How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (2 page)

Introduction

Luck touches every part of our lives. As the Roman poet Ovid once said, “Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast. In the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”

In the culinary world, hearing luck and food in the same sentence isn’t always a good thing. It can conjure up thoughts like, “You’re lucky you didn’t get sick from that week-old pizza!” But when it comes to the
creation
of great dishes, satisfying drinks, and useful kitchen utensils, it’s a concept that can captivate us.

Consider, if you will, the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the chocolate-peanut-butter marriage was celebrated with a highly successful ad campaign featuring two people colliding and their beloved foods intermingling. Their campy verbal exchange—“You got peanut butter on my chocolate!” “Your chocolate is in my peanut butter!”—would end with unintended gastronomic bliss. Decades on, these spots still resonate (for proof, just check out a parody of the ads on YouTube from the animated comedy series
Family Guy
). Why? Because we love happy culinary accidents, and, as it happens, there’s no shortage of them. Nachos and Popsicles. French dip sandwiches and potato chips. Microwaves and paper towels.

Luck, in fact, is the resonating theme of this book. It drives so many of those culinary instances of unforeseen good fortune that have kept our bellies full and our kitchens running smoothly over the centuries.

Behind these lucky discoveries are usually acts of
serendipity,
a concept first coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. He’d read a book about Serendip (modern-day Sri Lanka) called
The Three Princes of Serendip
and was fascinated by the title characters, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Using that quote as a definition, he started describing some of his work as
serendipity
.

What makes serendipity so fascinating is the combination of the lucky find and the smarts (or to use Walpole’s fancier term
sagacity
) to capitalize on the breakthrough. As Albert Einstein once said about discovery: “The really valuable factor is intuition. . . . There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.” The
intuition
to turn what looks like a blunder into something special comes up often throughout this book. Take the ever-popular cereal Wheaties for instance. A fella was cooking up some gruel when a bit dripped onto an open stove, crackling over the open fire. He could have simply cleaned the mess and gone about his day. But he intuitively recognized its potential and brought it to a local company, which, employing a little sagacity of its own, figured out how to transform the flakes into a commercially viable way to eat breakfast.

While the book mines many stories of serendipity,
chance
does come in other forms—and these get play here as well. For instance, there are times when you actually know exactly what you want to create but struggle with how to get there. When happenstance allows you to find that missing link, these moments have been dubbed by scientist and author Royston M. Roberts as
pseudoserendipity
. For those who have ever popped a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets for soothing relief after an exceptionally rich meal or a little too much alcohol, you can chalk it up to this particular form of fantastic luck. An inventor plugged away looking for just the right combination to make the famed tablet but came up empty until a trip to the local newspaper surprisingly presented the answers to his problem.

Just for good measure, I’ve also covered a third type of fluky creation. It’s not so much serendipity as it is about unpredictable or mistaken motivations (call them the cousins of serendipity). These occur before the first physical steps of creation, coming during the conceptualization phase. They include either an unplanned fortuitous encounter that spurs the essential kernel of the idea or a completely misguided reason to start rolling up the sleeves. For example, the Filet-O-Fish falls in the category of unanticipated inspirations. A McDonald’s franchisee was all about making burgers, but when he found out the surprising reason for why he was doing terrible business on Fridays (thanks to churchgoers who didn’t eat meat on this day), he was forced to come up with an alternative to the regular menu. As for the misguided, there was Sylvester Graham, who created his eponymous crackers because he hoped eating them would help diminish sex drives.

So what exactly draws us to these culinary origin stories in which luck features so prominently? First off, the stories are entertaining and surprising. Often the initial steps for products like Tabasco Sauce or cheese puffs are far from what you’d anticipate. Also, in some ways, discovering just how much fate plays in the recipe of so many successful products is inspirational. It gives hope to toiling chefs or tinkerers that if they keep trying long enough lady luck may ultimately lend a difference-making hand.

Interestingly, these two reasons have led to another common phenomenon when it comes to accidental discoveries and unexpected inspirations in the kitchen: myth making. It turns out that a number of highly heralded anecdotes of this type of invention are untrue. In a way, this seems counterintuitive because what inventor would want to weave a tall tale that gives greater applause to a mistake than to its creator? (Don’t we all want full credit?) Part of the explanation is that quite often it’s not the original inventor who spins the fanciful yarn but future beneficiaries who see the story as a memorable way to bring attention to the product. If the story inspires or is captivating enough to increase interest why not stretch the truth?

Throughout this book I’ve tried to do a little food-myth-busting by flagging those stories, assessing their accuracy, and, when appropriate, serving up alternate creation explanations. Still, even if some of these accounts are more fanciful than honest histories, they remain worthy to recount. Why? Because more often than not they’ve become a central part of a certain food or drink’s narrative. For example, maple-syrup makers often cite a historical tale that’s probably apocryphal; ditto for ice-cream cone producers. While those legends may not tell you the full story of the products’ beginnings, they do give you some insight into how the products have been marketed over the years and how they became such an indelible part of our everyday lives.

