How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (18 page)

One day Gibson came into The Players, saddled up to the bar, and was keen for something out of the ordinary. Chatting up Connolly, Gibson challenged the barkeep to improve upon the already unassailable martini. Showing a sense of humor as dry as the drink, Connolly simply subbed out the olive for an onion and named it after the famous patron.

While this is the most common account of the cocktail’s origin, other versions do exist. One features the onion as a decoy. In this story, a different Gibson, an American diplomat named Hugh Gibson, didn’t want to get drunk while colleagues and foreign dignitaries boozed. As a result, he got bartenders to pour him water in a martini glass on the sly and substitute the olive with the onion so that he could tell which one was his nonalcoholic drink. The iconic
Joy of Cooking
said Gibson pulled the stunt because he “found himself obliged to attend a stupefying number of cocktail parties.” Most martini-ologists believe this is a tall tale.

Then there’s a San Francisco fellow named Walter D. K. Gibson, who has received tribute for the drink’s invention by a number of Bay Area writers. There is evidence to support that this Gibson did invent an eponymous cocktail, but it’s worth noting that even if this West Coast Gibson came first (Walter apparently came up with his drink in the 1890s), it didn’t include the all-important onion.

All this points back to Charles Dana Gibson, whose fame likely led to the spread of Connolly’s onion-inspired work. One would think that only the clout of a man like the illustrator Gibson could have turned such a small substitution into a world-renowned drink.

Irish Coffee: Dangerous flight

Joe Sheridan kept it simple when he applied for a job in 1943 at the Foynes Flying Boat Base near Shannon, Ireland. “Dear Sir,” the application letter went, “I’m the man for the job. Yours sincerely, Joe Sheridan.” He didn’t know just how right he was. Within no time, Sheridan, who amazingly did get the position, would capitalize on a blustery evening to create one of St. Patrick’s Day’s most popular libations—the Irish coffee.

Sheridan’s new job was working at the cafe on base. But this was no ordinary bar and restaurant. Although Ireland was officially neutral during World War II, the country clandestinely ferried high-level Allied VIPs and military personnel on long-haul flights from Europe to a number of locations, including the United States and Canada. Between German fighters and inclement weather, this was not an easy run. Winston Churchill once flew out of Foynes during the war and nearly had to make an emergency sea landing because of a particularly grueling storm.

It was a night similar to the one Churchill faced that led Sheridan to his delicious and bracing combination of Power’s Irish Whiskey, coffee, sugar, and a dollop of cream on top. Late one winter night in 1943, a plane set out from Foynes to Botwood, Newfoundland, but ran into bad weather. By one account the flight was five hours into its journey when it was forced to turn around and return to the air base. The pilot alerted the Foynes control tower and staff was asked to come back to cater to the passengers who would undoubtedly be weary from ten hours of flying.

Sheridan knew he’d have to come up with something special on the fly for the returning travelers. Although whiskey in tea was a common Irish combination, the chef figured these passengers—primarily North Americans—would rather have a concoction featuring coffee (more popular in the New World) with the alcohol. When the waylaid fliers got a taste of the new drink, one reportedly asked Sheridan if the soothing cup of joe was Brazilian coffee. Sheridan responded that it was Irish coffee and the name stuck.

Recognizing he’d hit upon something special, Sheridan spent the next few weeks working on his new drink. Showing a marketer’s touch, he came up with the idea of serving his Irish coffee in a fancy stemmed glass. When the Foynes base closed in 1945, Sheridan moved along with other members of the catering staff to a new airport across the river, which today is known as Shannon International Airport. He continued serving his Irish coffee to the civilians who now used this airport as a trans-Atlantic hub. By 1947 Sheridan’s coffee was chosen as the airport’s “official welcoming beverage,” and a few years later, one particularly proactive passenger would become besotted with the drink. His name was Stanton Delaplane, a fancy-dressing Pulitzer Prize–winning travel writer from San Francisco.

Upon returning home, Delaplane went to his favorite watering hole, The Buena Vista. Sidling up to the bar, he told the establishment’s owner Jack Koeppler about Irish coffee. Koeppler loved the concept and on November 10, 1952, the pair spent a long evening trying to re-create the drink. Alas, an exact imitation eluded them for two reasons: They couldn’t get the coffee/whiskey taste just right and the cream kept sinking. Koeppler developed an obsession, making a pilgrimage to Shannon Airport to get the correct recipe directly from Sheridan. According to The Buena Vista’s website, Koeppler would return with the perfect whiskey for the job but continued to struggle with the cream. Finally, Koeppler went to George Christopher, a dairy owner who would go on to be San Francisco’s thirty-fourth mayor. Christopher helped devise a cream—aged for forty-eight hours and frothed to exacting consistency—that could float atop the drink. According to the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, Sheridan would later immigrate to the United States and continue serving his Irish coffee until his death in 1962. That he never stopped dispensing his signature drink shouldn’t be surprising. Clearly, he was the best man for that job.

Kool-Aid: Post office complications

A borderline obsession with Jell-O and limitations with the US Postal Service led Edwin E. Perkins to create one of the United States’ most iconic drink mixes—Kool-Aid. Perkins’s story is also one that truly reflects the time and spirit of America in the early twentieth century.

Perkins was born in 1889 in Lewis, Iowa, to a family that had moved west to seek a better way of life. One of ten children, Perkins and his family ultimately ended up in Fumas County, Nebraska, where they cultivated a farm. Although those were rough times in Nebraska, the Perkins family survived and even flourished thanks in large part to a strong work ethic. In fact, they prospered enough that by the time Edwin Perkins was eleven years old, his father was running a successful general store in the tiny hamlet of Hendley, Nebraska. The young Perkins would work as a clerk at the shop and while helping out, he was introduced to an innovative dessert that was sweeping the nation—Jell-O. Perkins was smitten with its brightly colored packaging and easy-to-produce process.

