Tapas: Fruit flies
Tapas are such a part of the Spanish lifestyle that there’s a word to describe the culture built up around them—tapeo. As essayist Alicia Rios explained: “The art of tapeo . . . induces states of inspiration and delight, it gives rise to witty banter on trivial topics and the interchange of snippets of juicy gossip.” If you happen upon any plaza in Spain on a leisurely afternoon, you’re sure to find people enjoying some good wine with plates of the finger food (often featuring such popular local fare as chorizo, Serrano ham, and olives).
Over the year, one of the “trivial topics” that has undoubtedly been debated over tapas is how this tradition first came into being.
One popular legend dates back to the thirteenth century. King Alfonso X of Castile had become ill. As part of his convalescence his doctors insisted that he show restraint when it came to his appetite. He was given small portions to eat with his wine. (Apparently wine was a good tonic for getting well.) Once the monarch recovered he liked the custom so much he required taverns under his dominion to offer small plates of food with wine.
While this story sounds wonderfully regal, the actual origin probably has more practical everyday roots. In this explanation, the arid southern region of Andalusia is the birthplace of tapas. The area is known for its sherry, a must-have aperitif for visiting travelers. Unfortunately for tourists and locals alike, the strong, sweet wine not only attracted drinkers but also insects. Fruit flies would hover around open glasses or, even worse, end up in the alcohol. In addition, the dry conditions meant that dust and dirt could sometimes whip up in a breeze and settle in the glass.
The simple solution was to cover the top of the glass when not drinking. This would prevent the pesky bugs from delving into the drink. Some disagreement exists over what was initially chosen as a cover. The Joy of Cooking, which places tapas’ modern invention in the nineteenth century, says that tavern owners started off putting bread on the glass—others say that a piece of ham typically served as the barrier. According to domestic maven Martha Stewart, small plates were placed over glasses.
Although this practice began as a protective measure, smart business owners realized that it could also be an inducement. “It became customary for the bar owners to offer a sampling of food on the dish to attract customers, and each bar prepared their house specialty, trying to outdo the competition,” Stewart wrote. Supporting this story is the etymology of the word tapas. Stemming from the word tapar (“to cover”) the word is typically translated to mean “lid” or “cover.”
Nowadays, every region of Spain has its own specialties for tapas lovers. In Castile there is montados de lomo (marinated pork loin and bread) or morcilla (a fried black pudding sausage dish). If you go to Galicia you’ll find finely prepared octopus or shellfish. Deciding on the best tapas will surely lead to a debate of its own . . . over a bottle of wine and some tapas.
Wheaties: Messy cooking
The Breakfast of Champions was once gruel for the infirm and out-of-shape. A Minneapolis health clinician named Mennen Minniberg was mixing up a batch of hot bran one day in 1921 when some of the stuff dripped out of the vat and onto the stove. The scorching surface went to work on the gruel and the result was a handful of crispy flakes.
Minniberg thought they might have some commercial prospects and headed over to a local flour business called Washburn Crosby Company, which would later become General Mills. The executives at Washburn liked the idea and gave Minniberg use of a laboratory to turn his findings into a marketable commodity. Unfortunately, he failed. The flakes proved far too flakey, grinding down to dust when bagged up for sale.
Wheaties’ official website acknowledges a health worker bringing his accidental discovery to the company’s attention, but doesn’t give his name (whether it be Mr. Minniberg or someone else; some have claimed the man’s last name was actually Minnenrode). The company also doesn’t confirm he was given a shot at turning his unintentional invention into something more.
Nevertheless, everybody agrees on who turned the clinician’s blunder into a breakfast wonder. It was a first-class miller named George Cormack. Educated in Scotland, he’d run mills in Canada and throughout the United States. When presented with bran flakes that couldn’t hold up when packaged, he labored tirelessly on an alternative. He came up with thirty-six varieties before settling on just the right formula. A key change: replacing bran with wheat.
