How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun

by Josh Chetwynd

  While at least one food historian gives the honor to the Pennsylvania Dutch (they wanted to make dunking their doughnuts in coffee easier), the two contenders for the crown at this debate relied on either a fortuitous accident or some improvised inspiration.

  The first contestant was an unnamed Native American from Cape Cod. Henry A. Ellis, a lawyer from the Cape, is generally credited as the man making the argument on behalf of the anonymous member of the Nauset tribe. Ellis claimed that the brave in question shot an arrow straight through the middle of a Pilgrim’s fry cake creating the first holed doughnut. Despite his courtroom background, Ellis’s argument wasn’t much of one. He lacked any tangible evidence to back up his story.

  His opponent, Fred Crockett, was better prepared. Crockett entered the fray on behalf of his cousin Hanson Crockett Gregory, bearing letters and affidavits to support his case. Crockett said that in 1847, a teenage Gregory, who would go on to become a renowned ship captain in Maine, heard his mom complaining that the centers of her doughnuts were getting too soggy. The brash young man got up, walked across the room, and stuck his fork through the center of one of the cakes—problem solved.

  Crockett won the day with that simple explanation. It was enough for the town of Camden, Maine, to erect a plaque in Gregory’s honor in 1947 calling him “The Inventor of the Hole in the Doughnut.” Despite Crockett’s victorious account, others have told Gregory’s story differently. The most fanciful version features sea captain Gregory fighting a terrible storm and needing somewhere to put his doughnut. With little choice, he stuck it on a spoke of his ship’s wheel, creating the hole. In her comprehensive volume, The Donut Book: The Whole Story in Words, Pictures & Outrageous Tales, Sally Levitt Steinberg persuasively argues that the popular ship’s wheel anecdote came from a children’s book fictionalizing Gregory’s discovery called Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the Doughnut.

  As for Gregory himself, he also weighed in on the topic. During an interview at the dawn of the twentieth century, Gregory told a reporter for the Boston Post he’d grown sick of eating tough doughnuts known as “greasy sinkers.” Considering his frustration briefly, he took off the ship’s tin pepper box and cut into the middle of the cake. It was, he said, “the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes.” Reflecting on his offhanded discovery, he added, “Of course, a hole ain’t so much, but it’s the best part of the doughnut—you’d think so if you had ever tasted the doughnuts we used to eat.” Homer Simpson would unquestionably agree.

  Graham Crackers: Sex-ruining snack

  Graham crackers will wreck your sex life. At least that’s what their creator, Sylvester Graham, hoped.

  In the early 1800s Graham, a trained preacher and self-styled medical guru, was very concerned about people’s sex life—or as he called it “venereal excess.” He was convinced that getting down (in a biblical sense) caused such physical maladies as headaches, poor circulation, epilepsy, and even spinal disease. No offense to the good reverend, but I have to wonder if he was doing it right.

  Graham believed that what you ate was at the root of sexual desire, which included masturbation—an act he was particularly jittery about. He said: “high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh . . . all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital passions.” As a result, Graham, who started the American Vegetarian Society, insisted that meat, oils, alcohol, sugar, fats, and refined white flour all be cut from diets.

  Lest you think that Graham was off-kilter, he attracted a pretty huge following in the late 1820s and into the 1830s. He set up boarding houses in New York and Boston for people who wanted to follow the path of temperance and abstinence and even had devotees on college campuses. The folks at Oberlin College, for example, “enthusiastically embraced” Graham’s principles. His adherents even had a name: Grahamites.

  This isn’t to say the man didn’t have detractors. Along with his ascetic ways, Graham was considered aloof and cranky by many (wouldn’t you be?). He was apparently attacked by mobs on at least three occasions, including one group of butchers and bakers who believed Graham was running them out of business. Famed writer Ralph Waldo Emerson contemptuously called him the “poet of bran.”

  What we think of today as a great kids’ treat was devised by the reverend in 1829 as part of his clean living regime. His crackers were made with unsifted wheat flour. It was less processed than other crackers on the market and Graham hoped it, along with similarly made “Graham bread,” would serve as a vital foundation for suppressing lustful urges.

