How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (7 page)

Sandwiches: Focused gambler

Time sure has a way of rehabilitating a reputation. Just ask the descendants of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. Born in 1718, the Earl of Sandwich took to politics at a young age and served in many high-profile roles in British government.

Alas, Sandwich’s reputation during his lifetime—and for a very long time afterwards—was less than stellar. He was criticized for negotiating unfavorable terms when brokering the Treaty Aix-la-Chapelle, ending the War of Austrian Succession in 1748. Later the Earl was derided by the public for helping prosecute politician and journalist John Wilkes for writing a ribald poem. And worst of all (from the British perspective), many have credited his performance as the first lord of admiralty during the American Revolution as a key reason the colonies won.

He was so bad, one British historian claimed, that during the Revolutionary War some officers refused commands rather than serve under Sandwich, who was said to have focused intently on patronage rather than ability when filling most positions.

“There may have been . . . worse administrators of the Navy; [but] there never was one who succeeded in attracting to himself such universal opprobrium,” the historian explained in 1919. “He sold his country for parliamentary votes, and the weakness of our Navy in the American War was the result.”

Now this line of history may be a bit overblown. After all, he did sponsor Captain James Cook’s voyages and, if history had shifted a bit in his favor, we’d still be calling Hawaii by its original name—the Sandwich Islands—after the earl.

But what really saved Montagu from history’s hall of shame was his penchant for gambling. The earl was well-known in his day as a libertine. Among his many vices, he had a longtime mistress with whom he had four children, and the man loved to drink. As one contemporary, Lord Chesterfield, put it, “He was a most profligate and abandoned character.”

In 1762 the forty-four-year-old earl was also indulging in card playing. The story goes that during heated games, the earl refused to put down his cards and leave the table when it was time to eat. To solve the problem he insisted that typical fare such as roast beef and cheese be placed in between two pieces of bread so he could hold his cards with one hand and chow down with the other. A slight variation on this tale has Sandwich concerned that if he used his hands to pick up food, it would leave smudges and make it easier for his opponents to identify cards. (For those supporters of the earl, there is a benign but far less popular offering that had him toiling late into the night in front of papers, requiring a free hand to continue his work.)

The earl’s creation was not the first filled-bread invention. Romans and early Jews, among others, were known for placing food in between bread products. But the Earl of Sandwich’s notoriety at a time when the British Empire was vast meant that stories of his habit could travel worldwide and become the moniker for the dish.

For his descendants, this legacy has proved a lot easier to swallow than all the criticism. In 2001 the eleventh Earl of Sandwich and his son Orlando Montagu decided to cash in on the family name, opening up a chain of restaurants called the Earl of Sandwich.

Keeping with the lore of the fourth earl, all the establishment’s sandwiches are made small enough to hold in one hand—even if patrons aren’t playing card games or doing work. Fittingly, the restaurant chain has “The Original 1762,” featuring hot roast beef, cheddar cheese, and horseradish sauce. There is also an “All American” sandwich on the menu, which considering the namesake’s bad history with the former colonies, may want to be reconsidered.

Tempura: Missionaries’ menu

The Japanese have brought a lot of fantastic things to this world: those slightly eerie, almost-human robots; sushi. . . . But amazingly, tempura, one of the country’s best-known dishes, is not one of them. Tempura was initially introduced by Portuguese visitors, who saw it as nothing more than a way to help maintain their religious zeal while in a foreign land.

During the age of exploration, the Portuguese were among the most intrepid. On September 23, 1543, two Portuguese merchants first made contact with the Japanese, selling two guns to a feudal lord on the island of Tanegashima. Once trading opened up (the Japanese bartered for lots of Western products besides Portuguese guns), Catholic missionaries followed. They included St. Francis Xavier, who spent most of his life traveling abroad preaching.

These devout missionaries and merchants carefully followed all the Catholic holidays while spending time in Japan. A big one in the sixteenth century was Ember Days. During this event, which took place four times a year, Catholics were required to abstain from meat.

While the Portuguese were observant, it didn’t mean they’d completely lost their appetite. Longing for some flavor from home, the foreigners cooked up some
yoshoku
(Western food). They breaded shrimp and fish and fried them with oil (likely sesame oil). Numerous scholars say that the word
tempura
came from part of the Latin for Ember Days—
quattour tempora
—with tempora, meaning “times,” being the basis for naming this new style of cooking. Taking Western words and adding them to the Japanese lexicon was not uncommon during this era. Terms like
tabako
(tobacco),
pan
(bread), and
juban
(undershirt) all came from words brought to Japanese shores by foreigners.

Still, the batter-fried dish wasn’t initially a hit amongst the Japanese. The Western version didn’t sit well with locals because it was likely a lot heavier than the fluffy batter used today. Some suggest that the Portuguese recipe for tempura was more about oiling up food than adding a crispy exterior.

