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POTATO CHIPS One version of events is that George Crum, a Native-American/African-American chef at Moon’s Lake House Lodge, an upmarket resort hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, faced an awkward customer one day in 1853. One source names this customer as railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Whoever it was complained that Crum’s Moon’s fried potatoes, the house specialty, were too thick, too soggy, and too bland, and insisted they be replaced. Although Crum did his best to make a thinner batch, the customer complained they were still not to his liking. Not taking these criticisms too well, Crum decided to teach him a jolly good lesson: he sliced a potato wafer-thin, fried it until it was so brittle that a fork would shatter it, and loaded it with salt. But far from hating the fries, the customer took one bite after another, saying they were absolutely delicious, and ordered more. Word spread quickly, and Crum went on to market his ‘Saratoga Chips’ and set up his own restaurant.
COCA COLA While trying to find a cure for headaches and hangovers, chemist John Pemberton from Atlanta, Georgia, otherwise known as ‘Doc’, concocted a syrup cordial made from wine and coca extract, which he called ‘Pemberton’s French Wine Coca’. In 1885, at the height of the temperance movement in US, Atlanta banned the sale of alcohol, forcing Pemberton to produce a purely coca-based version of the syrup that needed to be diluted. The story goes that one day a careless barman at a soda fountain nearby accidentally spritzed it with ice-cold soda water from the fountain instead of tap water. Others believe that Pemberton ordered this to be done deliberately, and had organised runners to take small samples to Willis Venables’ soda fountain in downtown Atlanta so that taste tests could be undertaken. Either way, customers gave it the thumbs up, and the ever-popular beverage was born.
ICE CREAM CONE By the end of the 19th century, when ice cream became cheap enough for ordinary people to afford, paper, glass and metal were commonly used to hold the treat. Vendors would scoop the ice cream into a cup and buyers would pay a penny to lick it clean before giving it back. Sometimes customers walked off with the cups, or they would slip through their fingers and break. At the 1904 World Fair at St Louis, Missouri, there were more than 50 ice cream vendors and more than a dozen waffle stands. It was hot, and ice creams sold well; much less so the hot waffles. When ice cream vendor Arnold Fornachou ran out of paper cups, the man in the booth next to him, who sold waffles – a Syrian man named Ernest Hamwi – came to his rescue by rolling up one of his waffles into a funnel to put ice cream in. That waffle became the first edible ice cream cone.
MICROWAVE While testing microwaves in front of a radar set in 1946, Second World War engineer and radar specialist Percy Spencer, who had left school at the age of 12, felt the bar of chocolate in his pocket begin to melt. Thinking that the microwaves might be responsible, he and a group of colleagues began trying to heat other foods to see if a similar warming effect could be observed. When Spencer tried popcorn kernels, they ‘popped’ all over the room. Next he decided to heat an egg. Cutting a hole in the side of a kettle, he placed the egg inside and passed microwaves over the top. The egg cooked so quickly he was unable to stop it exploding in another worker’s face as he was looking inside the kettle. At last there was an alternative to conventional gas and electric ovens. Food could be cooked much faster than people ever dreamed possible. The world’s first microwave oven had arrived.
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Post time 2-3-2021 10:19 PM
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