The company called the cereal Washburn’s Gold Medal Wheat Flakes, rolling it out in 1924. The product wasn’t immediately a top seller. Apparently a flashy name didn’t entice the masses. Acknowledging the problem, the company asked employees and their families to come up with an alternative title. Though Nutties was considered, they settled on Wheaties. For ultra-trivia geeks, Jane Bausman, the wife of the company’s export manager, submitted the winning entry.
Success kicked in when they started advertising. The Breakfast of Champions slogan was introduced on an outfield billboard at a minor league baseball stadium, and athletes started appearing on packaging in 1934. Lou Gehrig was the first. At the 1939 Major League All-Star Game, forty-six of the event’s fifty-one players endorsed the cereal. Countless more ballplayers and other athletes offered testimonials over the years about how they adored the wheat flakes. Despite their love for on-field legends, Wheaties initially put these sporting heroes’ images on the back of the boxes. It wasn’t until 1958, starting with Olympic decathlete Bob Richards, that athletes’ pictures started adorning the front.
With the exception of a brief flirtation with kids’ radio programming in the early 1950s, General Mills has held tight to Wheaties’ athletic focus. So much so that when Ohio’s congressional delegation once lobbied the cereal makers to put former astronaut and US senator John Glenn on a box, they were rebuffed. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote the company’s president urging him to recognize a New York City police officer and firefighter on a box along with a Port Authority officer. Again, the company passed.
Needless to say, don’t expect the faces of George Cormack or Mr. Minniberg on a box anytime soon.
Main Courses
Chicken Marengo: Broken supply line
This popular Italian dish gets its name from a battle in the town of Marengo, just south of Turin. Its inspiration: the famed Napoleon Bonaparte. The great general was elected France’s first consul in February 1800 (effectively becoming the leader of the new republic) and was itching to show his might. To that end, his audacious plan was to cross the Alps, enter Italy and overtake the Austrian army. When the two opposing forces engaged on June 14, 1800, things initially looked bad for Napoleon and his men. One of his trusted lieutenants, General Louis Desaix, reportedly told his leader, “This battle is completely lost, but it is only two o’clock; there is time to win another.” Though Desaix didn’t survive the day, he was right, as the French rallied to prevail at what was dubbed the Battle of Marengo.
Following the clash, Napoleon was well famished. This wasn’t surprising as the Corsican had a habit of never eating before a battle. The future monarch’s Swiss chef, Dunand, was well aware that his boss was going to want something particularly pleasing after the hard-fought victory. Unfortunately, the typical standbys were going to be impossible to make because the food wagons had been lost during the battle.
Dunand hurriedly sent out soldiers from the quartermaster’s staff to forage for supplies. All they could get, according to author Patricia Bunning Stevens, were “three small eggs, four tomatoes, six crayfish, a small hen, a little garlic, and some oil.” The chef took the hodgepodge and went to work. He presented Napoleon with sliced chicken browned in oil and flavored with garlic, along with tomatoes, fried eggs, and crayfish on a tin plate. (It’s also said by some that a soldier’s ration of bread was toasted and added. Others claim it’s unlikely that tomatoes were a part of the original dish.) As amazing as the military triumph was, equally surprising was Napoleon’s love for the unplanned fare. The first
consul supposedly told Dunand, “You must feed me like this after every battle.”
Versions of this story have been told in such respected publications as The Oxford Companion to Food and Larousse Gastronomique. Still, not everyone is a believer. Stevens concedes that the tale is “plausible” but argues “[t]he dish is sheer legend.” She points to the fact that Napoleon’s private secretary noted in his memoirs that food for that fated meal was supplied by a local convent and that the French received an “abundance of good provisions and wine.” (It’s worth noting that even if the convent offered lots of food, it could have included the strange combination that forced Dunand to create his funky combo.)
Stevens posits that the story of the dish was a marketing ploy by an unnamed restaurateur who thought a good anecdote would draw more buyers. Whatever the case, the dish itself was one of Napoleon’s favorites and may very well have been one he savored his whole life. Even when exiled on St. Helena in his final years, Napoleon was said to have talked often about his great victory at Marengo. He was even buried in the grey overcoat he wore on the day of the battle. As for chicken Marengo, it’s outlived the iconic French leader—with some changes. The pan-fried chicken is now often cooked in a white wine sauce, crayfish are rarely served as part of the dish, and mushrooms are a popular addition.