  By the end of the 1830s, Graham had lost his following. And despite his healthy ways, he died in 1851 at age fifty-seven. Still, a number of his teachings, like regularly brushing teeth—something that wasn’t common back then—and taking regular showers are the norm nowadays.

  As for his crackers, modern varieties typically have sugar in them and are made with refined flour (the horror!). Ironically, today’s starchy graham crackers can stick to teeth and wreak havoc on oral hygiene. If that wasn’t bad enough, what Graham would have thought of the devilish combination of his eponymous crackers with marshmallows and chocolate—aka s’mores—one can only imagine.

  Jelly Tots: Camera-ready treat

  Americans might not know much about Jelly Tots, but if you’re British, South African, or Canadian, these soft sugarcoated gumdrops were likely an indispensable item in your childhood diet. The nostalgia for these candies can run deep. Case in point: In 2010 a woman from Manchester, England, changed her name from Jane Nash to “Miss Jelly St Tots” for her fortieth birthday in honor of the confection. It’s unclear whether Miss Jelly St Tots would have such devotion if she knew that the first Jelly Tots came close to being thrown in the garbage before anyone even took a taste.

  Brian Boffey was a research scientist for the famed north England candy maker, Rowntrees, when he inadvertently made the first batch of tots in the late 1960s. He had been working on creating a powdered jelly that would set immediately when hitting cold water. (Think Jell-O mix that could be ready as soon as water was added.) It was a quixotic endeavor that would never successfully be completed.

  But his failure didn’t come from a lack of effort. He tried just about everything, even running high-speed photography experiments to figure out how drops of gelatin were formed. During his photo shoot, some of those gelatinous bits landed on a sugar tray. Boffey hadn’t had the time to toss them away, when one morning a high-ranking marketing executive came into the lab. The bigwig asked about the drops and Boffey explained that they were castoffs from his work.

  Undeterred, the exec asked him to add some additional flavors and colors to the rejects and bring them to his office. The scientist complied and the result was one of the United Kingdom’s most popular treats. Boffey never received a medal of honor for his meritorious candy service—but such a lack of adulation never bothered him. Boffey gave it so little thought that years later he couldn’t even pinpoint the day of his momentous discovery.

  “I didn’t even write it in my diary,” he told a local newspaper decades after Jelly Tots were introduced to the world in 1967. “I was about twenty-eight at the time and so busy with all the other products I was working on that I didn’t pay much attention to it.”

  Over the years he’s told people about his claim to fame, receiving one of two very different reactions. He joked, “They either hug me for keeping their children happy for however many minutes or give me a slap for ruining their teeth.”

  PEZ: Antismoking mint

  PEZ was definitely not intended for children when it was invented. With sexy ladies featured prominently in advertising and a message aimed at smokers, we can only hope kids were the furthest thing from Austrian inventor Eduard Haas’s mind when he came up with the product in 1927.

  The scion of a successful entrepreneurial family, Haas was following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who had invented a baking powder that made cakes lighter, and his dad,
who was a successful wholesale grocer. For his part, Haas developed a cold-pressed sugar brick—much like the shape and size of PEZ today. He added a drop of peppermint oil and figured he had a sophisticated mint that would appeal to the European elite.

  Selling them in tins, Haas marketed PEZ (named after the first, middle, and last letters of the German word for peppermint—pfefferminz) as “a luxury confection for wealthy people.” Haas, who was described as a health enthusiast at the time, thought these mints could also serve as an alternative to lighting up. He sent pretty pill-box-hat-wearing Pez Girls around Europe touting the slogan “Smoking prohibited, PEZing allowed.” Following World War II, Haas ratcheted up his commitment to PEZ as an antismoking tool for soldiers who had increasingly used nicotine during the war. Haas hired an engineer named Oskar Uxa in 1948 to develop a gadget technically dubbed a “pocket article dispensing container.” These contraptions looked a lot like a thin lighter—a la the Bic variety—but instead of providing a flame, the spring-loaded machine doled out PEZ. For some reason, Haas believed that eating mints from a fake—albeit chic—lighter would deter smokers all the more.

