How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (19 page)

Unfortunately, Pete would have a disagreement with Mabie over wages and quit the show. But as his brother would write, “Pete was a youngster and didn’t mind taking long chances.” That iffy prospect came in the form of doing concessions. He used his savings to purchase a couple of mules, a covered wagon, and some stock: peanuts, sugar, tartaric acid, and a lemon. According to George, Pete called the lemon “the best example of a friend I ever met.”

With his goods, he’d set up outside the big top and focus on selling old-fashioned yellow-tinged lemonade. The color change came one day when business was so great Pete ran out of water. “There were no wells or springs near,” George explained. “He rushed all around the show for water, but could find none.” Desperate, Pete sprinted into the dressing tent and came across Fannie Jamieson, one of the show’s bareback riders. She had just cleaned her pink tights in a vat of water, leaving the liquid looking a deep pink hue.

“Without giving any explanation or stopping to answer her questions, Pete grabbed the tub of pink water and ran,” George said. “It took only a minute to throw in some of the tartaric acid and the pieces of the . . . lemon and then he began to call out, ‘Come quickly, buy some fine strawberry lemonade.’ ”

The new-look lemonade did double the business of ordinary refreshment and, allegedly, ushered in a new style of the drink. So did Pete or future lemonade peddlers immediately change the formula to avoid icky additives for the pink coloring? Not really, claimed George, who said that subsequent water was procured “with no particular squeamishness regarding its source” and that “enough aniline dye [was added] to give it a rich pink” appearance.

Despite George Conklin’s detail, there is another simpler (slightly more hygienic) story explaining the beginnings of the colorful drink. It comes from a shady fellow named Henry E. Allott (alias Bunk Allen; personally, any guy with an alias makes me nervous). Allott was a Chicago saloonkeeper and gambler who had more than one run-in with the law. He was also a circus promoter and when he died in 1912, a number of newspapers, including the
New York Times
, credited Henry/Bunk with coming up with pink lemonade as a teenager. “One day while mixing a tub full of the orthodox yellow kind he dropped some red cinnamon candies in by mistake,” the
New York Times
wrote. “The resulting rose-tinted mixture sold so surprisingly well that he continued to dispense his chance discovery.”

According to research done by Lynne Olver, who runs the encyclopedic Internet website www.foodtimeline.org, this story, if true, would mean Allott invented the drink around 1872–1873—long after Conklin’s claimed invention. Moreover, one wonders how Allott got his newly colored drink tasting like lemonade instead of cinnamon. Then again, considering Pete Conklin’s story, I don’t think I’d even want to know.

Tea (and Iced Tea): Mystic brew

In many Asian cultures, tea is more than a soothing drink to curl up with on a frigid day. It has spiritual significance. Some early Chinese texts referred to the drink as an ingredient in the fabled brew known as the elixir of immortality. When it spread to Japan by the ninth century, it was used as a ritual drink. Even today, tea ceremonies are a serious affair often linked to following a Zen path.

Truth be told, the real origin of the first cup of tea is likely lost in time. But its mystical quality has naturally led to a legend that many cling tightly to. The lead character of the story is a great ancient cultural figure named Emperor Shen Nung (or Shennong). Renowned as a fantastic scholar and a deft herbalist who tasted scores of herbs to determine their value, Shen Nung was more than just a ruler. To that end, his name’s English translation is “divine farmer.”

Tea’s seminal moment is pinpointed to 2737 BC. Shen Nung was very concerned about hygiene and often drank boiled water to burn off impurities. One day he was making a pot of the liquid under a tea tree when a light breeze blew some of the leaves into the cauldron. Keeping with his reputation as a person willing to try all types of foliage, he took a sip and was moved by its taste and stimulating kick (hello, caffeine).

There is absolutely no way to confirm or deny this story. It’s even unclear whether Shen Nung existed or is a legendary figure himself. Many scholars feel confident that the drink was likely around at the time that Shen Nung allegedly lived, but it wasn’t until the third century BC that tea even makes it into writing. In that text a Chinese doctor recommended it for “increasing concentration and alertness.”

While not nearly as dramatic, the iced type of tea also has its own origins myth. This one takes place in 1904 at the St. Louis World’s Fair. One of the vendors at the event was the India Tea Association, which, of course, sold steaming brewed tea. But much to the concessionaire’s chagrin, during the sweltering summer, nobody at the fair had any interest in the hot drink. So Richard Blechynden, a special commissioner for the association, dispatched one of his waiters to get some ice and iced tea was born. This story received enough traction that in 1949, the
St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
wrote all about the forty-fifth anniversary of iced tea’s invention.

Unlike the uncertain beginnings of tea, Blechynden’s moment of extemporaneous inspiration almost certainly didn’t start us down the path to Snapple. Blechynden was at the 1904 fair, but a number of other vendors also served iced tea at the event as well. As menus were generally printed before the start of the proceedings, it’s likely that all these other merchants, which included folks from such extremely different locales as Japan and Louisiana, were already serving it up well before Blechynden’s purported moment of creation. In reality, according to research from author Pamela J. Vaccaro, iced tea was already a popular drink in many pockets of the United States at least two decades before the Fair.

