Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (10 page)

Who invented the loganberry, the youngberry, and the boysenberry? And which of these berries later inspired a famous amusement park?

Logan, Young, and Boysen.

• In 1883 James Harvey Logan of Santa Cruz, California, attempted to cross-breed two blackberry varieties, but they were planted too close to a vintage raspberry, which added its pollen to the mix. Of the 50 seeds Logan planted from this accidental union, one produced a plant with berries tasty enough that he reproduced the results, thus creating the loganberry.

• Byrnes M. Young, a Louisiana businessman who dabbled in horticulture on the side, crossed a blackberry with a dewberry (a cousin of the blackberry) in 1905 and got the youngberry.

• In 1923 horticulturist Rudolf Boysen crossed several varieties of blackberries, raspberries, and loganberries near Napa, California. His berries didn’t sell well, so he gave up and moved south to Orange County.

Another California grower—Walter Knott—had heard about Boysen’s unusual berries, so he went to the old fields and, among the weeds, found a few plants that were barely clinging to life. Knott was able to rescue the berries, which he named after Boysen. He later sold boysenberries from a roadside stand in Buena Park. In order to entice travelers to stop, Knott built cheesy tourist attractions, including a steaming volcano and a full-scale ghost town. Before long, Knott’s Berry Farm became more of an amusement park than a berry farm, and so it is today, thanks in no small part to Rudolf Boysen and his boysenberry.

At what time of day are you most likely to witness the Maillard reaction?

What’s the difference between baking and roasting?

During breakfast. Have you ever wondered why a piece of bread tastes different after you toast it? This is because of the
Maillard reaction
, first noted in 1912 by a French chemist and physician named Louis-Camille Maillard. Simply put, it involves a chemical reaction between sugars and amino acids that occurs when certain foods are browned by heating. The process creates a complex mixture of toasty flavors consisting of hundreds of compounds that change into other flavor compounds as they break down in your mouth. Every toasted food item has its own distinctive set of compounds, some of which are responsible for the difference between, for example, the taste of a toasted bagel and a toasted marshmallow. Other foods that get tastier thanks to the Maillard reaction: malted barley (used in beer and whiskey), roasted coffee, and roasted meat.

According to some chefs, roasting starts at a higher temperature, to brown the surface of the food. But other chefs disagree, and the terms “bake” and “roast” are often used interchangeably. Though roasting once meant “cooking on a spit over an open flame,” both terms technically mean “to dry cook with convection heat.” And while some ovens feature baking and roasting settings, for all intents and purposes, they’re the same thing (although most people wouldn’t “roast” a cake).

Customer:
“Waiter, what is this? My cheese is writhing with maggots!”

Waiter:
“Please lower your voice; the maggots are supposed to be there.”

What kind of cheese are they talking about?

How long do anthropologists think humans have been cooking their food? And what may have been the first cooked meal?

Casu marzu
, or “rotten cheese,” which comes from the island of Sardinia off the west coast of Italy. Processing this sheep’s milk cheese, also known as
formaggio marcio
, is sped up by the larvae of
Piophila casei
—the cheese fly. Cheese-makers bore holes into the cheese and store it outside; female flies fly inside the holes and lay their eggs (up to 500 of them). Once hatched, the maggots begin to eat their way out, fermenting the cheese into a soupy goo. When it arrives on your table, the writhing maggots tell you that it’s fresh and ready to eat. (Dead maggots mean spoiled cheese, so don’t eat that.) You can either remove the tiny grubs or just eat them along with the rest of the cheese. But be forewarned: When disturbed, the maggots begin jumping about.

Casu marzu has been outlawed due to sanitation concerns, but can still be found if you know where to look. Cheese lovers swear it’s well worth the search.

Cooking food may go back as far as 1.9 million years. Based on tools and other evidence found at archaeological sites on the African plains, the first known barbecue consisted of root vegetables, beans, seeds, and strips of carrion meat. According to the lead researcher, British anthropologist Richard Wrangham, “Cooking had a widespread effect on all aspects of life—including nutrition, ecology, energy production, and social relationships. In effect, humanity began with cooking.”

On January 16, 1919, the 18th amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified, beginning Prohibition. Coincidentally, what alcoholic beverage ingredient killed 21 people in New England the day before?

Molasses, the sugar byproduct used to make rum. And while a little molasses is good, 2.3 million gallons of it rushing toward you isn’t.

On that fateful afternoon in 1919, the sticky goo was stored in a massive steel tank on Commercial Street at the Purity Distilling Company in the North End district of Boston. Six stories high and perched on a hill, the tank was nearly full, having received a shipment from Puerto Rico a few days earlier. It was an unseasonably warm January day, about 40°F, and shortly after noon, factory workers heard what sounded like machine guns firing—a noise that turned out to be the tank’s metal rivets popping loose. Before anyone had time to react, a massive steel plate careened off the side of the tank and leveled a nearby building. Then the molasses burst out, sending a 15-foot-high wave speeding down the hill at 35 miles per hour. The brown goo covered factory walls, houses, wagons, automobiles, and freight cars, and even destroyed a railroad bridge. Dozens of horses, dogs, and people got trapped in the flood of molasses. Many didn’t make it out alive.

The mess took months to clean up, and although Purity’s lawyers tried to blame the disaster on saboteurs, in the end the company was held liable for building a faulty tank and forced to pay out millions in damages. This disaster occurred nearly a century ago, but some Bostonians claim that on a hot day you can still smell molasses rising up from the ground.

What do all these things have in common: glue, asbestos insulation, plastics, aspirin, synthetic rubber, industrial alcohol, crayons, chewing gum, baby powder, carpets, latex paint, firecrackers, paper plates, toothpaste, wallboard, shaving cream, and whiskey?