How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (10 page)

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?”

While at least one food historian gives the honor to the Pennsylvania Dutch (they wanted to make dunking their doughnuts in coffee easier), the two contenders for the crown at this debate relied on either a fortuitous accident or some improvised inspiration.

The first contestant was an unnamed Native American from Cape Cod. Henry A. Ellis, a lawyer from the Cape, is generally credited as the man making the argument on behalf of the anonymous member of the Nauset tribe. Ellis claimed that the brave in question shot an arrow straight through the middle of a Pilgrim’s fry cake creating the first holed doughnut. Despite his courtroom background, Ellis’s argument wasn’t much of one. He lacked any tangible evidence to back up his story.

His opponent, Fred Crockett, was better prepared. Crockett entered the fray on behalf of his cousin Hanson Crockett Gregory, bearing letters and affidavits to support his case. Crockett said that in 1847, a teenage Gregory, who would go on to become a renowned ship captain in Maine, heard his mom complaining that the centers of her doughnuts were getting too soggy. The brash young man got up, walked across the room, and stuck his fork through the center of one of the cakes—problem solved.

Crockett won the day with that simple explanation. It was enough for the town of Camden, Maine, to erect a plaque in Gregory’s honor in 1947 calling him “The Inventor of the Hole in the Doughnut.” Despite Crockett’s victorious account, others have told Gregory’s story differently. The most fanciful version features sea captain Gregory fighting a terrible storm and needing somewhere to put his doughnut. With little choice, he stuck it on a spoke of his ship’s wheel, creating the hole. In her comprehensive volume,
The Donut Book: The Whole Story in Words, Pictures & Outrageous Tales
, Sally Levitt Steinberg persuasively argues that the popular ship’s wheel anecdote came from a children’s book fictionalizing Gregory’s discovery called
Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the Doughnut
.

As for Gregory himself, he also weighed in on the topic. During an interview at the dawn of the twentieth century, Gregory told a reporter for the
Boston Post
he’d grown sick of eating tough doughnuts known as “greasy sinkers.” Considering his frustration briefly, he took off the ship’s tin pepper box and cut into the middle of the cake. It was, he said, “the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes.” Reflecting on his offhanded discovery, he added, “Of course, a hole ain’t so much, but it’s the best part of the doughnut—you’d think so if you had ever tasted the doughnuts we used to eat.” Homer Simpson would unquestionably agree.

Graham Crackers: Sex-ruining snack

Graham crackers will wreck your sex life. At least that’s what their creator, Sylvester Graham, hoped.

In the early 1800s Graham, a trained preacher and self-styled medical guru, was very concerned about people’s sex life—or as he called it “venereal excess.” He was convinced that getting down (in a biblical sense) caused such physical maladies as headaches, poor circulation, epilepsy, and even spinal disease. No offense to the good reverend, but I have to wonder if he was doing it right.

Graham believed that what you ate was at the root of sexual desire, which included masturbation—an act he was particularly jittery about. He said: “high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh . . . all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital passions.” As a result, Graham, who started the American Vegetarian Society, insisted that meat, oils, alcohol, sugar, fats, and refined white flour all be cut from diets.