White Zinfandel: Lucky fermentation

Once described as the “
TV Guide
of wines,” White Zinfandel, the sweet pink wine that can be picked up at the corner store for cheap, has often been derided by serious connoisseurs. Those wine snobs will be even more frustrated to know that White Zin would have never been if not for a combination of a nosy wine buyer and a fluke of nature.

The drink’s genesis dates back to 1972 at the Napa Valley, California, winery Sutter Homes Vineyard. The Red Zinfandel grape is used in making a dry red vino; that season the vineyard’s winemaker Bob Trinchero decided to remove some of the juices from the grape in order to create a more concentrated vintage. As part of the process, Trinchero was left with 550 gallons of white juice that he figured might be usable in making Chablis. Enter Darrell Corti, a legendary wine retailer from Sacramento. He said he’d buy half of the cases made from the juice if Trinchero would bottle it. Corti, whose expertise would later earn him induction into the Vintner’s Hall of Fame, suggested that the new wine be called
Oeil de Perdrix
(French for “eye of the partridge”). Trinchero’s response, “Oh, okay. I can’t pronounce it.” He made up the labels anyway and sent it in to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Yes, along with fighting bad guys and making sure that contraband cigarettes don’t flood the black market, the ATF is responsible for wine naming. Apparently they take the job seriously as they told Trinchero he had to come up with an English description for the new wine. Although there is no such thing as a White Zinfandel grape, he combined the color of the juice and the name of the grape, calling it “A White Zinfandel wine.”

Even with Corti’s intervention, the wine would have likely come and gone if not for a bit of luck. In 1973 Sutter Homes started selling small quantities of the drink, which at the time was a dry white. “I was thinking Chardonnay when I was making it,” said Trinchero in an oral history he did for the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. But two years later, while making a vintage, a process known as “stuck fermentation” occurred. Basically, the fermentation process unintentionally stopped, leaving some residual sugar in the wine and giving it a completely different look and taste.

At first Trinchero was less than thrilled. “Oh, my God, it’s got a pink tinge to it and it’s too sweet,” he recounted. “ ‘What am I going to do now, because my customer is used to the dry, white one.’ Then I said, ‘The heck with it. I’m going to bottle it anyway.’ Well, I had to. I couldn’t do anything with four hundred cases; that was too much wine for me at the time.”

It was a great call. In 1980 he bottled 24,000 cases; by 1995 the winery was churning out three million cases. In 2010 White Zinfandel represented 8 percent of all California wine shipments. “It’s been an amazing story,” he once quipped to
Wines & Vines
magazine. “I’m just glad it happened to me.”

Kitchen Inventions and Innovations

Cellophane: Stained tablecloth

Cellophane was one of the twentieth century’s biggest breakthroughs in food packaging. It replaced wax paper as the prime way to keep your sandwich—or really any food—fresh longer. It even changed the way the food industry worked, lessening the need for locally harvested goods. But the day its inventor, Jacques Brandenberger, first began his journey toward the product’s invention, he wasn’t thinking food—he had wine on his mind.

Brandenberger, a Swiss engineer, was sitting in a fine restaurant in Paris enjoying a meal when he saw another patron clumsily knock over a glass of red wine onto his table. The tablecloth was ruined and waiters scurried around quickly replacing the soiled sheet. Brandenberger concluded that a treated tablecloth that could wick away liquid would be a fantastic creation. The scientist immediately went to work on the idea.

He applied himself mightily in his quest. After some failures, he decided to try cellulose as the basis for a treatment. Made from the sugar molecules that comprise plant cell walls, cellulose was discovered in the late nineteenth century and was being used to make synthetic fibers like rayon. As cellulose is a resilient substance (it’s the reason tree trunks and branches are so tough), an optimistic Brandenberger sprayed a dissolved form on a sheet.

The result initially looked like another letdown. The cloth came out stiff as a board, making it impossible to fold or put over a table. Luckily, Brandenberger noticed something interesting about this miscue: He could peel off the cellulose. This new clear sheet had some promising properties—while it wasn’t impermeable to water, with some modifications, it became resistant to oils and grease and was flame resistant. Brandenberger still wasn’t contemplating food at this point, but he did abandon his tablecloth dream and began working with his new substance. In 1908 he patented the viscose sheet, dubbing it cellophane (a shortening of
cellulose
to “cello” and adding “phane” from the Greek word
diaphanis
, meaning transparent). Early applications included using the material to wrap fancy French perfume bottles and even producing eye lenses for gas masks.

In 1923 Brandenberger licensed the US rights to his product to the famed chemical company DuPont. It was a DuPont scientist named William Hale Charch who came up with a way to make cellophane food friendly. His secret was adding a waterproof component. With Charch’s tweak, perishables wouldn’t get soggy from outside contaminants and safety was increased by preventing meat juices from soaking through packaging—a problem that often spread dangerous bacteria.