesses, and brands, with names denoting the places of origin.
Wiener wurst
— “Vienna sausage” —eventually gave birth to the German-American terms “wiener” and “wienie.”

Shape and size were not the only distinguishing national features to emerge. Mediterranean countries specialized in hard, dry sausages that would not spoil in warm weather. In Scotland, oatmeal, a common and copious food, became one of the earliest cereal fillers for sausage, starting a practice that then, as now, made pork or beef all too often a secondary ingredient. In Germany, sausages were thick, soft, and fatty, and it was in that country that the “frank” was born in the 1850s.

In 1852, the butchers’ guild in Frankfurt introduced a sausage that was spiced, smoked, and packed in a thin, almost transparent casing. Following tradition, the butchers dubbed their creation “frankfurter,” after their hometown. The butchers also gave their new, streamlined sausage a slightly curved shape. German folklore claims this was done at the coaxing of a butcher who owned a pet dachshund that was much loved in the town. He is supposed to have convinced co-workers that a dachshund-shaped sausage would win the hearts of Frankfurters.

Three facts are indisputable: the frankfurter originated in the 1850s, in
the German city from which it derived its name; it possessed a curved shape; and it was alternatively known as a “dachshund sausage,” a name that trailed it to America.

In America, the frankfurter would also become known as the hot dog, today its worldwide name.

Two immigrants from Frankfurt, Germany, are credited with independently introducing the sausage to America in the 1880s: Antoine Feuchtwanger, who settled in St. Louis, Missouri; and Charles Feltman, a baker who sold pies from a pushcart along Coney Island’s rustic dirt trails. It was Feltman who would become an integral part of the hot dog’s history.

In the early 1890s, when Coney Island inns began to serve a variety of hot dishes, Feltman’s pie business suffered from the competition. Friends advised him to sell hot sandwiches, but his small pie wagon could not accommodate a variety of foods and cooking equipment. Instead, the pieman decided to specialize in one hot sandwich, his hometown’s sausage, the frankfurter.

Installing a small charcoal stove in his pushcart, Feltman boiled the sausages in a kettle and advertised them as “frankfurter sandwiches,” which he served with the traditional German toppings of mustard and sauerkraut. The sandwiches’ success enabled Charles Feltman to open his own Coney Island restaurant, Feltman’s German Beer Garden, and the amusement resort became identified with the frankfurter. With business booming, in 1913 Feltman hired a young man, Nathan Handwerker, as a roll slicer and part-time delivery boy, for eleven dollars a week. The move would open a new chapter in the hot dog’s unfolding history.

Nathan’s Franks
. By 1913, Coney Island was a plush resort and an important entertainment center. Two avid frankfurter eaters along the beach-front were a local singing waiter named Eddie Cantor and his prominent-profiled accompanist, Jimmy Durante. Both worked for little money and resented the fact that the prospering Charles Feltman had raised the price of his “franks” to a dime. The struggling vaudevillians suggested to Nathan Handwerker that instead of working for Feltman, he go into competition with him, selling franks for half the price.

In 1916, Nathan did just that. With savings of three hundred dollars, he purchased an open-front Coney Island concession on the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues and introduced the nickel frank, using a spiced meat formula devised by his wife, Ida. And to promote his product, Nathan employed a clever stratagem. He offered doctors at nearby Coney Island Hospital free franks if they would eat them at his stand wearing their professional whites and with stethoscopes prominently displayed. Doctors, then unassailably revered, proved an advertisement for the quality and salubriousness of Nathan’s franks that—together with the nickel price—almost sank the competition. To assist in serving the steady stream of customers, Nathan hired a perky, redheaded teenager, Clara Bowtinelli, who did not last long. A talent agent who frequented the concession took an interest in her, shortened her surname to Bow, and she was headed to Hollywood to become the glamorous “It Girl” of silent films.

Hot dog and hamburger, today American specialities, have German roots
.

“
Hot Dog
”. In 1906, slender, streamlined sausages were still something of a novelty in America, and they went by a variety of names: frankfurters, franks, wieners, red hots, and dachshund sausages. By this time, a refreshments concessionaire, Harry Stevens, had already made the sausage a familiar food at New York City baseball games. At the Polo Grounds—the home of the New York Giants—Stevens’s vendors worked the bleachers, bellowing, “Get your red-hot dachshund sausages!”

In the stands one summer day in 1906 was a syndicated Hearst newspaper cartoonist, Tad Dorgan. The dog-like curve of the frank and the vendors’ “barking” call inspired Dorgan to sketch a cartoon of a real dachshund, smeared with mustard, sandwiched in a bun. As the story is told, back at his office, Dorgan refined the cartoon, and unable to spell “dachshund,” he settled on “dog,” captioning the picture “Get your hot dogs!”

The name not only stuck, it virtually obsoleted its predecessors. And it quickly spawned a string of neologisms: the exclamatory approval “hot dog!”; the more emphatic “hot diggity dog!”; the abbreviated “hot diggity!” which inspired the song lyrics “Hot diggity, dog diggity, zoom what you do to me”; the noun for a daredevil, “hot dogger”; and the verb for going fast or making tracks, “to hot dog,” which decades later became a surfing term.

It was the universal acceptance of the term “hot dog” that caused the world to regard the frank or wiener as a thoroughly American invention. And America fast became the major producer of hot dogs: today 16.5 billion are turned out each year, or about seventy-five hot dogs for each man, woman, and child in the country.

The man responsible for the term “hot dog,” Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, who signed his illustrations TAD, was a major American cartoonist. There have been retrospectives of his work, and several cartoon museums around the country feature Dorgan collections. Historians, archivists, and curators of cartoon museums generally credit Dorgan with originating “hot dog,” but their numerous searches to date have not produced the verifying cartoon.

Hamburger: Middle Ages, Asia

The hamburger has its origin in a medieval culinary practice popular among warring Mongolian and Turkic tribes known as Tartars: low-quality, tough meat from Asian cattle grazing on the Russian steppes was shredded to make it more palatable and digestible. As the violent Tartars derived their name from the infernal abyss, Tartarus, of Greek mythology, they in turn gave their name to the phrase “catch a tartar,” meaning to attack a superior opponent, and to the shredded raw meat dish,
tartar steak,
known popularly today by its French appellation,
steak tartare
.

Tartar steak was not yet a gourmet dish of capers and raw egg when Russian Tartars introduced it into Germany sometime before the fourteenth century. The Germans simply flavored shredded low-grade beef with regional spices, and both cooked and raw it became a standard meal among the poorer classes. In the seaport town of Hamburg, it acquired the name “Hamburg steak.”

The Hamburg specialty left Germany by two routes and acquired different names and means of preparation at its points of arrival.