ACCIDENTALLY DELICIOUS
Have you ever been really hungry, but there wasn’t much to eat in your kitchen? Did you throw together a bunch of stuff you had on hand and were pleasantly surprised when it tasted good? You aren’t alone. Some of our favorite foods were created by accident. Here’s a sample menu of some familiar foods that might never have happened if someone hadn’t created them by mistake.
Ice cream cone: Before the ice cream cone, people ate their ice cream out of dishes or paper wrappers. This changed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair in Missouri. A vendor, the story goes, ran out of dishes to serve his ice cream. Luckily, Ernest A. Hamwi was set up next to him and was selling crisp waffle-like pastries called zalabia. The quick-thinking Hamwi rolled a zalabia into a cone shape. It cooled quickly, and the ice cream vendor filled it with ice cream for his customers. He was able to continue selling ice cream, and customers got a second treat when they realized they could eat the cone.
Chocolate Chip Cookies: Chocolate chip cookies are a favorite all over the world. But the baker who might have invented them likely was trying to make a different kind of cookie. In 1930, Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband were running the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. One day, Wakefield was making cookies for her guests, but she was out of baker’s chocolate to melt and add to the dough. Instead, she chopped up a block of semi-sweet chocolate and added the pieces. She thought the pieces would melt and make the entire cookie chocolate. But the chocolate pieces stayed intact, melting into gooey little bits inside the cookie. The chocolate chip cookie was born. These cookies are often called Toll House cookies because of where they were first made popular.
Potato Chips: One of the world’s favorite snacks might have been the result of a complaint. In 1853, a man was eating dinner at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York. He ordered fried potatoes, a popular side dish. But when they came out of the kitchen, he didn’t think they were crispy enough. He sent them back to the kitchen, where chef George Crum was so angry at having his cooking criticized that he sliced the potatoes really thin, put lots of salt on them, and fried them. Not only did the diner love them, but everyone else did, too. They soon became a specialty of the restaurant.
Tofu: Tofu, or bean curd, is made by curdling fresh soy milk, pressing it into a solid block, and then cooling it. Tofu was accidentally invented in China 2,000 years ago, when a cook added seaweed to soy milk, which made it curdle. This is the same process that is used for making cheese. Like cheese, tofu is a great example of how really messing up a recipe can create something unexpectedly good.
Cheese Puffs: Who in the world could have thought up cheese puffs? you ask. The company that invented them wasn’t even trying to make food for people. It was producing animal feed. In the 1930s, the Flakall Company of Wisconsin made food for livestock from small, flaked pieces of grain. One day, an employee, Edward Wilson, watched workers pouring cornmeal into the flaking machine, moistening it to keep it from clogging. Because the machine was hot, the wet cornmeal came out of it in puffy ribbons that hardened when they hit the air. Wilson took some of the ribbons home, added oil and flavoring to them—and voilà: cheese puffs!
Popsicles: On a hot day, nothing tastes better than an icy-cold popsicle. This summer treat was invented by an 11-year-old boy. In San Francisco in 1905, Frank Epperson mixed some sugary soda powder into a glass of water, but then he left it out on his porch with the wooden stirring stick still in it. That night, temperatures dropped so low that the mixture froze. The next morning, Frank took the frozen mixture out and used the wooden stick to hold it while he licked it. Frank knew he’d made something special, and soon he was selling the frozen treat to people in his neighborhood. He named it the “Epsicle.” (“Sicle” was a shortened version of “icicle.”) As an adult, he patented the frozen treat. His kids convinced him to change the name to what they called it: “Pop’s Sicle,” which soon became the popsicle.
