Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (79 page)

Chocolate Chip Cookie: Post-1847, United States

Although history does not unambiguously record the origin of the chocolate chip cookie, we can be certain that there was no such confection prior to 1847, for before that time, chocolate existed only as a liquid or a powder, not as a solid.

The route to the chocolate chip cookie began in Mexico around 1000
B.C
. The Aztecs brewed a chocolate ceremonial drink,
xocoatl
, meaning “bitter water,” made from pulverized indigenous cocoa beans. In the Nahuatl dialects of Mexico,
xocoatl
became
chocolatl
. Spaniards introduced the New World drink to Europe, where chocolate remained a beverage
until 1828. That year, a Netherlands confectioner, C. J. Van Houten, attempting to produce a finer chocolate powder that would more readily mix with milk or water, discovered the cocoa bean’s creamy butter. In 1847, the British confection firm of Fry and Sons produced the world’s first solid eating chocolate. Chocolate chips became a reality; the cookie a possibility.

Legend has it that the first chocolate chip cookies were baked around 1930 at the Toll House Inn, on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts.

Built in 1708 as a tollgate for travelers halfway between Boston and New Bedford, the house was purchased in the late 1920s by a New England woman, Ruth Wakefield, and renovated as an inn. In her role of resident cook and baker, Mrs. Wakefield added chocolate pieces to her basic butter cookies, creating the Toll House Inn cookie, which would become a national product. For chocolate bits, Mrs. Wakefield laboriously diced the Nestle Company’s large Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar. The company, impressed with her recipe, requested permission to print it on the chocolate bar’s wrapper, in exchange for supplying Mrs. Wakefield with a lifetime supply of free chocolate.

For almost a decade, housewives and professional bakers had to hand-dice Nestle’s chocolate bars to make Toll House cookies. To ease the chore, the company scored the bar and even sold a special chopper. Finally, in 1939, with Toll House cookies a national craze, Americans were introduced to Morsels, the commercially packaged chocolate chip, an innovation that further popularized the cookie and became its generic name. From
bis coctum
to
craken
to chocolate chip, the cookie had come a long way.

Doughnut: 16th Century, Holland

For over two hundred fifty years, doughnuts, which originated with Dutch bakers, did not have holes in the center; the hole was an American modification that, once introduced, redefined the shape of the pastry.

The deep-fried batter doughnut originated in sixteenth-century Holland, where it was known as an
olykoek
, or “oil cake,” named for its high oil content. Made with sweetened dough and sometimes sugared, the oil cake was brought to America by Pilgrims who had learned to make the confection during their stay in Holland in the first two decades of the 1600s. Small, the size of a walnut, the round oil cake in New England acquired the name “dough nut,” while a related long twisted Dutch pastry of fried egg batter became known as the cruller, from the Dutch
krullen
, “curl.”

The hole in the doughnut’s center appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, the independent creation of the Pennsylvania Dutch and, farther east, a New England sailor. Hanson Gregory, a sea captain from Maine, is said to have poked holes in his mother’s doughnuts in 1847, for the practical reason (also stated by the Pennsylvania Dutch) that the increased surface area allowed for more uniform frying and eliminated the
pastry’s soggy center. Today Hanson Gregory’s contribution of the hole is remembered in his hometown of Rockport, Maine, by a bronze plaque, suggesting that in America, fame can be achieved even for inventing nothing.

Chewing Gum: 1860s, Staten Island, New York

The action of chewing gum, through exercising the muscles of the jaw, relieves facial tension, which in turn can impart a general feeling of bodily relaxation. Gum is part of the U.S. Armed Forces’ field and combat rations, and soldiers consume gum at a rate five times the national average. Thus, it seems fitting that the man responsible for the chewing gum phenomenon was a military general: Antonio López de Santa Anna, the despised Mexican commander responsible for the massacre at the Alamo.

Santa Anna had reason to chew gum.