The wobbly gelatin inspired the young man to channel his inner entrepreneur. Within a year or two of his wiggly, jiggly discovery, he was experimenting with a chemistry set. The goal: Concoct his own product that would win the love of the masses. He also began a number of other cottage industries, including publishing a weekly newspaper, the
Hendley Delphic
, and working as the village postmaster.

The postmaster gig was a good one for Perkins because along with everything else, he’d established a mail-order business. As a teenager, he was hawking everything from perfumes to something called Nix-O-Tine Tobacco Remedy, which was an antismoking kit. Still, he never lost sight of trying to reach the heights of Jell-O glory.

In the early 1920s, Perkins thought he’d found it. Although he was now manufacturing more than 125 different “household products,” ranging from face creams and lotions to salves and soaps, his most popular product was something called Fruit-Smack. Like Jell-O, there were six flavors, but it wasn’t something you needed to let set. Instead, it was a liquid concentrate that could be poured into water to create a pitcher of a sweet drink for mere pennies.

Alas, his expected gold mine was running into a consistent problem. Units of Fruit-Smack were shipped in small four-ounce corked glass bottles and packages kept getting returned because during the bustle of shipping, the vials were cracking and leaking. Throw in the cost of the heavy containers cutting into profits, and Perkins had no choice but to come up with an alternative.

Again, Jell-O was the perfect model. A dry mix, Jell-O kept easily and, even more important, could be safely shipped in paper packaging. Perkins became determined to devise a dehydrated concentrate form of his Fruit-Smack that could sidestep his shipping problems. It took a while, but by 1927 he cracked it, offering, naturally, six flavors: raspberry, cherry, grape, lemon, orange, and root-beer. Ironically, despite the inspiration for the Kool-Aid mix (avoiding packaging issues), Perkins had problems devising the perfect materials to ship his new powder mix. In the end a brightly colored envelope—a la Jell-O—with a soft waxed paper lining worked perfectly. Before long he had a product that even Jell-O makers would envy. By 1950, he was shipping a whopping 323 million packets annually.

Ovaltine: Foul-tasting health drink

If Ovaltine’s long-departed inventor Dr. Georg Wander were around today, he would surely be confused by the fact that when people consider his drink they likely picture a comfortable little child warming up with a late-night combination of his mix and milk before dozing off to sleep.

Wander had far different, more altruistic intentions for his invention. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Swiss chemist was very concerned about people’s diets. At the time so many individuals suffered from nutritional deficiencies. In particular he worried about children, the infirm, the weak, and even breastfeeding women. Wander pledged himself to coming up with a product that could serve as a “nourishing food supplement.”

As the basis for his new blend, he chose barley malt. Though best known for its role in brewing beer, it had been lauded for its medicinal values for some 2,000 years. Wander developed an inexpensive way to produce malt extract and then fortified it with nutritious things like vitamin D and phosphorous. Wander must have figured he had come up with a valuable way to fight malnutrition.

But his original syrupy mix had a major glitch. Quite simply, even the malnourished want something that tastes good, and the healthy (but bitter) malt invention wasn’t meeting that need. After Wander’s death in 1897, his son Albert took over the family business. The younger Wander recognized what his father had missed. Along with figuring out a way to make a dry powder, he added such ingredients as sugar, eggs, and cocoa to round out the drink’s flavor. In 1904 Albert unveiled Ovomaltine (named for the combination of the Latin word for egg—
ovo—
and malt).

Albert had a different view of the drink’s value than his father. Wrote one journalist, “[H]e marketed it as an energy drink—the Red Bull of its day, as it were.” Within a few years of its debut, Albert truncated the name of the mix to Ovaltine and began shipping it abroad. When clever marketers in Britain got ahold of it, they started selling the product directly to the youth set as a healthy hot cocoa alternative. Relying heavily on radio advertising, Ovaltine execs sponsored a show called The League of Ovaltineys. It featured a secret society of kids who would give away badges and other goodies to listeners. The Ovaltineys lured audiences as large as five million children, who were expected to follow the group’s code. The rules included the wonderfully self-serving declaration: “Every day [I must] . . . drink my delicious Ovaltine, to make me fit and happy, with a mind that’s bright and keen.” The approach was so profitable that when Ovaltine reached the United States similar tactics were employed with the company underwriting such popular radio shows as
Little Orphan Annie
and
Captain Midnight.

While it wasn’t Wander’s goal or intention to create a good old-fashioned comfort drink, he should rest easy knowing that even today it remains a wholesome option. While the brand has lost its zip in the marketplace, Ovaltine still offers a healthy combination of vitamins A, C, D, B1, B2, and B6 along with niacin and phosphorous.

Pink Lemonade: Accidental carnival creation

The circus is all about hyperbole. Come see the tallest she-man in the world! Watch a blindfolded diver plummet one thousand feet into a goldfish bowl! There is always a fantastic saga to be told. The origins of pink lemonade, which everyone seems to agree was created by circus folk, is no exception. The only question is which mythic yarn you want to believe.

Lion tamer extraordinaire George Conklin offered the most detailed explanation of the drink’s beginnings in his 1921 memoir
The Ways of the Circus: Being the Memories and Adventures of George Conklin Tamer of Lions
. He claimed his brother, Pete Conklin, made the first brew in 1857. At the time Pete was working with the Jerry Mabie show, which was like working on the biggest touring rock concert today. Mabie’s circus held a record, according to George, for going from town-to-town nonstop for
seven years
.