  The little mints inside Uxa’s creation remained far from the sweet confection we know today. Some of the early flavors included the very unappealing chlorophyll, eucalyptus, and coffee (how coffee qualifies as a mint is beyond me). In 1953 Haas brought his business to the United States and tried to replicate his marketing approach. Beyond the antismoking shtick, PEZ was now being sold as a way to reclaim self-esteem lost with bad breath and as a tool for staving off hunger, which would help users lose weight. Somehow it was also going to help fight infections (presumably because the dispenser avoided the need for one person to hand over the mint to another, enhancing hygiene).

  While these PEZ bricks may have satisfied European customers, Americans had a completely different take. This probably wasn’t because of the wild claims of the mint’s restorative powers, but due to a far more capitalistic factor: It just cost too much. At the time, a candy bar went for five cents compared to a PEZ dispenser with two refills, which cost a heady twenty-five cents.

  Haas turned to his man in America, Curtis Allina, to come up with a solution. Allina, an Austrian who had been raised in the United States, suggested reformulating the brand into a kids’ sweet. Thanks to Uxa’s antismoking dispenser, Haas’ company was positioned to differentiate itself from competitors. They used Uxa’s basic design to create a toy that could also give out candy (what could be better?). At first, PEZ came in true toy shapes like a full-body Santa Claus, a full-body robot, or a space gun. But in the late 1950s, the company returned to its sleeker design and began sticking heads on the old faux lighters. Popeye was the first to get the honor in 1958.

  Though PEZ has weathered some ups and downs since, popular culture—through movies like Stand By Me and TV shows such as Seinfeld—have kept it in the public consciousness. Another key to its staying power has been nostalgia fiends. Beginning in the late 1980s, the dispensers were deemed collector worthy. Today more than three billion pieces of PEZ are consumed annually in the United States. Still, it’s unlikely that any of those little bricks has prevented smoking.

  Pop Rocks: Failed drink additive

  If there were an urban legend hall of fame, Pop Rocks would be a slam dunk inductee. No, Mikey from those old Life cereal commercials did not meet a terrible end after eating the carbonated candy, and spider eggs were never found in packets of the sugary pebbles. It’s also perfectly safe to wolf down some Pop Rocks and swig a Coke. As absurd as those claims might sound today, there is one seeming tall tale that’s actually true: Pop Rocks were invented when an effort to create a convenient way to carbonate Kool-Aid failed.

  The man responsible for putting a fizzy chemical reaction in your mouth was Bill Mitchell. He was one of General Foods’ most impressive scientists having helped develop such winning products as Cool Whip, Jell-O Instant Pudding, and Angel Food Cake mix. “Throughout the industry,” wrote Marv Rudolph in his book Pop Rocks: The Inside Story of America’s Revolutionary Candy, “Bill [had] a reputation as a true inventor—the sort of person who looks at problems differently and can find elegant, sometimes simple solutions that no one else considered.”

  Despite that esteem, there was one project that vexed the masterful Mitchell. In 1953, General Foods purchased Kool-Aid. It was a successful brand but didn’t do the business of heavyweights Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Mitchell’s mission was to come up with a way to mix Kool-Aid and then add a tablet or some other agent to make it bubble like its big boy soft drink competitors.

  Mitchell figured carbon dioxide trapped in frozen water could do the trick. He developed a little briquette of chocolate-covered carbonated ice that was dubbed Soda Burst. The idea was you could buy it in the freezer section and then add either water or milk, which would melt the little frozen puck and yield a chocolate soda. The problem was most supermarket freezer sections kept their coolers at unreliable temperatures. When it got too warm, the ice would “de-gas” and the briquettes wouldn’t do their job. A second effort required a special contraption that was deemed way too complicated.