In the 1830s, when Texas attempted to proclaim its independence from Mexico, a Mexican army of five thousand men, led by Santa Anna, attacked the town of San Antonio. The one hundred fifty native Texans forming the garrison retreated into Fort Alamo. The Mexican general and his men stormed the fort, killing all but two women and two children. A few weeks later, charging under the battle cry “Remember the Alamo!” American forces under General Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna and forced Mexico to accept Texas’s secession. Texas became a state in 1845, and Santa Anna, one of the few Mexican commanders not executed for his war crimes, entered the United States and settled on Staten Island, New York.

The exiled general brought with him a large chunk of chicle, the dried milky sap or latex of the Mexican jungle tree the sapodilla. Known to the Aztecs as
chictli
, the tasteless resin had been a favorite “chew” of Santa Anna. On Staten Island, the former general introduced chicle to a local photographer and inventor, Thomas Adams, who imported a large quantity of the gummy resin, then tried and failed to convert it chemically into an inexpensive synthetic rubber. To recoup a portion of his investment, Adams, recalling how avidly his own son Horatio, as well as Santa Anna, enjoyed chewing chicle, decided to market it as an alternative to the then-popular wads of paraffin wax sold as chew.

Thomas Adams’s first small tasteless chicle balls went on sale in a Hoboken, New Jersey, drugstore in February 1871 for a penny apiece. The unwrapped balls, packaged in a box labeled “Adams New York Gum—Snapping and Stretching,” were sold along the East Coast by one of Adams’s sons, a traveling salesman. Chicle proved to be a superior chew to wax, and soon it was marketed in long, thin strips, notched so a druggist could break off a penny length. It had the jaw-exercising consistency of taffy.

The first person to flavor chicle, in 1875, was a druggist from Louisville, Kentucky, John Colgan. He did not add the candy-like oils of cherry or peppermint, but the medicinal balsam of tolu, an aromatic resin from the bark of a South American legume tree,
Myroxylon toluiferum
, familiar to
children in the 1870s as a standard cough syrup. Colgan named his gum Taffy-Tolu, and its success spawned other flavored chicles.

Thomas Adams introduced a sassafras gum, then one containing essence of licorice and named Black Jack, which is the oldest flavored chewing gum on the market today. And in 1880, a manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio, introduced a gum that would become one of the industry’s most popular flavors: peppermint. In the same decade, Adams achieved another first: the chewing gum vending machine. The devices were installed on New York City elevated-train platforms to sell his tutti-frutti gum balls.

It was in the 1890s that modern processing, packaging, and advertising made chewing gum truly popular. Spearheading that technology was a soap salesman turned chewing gum manufacturer, William Wrigley, Jr.

Wrigley’s first two brands, Lotta Gum and Vassar, were soon forgotten. But in 1892, he introduced Wrigley’s Spearmint, followed the next year by Juicy Fruit, both of which became America’s top-selling turn-of-the-century chewing gums. Wrigley was a tireless gum advertiser. Following his personal motto— “Everybody likes something for nothing” —and his business philosophy— “Get them hooked” —in 1915 he collected every telephone directory in the country and mailed four free sticks of gum to each of the 1.5 million listed subscribers. Four years later, he repeated the kindness and the ploy, even though the number of American phone subscribers exceeded seven million.

Popular as gum chewing was with many people, it was not without its detractors. The puritanical-minded saw it as a vice; snuff habitues dismissed it as sissified; teachers claimed it disrupted a child’s classroom concentration; parents warned that swallowed gum caused intestinal blockage; and physicians believed excessive chewing dried up the salivary glands. As late as 1932, engineering genius Nikola Tesla, inventor of the alternating-current electrical system, solemnly voiced that concern: “By exhaustion of the salivary glands, gum puts many a foolish victim in the grave.”

What we buy today is not General Santa Anna’s original taffy-like chicle, but a gentler synthetic polymer, polyvinyl acetate, itself tasteless, odorless, and unappetizingly named, which Americans chew at the rate of ten million pounds a year.

Chiclets and Bubble Gum
. Two men who entered the burgeoning chewing gum business in the 1880s were brothers Frank and Henry Fleer, each pursuing a different goal that would result in an industry classic.