Chicken Tikka Masala: Fussy customer
Forget such evocatively named English dishes as bangers and mash or bubble and squeak. The United Kingdom’s national food is Indian. “Having a curry” (as it’s called there) is so popular that Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper once put the annual spending on Indian food in the United Kingdom at more than four billion dollars.
With that context, it’s no wonder that the British take great pride in their contribution to the cuisine. So much so that a member of Parliament once went so far as to ask the European Union to designate one famed Indian dish, Chicken Tikka Masala, as a Scottish creation. It didn’t matter that the dish’s creator merely stumbled upon it.
Ali Ahmed Asham was a chef at Glasgow’s Shish Mahal restaurant in the 1970s. He’d been dealing with a stomach ulcer, according to the Daily Record, when one night a customer came in for Chicken Tikka. Asham cooked up the meal, but the patron was not satisfied. He complained that the meat was too dry. An exasperated Asham had a can of Campbell’s tomato soup he’d kept on hand to deal with his stomach malady. He opened it up, added some spices (some say he had already added the spices for his benefit), and sent the chicken out again, but this time with his new sauce. Years after the incident, Asham told a variation on the story minus the drama: “[O]ne day a customer said, ‘I’d take some sauce with that, this is a bit dry’ so we cooked Chicken Tikka with the sauce, which contains [yogurt], cream, and spices.”
Either way, it was a flavorful combo—and one that probably each of the nine thousand curry houses across the United Kingdom serves regularly. To recognize the momentous discovery, Glaswegian member of Parliament Mohammad Sarwar sprung into action in 2009. He made a motion in the British House of Commons regarding “the culinary masterpiece that is Chicken Tikka Masala.” Noting that it was “Britain’s most popular curry” he asked that his fellow representatives rally around Asham and push the European Union to designate Glasgow as an “EU Protected Designation of Origin” for the dish.
Needless to say Indians didn’t like the idea of tomato soup getting acclaim for such a cornerstone option on curry menus.
Zaeemuddin Ahmad, a chef from Delhi’s Karim Hotel, maintained that the dish was his family’s recipe. “Chicken Tikka Masala is an authentic Mughlai recipe prepared by our forefathers who were royal chefs in the Mughal period,” he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “Mughals were avid trekkers and used to spend months altogether in jungles and far off places. They liked roasted form of chicken with spices.”
Rahul Verma, an expert on Delhi street food, offered a different opinion, saying the dish was introduced in the Indian region of Punjab in the 1970s. Though he didn’t buy Asham’s claim, he believed that the dish wasn’t by design. “It’s basically a Punjabi dish not more than 40 to 50 years old [as of 2009] and must be an accidental discovery which has had periodical improvisation,” he said.
While one of those Indian antecedents may very well be true, it’s still very possible that the meal Asham produced for his persnickety customer was the one that spawned the Chicken Tikka Masala revolution in Great Britain. As for Britain’s leadership, they weren’t ready to get behind the cause. Sarwar’s effort didn’t sit well enough with his colleagues to lead to a formal request to the European Union. In the end only nineteen members of Parliament signed on to his motion.
Chimichanga: Fryer slip-up
The fryer has brought joy to so many cultures around the globe (think french fries or, if you’re more adventurous, Scotland’s deep-fried haggis). Of course Mexican food has its fair share of deep-fried delicacies with one of its most popular being the chimichanga. Yet despite the cuisine’s penchant for greasy fare, this entry into the bubbling goodness was pure happenstance.
For those of you with a weak stomach or limited exposure to the chimichanga, it’s effectively a deep-fried burrito—and it’s the pride and joy of Tucson, Arizona. A pioneering woman named Monica Flin is widely regarded as the inventor of the dish. Flin, the daughter of a French émigré, opened Tucson’s El Charro Café in 1922. Not only was Flin one of the only female restaurant owners in the southern Arizona town, she also practically did it all at the establishment—cooking, serving as hostess, and waiting tables. Throw in the fact that she often had a handful of nieces and nephews hanging around the café, and it’s clear that Flin was one busy woman.