By the 1770s the Japanese had made changes to the process. The newer version had fish and vegetables wrapped in udon noodles. The lighter fare was skewered on bamboo sticks and became a popular choice at street stalls, where customers could eat it without the need of chopsticks.

Since then tempura has developed into one of the country’s most recognizable dishes. The batter has become lighter over the years with egg, water, and flour as popular ingredients for breading everything from shellfish, octopus, and fish to all sorts of veggies. Nevertheless, the divine role played by Christian missionaries is not forgotten.

“I had long heard that the origin of tempura could be traced to Portuguese cooking, and imagined that those original squid fritters had simply been ‘Japanized,’ ” wrote Takashi Morieda, an expert on Japanese cuisine. “But upon closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that what the Japanese actually acquired was an understanding of the deep-frying process—and from that point, tempura evolved to suit the country’s own unique palate, thus integrating it into the heart of Japanese cuisine.”

TV Dinners: Overstocked turkeys

When Gerry Thomas told listeners about how he created the TV dinner—those easily reheated, multipocket tin-tray meals—he gave the story a flair that only someone who knew how to sell could offer. Not surprisingly, Thomas was a salesman. In the early 1950s he made $200 a month for C. A. Swanson and Sons, which sold foodstuff in bulk to restaurants and other companies.

As Thomas relayed the tale, a business snafu provided him with the opportunity to change American eating habits. In the fall of 1951, abnormally temperate weather led to fewer turkeys being sold at Thanksgiving. “It was very warm on the East Coast, so there was less demand for turkeys,” Thomas would recount more than fifty years later. This left Swanson with a staggering 520,000 pounds of surplus turkey meat. Without even a properly acclimatized warehouse to put the birds, the meat was stuck on refrigerated railway cars crisscrossing the United States.

Swanson needed a plan and Thomas stepped in. On a sales call in Pittsburgh, he came across a single-compartment metal tray that was being used by Pan Am Airlines for in-flight meals on overseas journeys. Thomas asked if he could have one of the trays and on the flight back to Swanson’s Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters he took inspiration from his find and sketched a modified three-compartment tray. The final part of his plan came while walking by an appliance store. He saw a group huddled around the window, rubbernecking to check out a small 10-inch screen.

“I figured if you could borrow from that, maybe you could get some attention,” Thomas said in a 1999 interview.

These trays—and his marketing plan—would be the answer to Swanson’s turkey problem, he told his bosses. Along with turkey covered with gravy and a corn bread dressing, the original TV dinners included sweet potatoes and buttered peas. In 1953 they made their debut at ninety-eight cents a dinner and became an instant hit with approximately ten million units sold in the first year. According to Thomas, his reward was a salary increase to $300 a month and a $1,000 bonus.

This story has been endorsed in one form or another by many people. The Frozen Food Hall of Fame inducted Thomas into its ranks for his work on the TV dinner. In 1999 he had his hands (and a tray) immortalized in cement outside Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre. Even
Maxim
magazine ranked Thomas twenty-eighth on its list of the “50 Greatest Guys of the Century”—three spots ahead of James Bond, no less. In his later years, Thomas, who died in 2005, served as an ambassador for the dinner, traveling around with silver cufflinks in the shape of TV dinner trays (the Swanson family no longer owned the company by that point).

But with slick salesmen you have to be a little careful about what you’re purchasing. Journalist Roy Rivenburg raised a number of questions about Thomas’s story in a 2003
Los Angeles Times
article. Rivenburg pointed out that rather than being unseasonably warm, November 1951 was unusually cold, throwing some doubt into the underpinning of the railway car story. Thomas would recant a bit on that fact, saying that the train story was “a metaphor” for an “annual problem” Swanson had when it came to unloading excess turkey meat. Rivenburg also offered alternative candidates as the TV dinner’s true parents, including company heads Clarke and Gilbert Swanson and a handful of other employees at the company. Finally, he pointed out that other companies were selling similar types of frozen dinners before the TV dinner, suggesting that even if Thomas’s inspiration was legit, he wasn’t the first.

Still, nothing is definitive and Rivenburg did interview one figure knowledgeable about the origins of the trays who seemed to corroborate at least part of Thomas’s claims. One thing is certain: Thomas’s account was used for years as part of the TV dinner’s marketing strategy with the media. Beyond that, it’s buyer beware.

Desserts

Chocolate Chip Cookies: Missing ingredient

If you read the writings of Ruth Graves Wakefield, you’d think she was straight out of central casting for the domesticated housewife. She literally studied household arts at the Framingham State Normal School (class of 1924) and wrote cookbooks that encouraged new brides to “try a lot of these recipes, especially those which are your husband’s favorites.” She even laid out a list of thirty-six must-dos that every woman should perform in order to reach “your goal of being a proficient wife and hostess.” (Example: serving perfect coffee.)