Frank Fleer sought to create a gum with high surface tension and “snap-back,” which could be blown into large bubbles. Snap-back, or a gum’s elasticity, is a crucial parameter; low snap-back, and a burst bubble explodes over the chin and nose without contracting; high snap-back, and the bulk of the gum retreats to the lips. His first bubble gum effort, with the tongue-twisting title Blibber-Blubber Bubble Gum, failed because Blibber-Blubber burst before achieving a large bubble. In addition, the gum was too “wet,”
making a burst bubble stick to the skin.

Brother Henry Fleer was tackling a different challenge: to develop a brittle white candy coating that could encapsulate pellets of chicle. Henry’s task was the easier, and in the 1910s his product emerged, as Chiclets. Not until 1928 did brother Frank succeed in producing a sturdy, “dry” gum that blew bubbles twice the size of his earlier product. Double Bubble was an immediate success among Americans of varied ages. But what delighted Frank Fleer even more was that during World War II, American GIs introduced the gum to Eskimo populations in Alaska, where it quickly displaced their centuries-old traditional “chew,” whale blubber.

Ice Cream: 2000
B.C
., China

Ice cream is rated as Americans’ favorite dessert and we consume it prodigiously. Annual production amounts to fifteen quarts a year for every man, woman, and child in the United States, and if water ice, sherbet, sorbet, spumoni, and gelato are added, the figure jumps to twenty-three quarts per person. But then ice cream was a dessert phenomenon from the time of its creation, four thousand years ago, in China, even if that first treat was more of a pasty milk ice than a smooth icy cream.

At that point in ancient history, the milking of farm animals had recently begun in China, and milk was a prized commodity. A favorite dish of the nobility consisted of a soft paste made from overcooked rice, spices, and milk, and packed in snow to solidify. This milk ice was considered a symbol of great wealth.

As the Chinese became more adept at preparing frozen dishes—they imported and preserved snow from mountain elevations—they also developed
fruit ices
. A juice, often including the fruit’s pulp, was either combined with snow or added to milk ice. By the thirteenth century, a variety of iced desserts were available on the streets of Peking, sold from pushcarts.

After China, ice milk and fruit ice appeared in fourteenth-century Italy, with credit for the desserts equivocally divided between Marco Polo and a Tuscan confectioner, Bernardo Buontalenti. Those European recipes were secrets, guarded by chefs to the wealthy, and with refrigeration a costly ordeal of storing winter ice in underground vaults for summer use, only the wealthy tasted iced desserts.

From Italy, frozen desserts traveled to France. When the Venetian Catherine de’Medici married the future King Henry II of France in 1533, she used fruit ices to demonstrate to the rest of Western Europe her country’s culinary sophistication. During a month-long wedding celebration, her confectioners served a different ice daily, with flavors including lemon, lime, orange, cherry, and wild strawberry. She also introduced into France a semifrozen dessert made from a thick, sweetened cream, more akin to modern ice cream than to Chinese milk ice.

Ice cream became fully freezable in large quantities in the 1560s as the result of a technical breakthrough. Blasius Villafranca, a Spanish physician living in Rome, discovered that the freezing point of a mixture could be attained rapidly if saltpeter was added to the surrounding bath of snow and ice. Florentine confectioners began to produce the world’s first solidly frozen, full-cream ices. Within a decade, a molded, multiflavored dessert of concentric hemispheres bowed in France as the
bombe glacée
.

An 1868 ice cream vendor, or “hokey pokey” man
.

Italian immigrants relocating throughout Europe sold ice cream and ices from ice-cooled pushcarts, and the desserts came within reach of the masses. By 1870, the Italian ice cream vendor was a familiar sight on London streets, called by British children the “hokey pokey” man, a corruption of the vendor’s incessant cry,
“Ecco un poco
” — “Here’s a little.” Even in America, an ice cream vendor was known by that expression until the 1920s—until, that is, confectioner Harry Burt from Youngstown, Ohio, marketed the
first chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar on a stick, naming it a “Good Humor Sucker.” Thus was born the Good Humor man.