Starters
and
Small Plates

Bisquick: Tardy train traveler

Timing—or the lack thereof—is everything. The phrase may be cliché, but for Carl Smith it was the key to discovering one of the baking world’s most versatile products. One November night in 1930, Smith, a General Mills executive, hopped onto a Southern Pacific Railroad train in Portland, Oregon. He was returning home to San Francisco and was pretty hungry. Alas, it was late and formal meals had long since been served in the dining car. He resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to take whatever scraps were left at such an hour.

Yet, he was astonished to find himself quickly being served fresh, delicious hot biscuits. If he’d been feasting during a designated eating time, he wouldn’t have given it much thought as the train’s kitchen would have been expected to have biscuits good to go. But enjoying such a treat at an odd hour piqued his curiosity. He headed back into the galley and asked how the chef had such fantastic flakey delights at the ready. The cook took Smith to an ice box and showed him the secret: The dough (a combination of lard, flour, baking powder, and salt) had been mixed beforehand and kept cold in order to be baked at a moment’s notice.

Smith immediately realized having biscuits that could be prepared so quickly was a winning idea. Upon returning home, he went to General Mills’ team of chemists and challenged them to come up with a mixture that could yield biscuits comparable to those he’d had on his trip back to San Francisco. Actually, Smith took it one step further: He wanted them to taste homemade. It wouldn’t be an easy task. Typical shortenings such as lard or butter would be problematic in a mass-produced mix because they wouldn’t keep well on grocery shelves. Following much consideration, they opted for sesame oil, which didn’t go rancid after sitting for a long time. Even after settling on the right oil, the scientists labored hard trying to put together the right combination of ingredients to ensure that the biscuits would come out perfectly.

Testing was done in spy-level secrecy. Though Smith had only happened upon the idea after a late entry into a dining car, the General Mills folks were convinced that others would quickly identify the commercial value of such a mix. They were right. Bisquick (a moniker that combined “biscuit” and “quick”) rolled out in 1931 and within a short time there were ninety-five other brands for sale. Only six survived the first year, with Bisquick dominating the market. Part of the reason for Bisquick’s popularity was kitchen mavens everywhere understood that the mix could be used for more than just making biscuits. Everything from coffee cakes and pancakes to cheeseburger pies (my personal favorite example of pure decadence) were being created with the invention.

General Mills zealously marketed the product, successfully employing giveaways (free tins were included early on), celebrity endorsers (Shirley Temple hawked Bisquick for a while), special clubs (the popular Bisquick Recipe Club provided cookbooks and encouraged recipe sharing), and even a dash of sexual politics (a 1940s motto was “so simple, even a husband can do it”). It also inspired other companies to innovate all sorts of baking mixes. Without Bisquick, it might have been years before somebody came up with those yummy easy-to-make chocolate cakes. But the biggest selling point for Bisquick was its original promise that it would only take ninety seconds to make biscuits from the box to the oven—proving once again that timing is everything.

Brown ’n Serve Rolls: Fire alarm discovery

For housewives in post–World War II suburbia, Brown ’n Serve Rolls were a go-to staple. Partially cooked and kept in the refrigerator, these babies, which have no relation to popular Brown ’N Serve sausages, could be popped in the oven and in just seven minutes put on the table hot and fluffy. In an era before the invention of microwave ovens, this was one of the first food items that could be cooked with almost no preparation at home and still taste restaurant quality.

Joe Gregor, who owned a small bakery in Avon Park, Florida, knew he needed a game-changing product. His business wasn’t doing so well, and the few patrons who came in explained they wanted bread products for home that could be oven-fresh. Gregor got the picture and spent hours with his buddy Jules Jacobsen trying to come up with a partially cooked roll that could be reheated at home.

Gregor’s efforts yielded nothing but failure until a fire literally sparked discovery. In truth, it wasn’t an inferno but a fire alarm that did the trick. You see, the civic-minded Gregor was more than just a baker—he was also a volunteer fireman. One afternoon in the late 1940s, he heard the town’s fire bell sound. He was right in the middle of baking some rolls, but he knew he had to run. So Gregor prematurely pulled the dough out of the oven (to avoid a fire of his own) and headed off to take care of the emergency. When he got to the scene, it turned out that there wasn’t a big blaze—just a small brush fire—and Gregor was sent home.

Much to his surprise, when he got back to the bakery he discovered his unfinished rolls hadn’t fallen. Typically when bread is pulled out of the oven early it won’t keep its shape, but these did. Why, he wondered? It turned out to be pure luck. The oven had been leaking heat. Instead of cooking at 450°F the way Gregor intended, it only got up to 275°F. The lower temperature had kept the rolls standing tall. Even better news: When the rolls were put back in the oven for just a few minutes, they came out tasting great.

The new creation—originally called Pop-n-Oven rolls—were a hit locally, catching the attention of General Mills. In 1949 the big food company paid $60,000 for the recipe, and by September 1950
Popular Science
magazine was touting Gregor’s work as “nationally famous.” At first General Mills tried to keep Gregor’s process under wraps. They even gave the rolls a sci-fi–esque code name: Project 49. But over time, in an effort to spur flour sales, the company shifted gears providing commercial bakers with thermometers and instructions on how to make the half-cooked items. While General Mills stopped producing Brown ’n Serve rolls by the 1970s, partially cooked rolls can still be found in supermarkets (Wal-Mart sells multiple brands in twelve-roll packs) thanks to a community-conscious baker and his busted oven.