  After those failures, the scientist shifted gears. Instead of frozen water, he looked for something that could store carbon dioxide at room temperature. He went with sorbitol, a sugar alcohol that occurs naturally in fruit. Unfortunately, the result of his work wasn’t a thick solid but a glassy substance that had some fizzle—but not nearly enough to get Kool-Aid popping.

  What could have been disappointment turned a light on in Mitchell’s mind. If he added a few ingredients to his thin sheet of sorbitol, like everybody’s favorite artificial colors and flavors, he could make a new type of carbonated candy. In 1957 he produced the first Pop Rocks.

  So did General Foods bigwigs laud Mitchell for his new confection? Let’s leave it to one of Mitchell’s contemporaries to answer that question. “Carbonated candy was almost a joke; a novelty; a technical curiosity, not a technical accomplishment,” said longtime General Foods executive Adolphus Clausi in an interview years later. “Marketing, when shown the product, laughed and said, ‘Don’t you have something better to do?’ ”

  Yikes. With that frosty reception, no wonder no one considered it a commercial option for nearly two decades. For years, the only people who got a taste were General Foods employees and their kids, who would often ask Mitchell to prepare a batch for birthday parties.

  What saved Pop Rocks was a guy named Herman Neff, who sold his Canadian snack company to General Foods in the early 1970s. Neff, who continued to work with General Foods after the sale, found out about Mitchell’s popping candy and thought it would sell well north of the US border. He was right. Following that success, it hit the American market in 1976 and became an immediate best seller.

  Why the fizzy sweet became such a magnet for fictional stories is unclear. Heck, it didn’t even have the Internet to spread false rumors. But the danger claims did frustrate Mitchell, who in 1979 took the unusual step of writing open letters to parents and schools about the safety of Pop Rocks (which were also known as Cosmic Candy). Mitchell even addressed the Mikey rumor, telling customers that “we checked on ‘Mikey’s’ well-being and found he is alive and well.”

  Popsicles: Cold night and forgetful kid

  All Frank Epperson wanted was a cool drink. On a red-letter date (now lost in the mists of time) in 1905, he was sitting on his back porch using a stick to mix together some dry flavored powder into a glass of soda water. For one reason or another, he became distracted. This shouldn’t be surprising because Epperson was just eleven years old at the time. Maybe his mother called him; maybe he went to play some ball; or, maybe he simply lost interest in the drink, which by some accounts had lost its fizz.

  Whatever the case may be, when he was called into the house that evening he left the mixture outside. It would have been a forgotten mistake if not for the fact that it was an unexpectedly ultrafrigid evening that night in Northern California’s Bay Area
where Epperson grew up. The next day he came out to find his drink frozen with the stirring stick poking out.

  Epperson tasted the combination and loved it. But what was an eleven-year-old to do? He apparently showed his friends (I’m sure it made him very popular at recess), but basically put the idea in the freezer—so to speak.

  He would go on to serve as a pilot in World War I and embark on a number of business ventures from real estate to manufacturing kewpie dolls. But in the early 1920s, he noticed that ice-cream sandwiches were becoming a popular treat.

  While frozen fruit juice treats, called “hokeypokeys,” had been around since the 1870s with vendors successfully selling them on the streets of New York and other big cities, Epperson figured his creative advantage would be that stirring stick he’d left in his soda mixture as a preteen. He filed for a patent for “a handled, frozen confection” in 1923 and began selling his treat, which he first called “the Epsicle”—a combo of his last name and icicle—at a popular local amusement area called Idora Park in Oakland. (Useless fun fact: The wood of choice for the ice treat’s stick was and remains birch.) It was a hit and he sold the rights to make his ice lollies to a New York manufacturer called the Joe Lowe Company.

  One of the first orders of business around the time Epperson partnered with Joe Lowe was to alter the product’s name for marketing purposes. The most popular story surrounding the choice of “Popsicle” asserted that Epperson’s children called it “pop’s icicle” rather than its real name. This was no small marketing sample as he had nine kids, so this tale could very well be true. Others suggest that the name was simply a variation on another sweet that used a stick: the lollipop.