One day Flin was in the midst of frying ground beef for tacos. With so much going on, she mistakenly knocked a burrito into the fryer. Her initial reaction was anger and the trilingual woman (she spoke French, Spanish, and English) was on the verge of dishing a popular Spanish “Ch” swear word to express her displeasure. (I’m guessing it was the F-word, Spanish style.) Looking around at some of the children in the kitchen she caught herself at the last moment and blurted out “chimichanga,” which translates roughly to the Spanish version of thingamajig. As the restaurant’s menu says today, “Thankfully for all of us, Monica was a controlled and creative cuss.”
The dish, which was once dubbed one of America’s top fifty plates by USA Today, does have others who claim to be its inventor. Some historians suggest that local Native American tribes or Mexicans on the Sonoran border were frying up burrito-esque meals long before Flin’s discovery. George Jacob, owner of another Tucson restaurant called Club 21, said he produced the first fried burrito when a traveler from the east found the traditional type too blah. Jacob slathered it with shortening and used the grill to brown it. The pan-fried creation immediately went on his menu. As Jacob’s restaurant didn’t open until 1946, it’s likely that if he decided the fried burrito was menu worthy, he did so after Flin’s folly. Plus, Jacob’s original dish wasn’t dunked in the deep-fryer. To this day, El Charro still exists with Flin’s great-grandniece Carlotta Flores continuing the tradition. She has made a few changes; most notably, lard has been replaced with canola oil in the fryer.
If Flin’s story seems familiar to some Midwesterners, it’s probably because St. Louis’s popular toasted ravioli—deep-fried, meat-filled pasta sprinkled with herbs and grated parmesan cheese—has a similar origin. The most common story about its birth sets the invention’s discovery sometime between the 1930s and 1950s at a restaurant called Oldani’s in the Italian area of St. Louis known as The Hill. One of the restaurant’s cooks, Fritz (history only gives us his first name), mistakenly deep-fried a batch of ravioli when he thought a pot of hot oil was water. A variation has him simply knocking the ravioli into the oil accidentally. No matter, the tale proves that, as was the case with the chimichanga, good things can happen when food falls into the fryer.
Fettuccine Alfredo: Finicky new mom
For a chef, there may be no gre
ater indignity than an inability to get your spouse to eat your cooking. This was the ignominy that Alfredo di Lelio was facing circa 1914. Now, di Lelio, who ran a fine restaurant in Rome called Trattoria Alfredo, did have a major factor working against him. His wife, Ines, had just given birth to a baby and the whole affair had completely ruined her appetite.
“It was a hell of a life,” di Lelio was once quoted as saying. “Work all day and rock the baby at night. I had to do something.”
Desperate, he went with the most comforting dish he could imagine. It featured wide noodles smothered in a heap of Parmesan cheese and lots of butter. In particular, the copious amounts of thick butter—yes, this was before cholesterol concerns and the widespread use of defibrillators—was so rich and inviting that it restored Ines’s taste for food and gave di Lelio a signature dish. (The cream version that Americans love would emerge in the United States many decades later.)
Fettuccine Alfredo may have remained a curious local dish, if not for a little Hollywood glitz and some good old-fashioned American media attention. In 1927 Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (the Brad and Angelina of their day) were on vacation in Rome when they happened upon di Lelio’s little trattoria. A genial host, di Lelio whipped up his house special for the stars, who loved it.
How much did they love it?
The pair returned to the restaurant later in the trip and gave di Lelio a golden fork-and-spoon-set to toss his creation. One was engraved with Pickford’s signature and the other with Fairbanks’s and each had the inscription To Alfredo—the king of the noodles. Upon returning to Hollywood, Fairbanks and Pickford praised the food to their movie star crowd, gaining a fair bit of publicity for the pasta in the process. But it was another zealot for Alfredo’s work, Saturday Evening Post food writer George Rector, who brought it to the American masses. He wrote in his Post column, “Alfredo doesn’t make fettuccine. He doesn’t cook fettuccine. He achieves it.”
How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Page 3
