Sheridan knew he’d have to come up with something special on the fly for the returning travelers. Although whiskey in tea was a common Irish combination, the chef figured these passengers—primarily North Americans—would rather have a concoction featuring coffee (more popular in the New World) with the alcohol. When the waylaid fliers got a taste of the new drink, one reportedly asked Sheridan if the soothing cup of joe was Brazilian coffee. Sheridan responded that it was Irish coffee and the name stuck.
Recognizing he’d hit upon something special, Sheridan spent the next few weeks working on his new drink. Showing a marketer’s touch, he came up with the idea of serving his Irish coffee in a fancy stemmed glass. When the Foynes base closed in 1945, Sheridan moved along with other members of the catering staff to a new airport across the river, which today is known as Shannon International Airport. He continued serving his Irish coffee to the civilians who now used this airport as a trans-Atlantic hub. By 1947 Sheridan’s coffee was chosen as the airport’s “official welcoming beverage,” and a few years later, one particularly proactive passenger would become besotted with the drink. His name was Stanton Delaplane, a fancy-dressing Pulitzer Prize–winning travel writer from San Francisco.
Upon returning home, Delaplane went to his favorite watering hole, The Buena Vista. Sidling up to the bar, he told the establishment’s owner Jack Koeppler about Irish coffee. Koeppler loved the concept and on November 10, 1952, the pair spent a long evening trying to re-create the drink. Alas, an exact imitation eluded them for two reasons: They couldn’t get the coffee/whiskey taste just right and the cream kept sinking. Koeppler developed an obsession, making a pilgrimage to Shannon Airport to get the correct recipe directly from Sheridan. According to The Buena Vista’s website, Koeppler would return with the perfect whiskey for the job but continued to struggle with the cream. Finally, Koeppler went to George Christopher, a dairy owner who would go on to be San Francisco’s thirty-fourth mayor. Christopher helped devise a cream—aged for forty-eight hours and frothed to exacting consistency—that could float atop the drink. According to the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, Sheridan would later immigrate to the United States and continue serving his Irish coffee until his death in 1962. That he never stopped dispensing his signature drink shouldn’t be surprising. Clearly, he was the best man for that job.
Kool-Aid: Post office complications
A borderline obsession with Jell-O and limitations with the US Postal Service led Edwin E. Perkins to create one of the United States’ most iconic drink mixes—Kool-Aid. Perkins’s story is also one that truly reflects the time and spirit of America in the early twentieth century.
Perkins was born in 1889 in Lewis, Iowa, to a family that had moved west to seek a better way of life. One of ten children, Perkins and his family ultimately ended up in Fumas County, Nebraska, where they cultivated a farm. Although those were rough times in Nebraska, the Perkins family survived and even flourished thanks in large part to a strong work ethic. In fact, they prospered enough that by the time Edwin Perkins was eleven years old, his father was running a successful general store in the tiny hamlet of Hendley, Nebraska. The young Perkins would work as a clerk at the shop and while helping out, he was introduced to an innovative dessert that was sweeping the nation—Jell-O. Perkins was smitten with its brightly colored packaging and easy-to-produce process.
The wobbly gelatin inspired the young man to channel his inner entrepreneur. Within a year or two of his wiggly, jiggly discovery, he was experimenting with a chemistry set. The goal: Concoct his own product that would win the love of the masses. He also began a number of other cottage industries, including publishing a weekly newspaper, the Hendley Delphic, and working as the village postmaster.
The postmaster gig was a good one for Perkins because along with everything else, he’d established a mail-order business. As a teenager, he was hawking everything from perfumes to something called Nix-O-Tine Tobacco Remedy, which was an antismoking kit. Still, he never lost sight of trying to reach the heights of Jell-O glory.
In the early 1920s, Perkins thought he’d found it. Although he was now manufacturing more than 125 different “household products,” ranging from face creams and lotions to salves and soaps, his most popular product was something called Fruit-Smack. Like Jell-O, there were six flavors, but it wasn’t something you needed to let set. Instead, it was a liquid concentrate that could be poured into water to create a pitcher of a sweet drink for mere pennies.
Alas, his expected gold mine was running into a consistent problem. Units of Fruit-Smack were shipped in small four-ounce corked glass bottles and packages kept getting returned because during the bustle of shipping, the vials were cracking and leaking. Throw in the cost of the heavy containers cutting into profits, and Perkins had no choice but to come up with an alternative.
Again, Jell-O was the perfect model. A dry mix, Jell-O kept easily and, even more important, could be safely shipped in paper packaging. Perkins became determined to devise a dehydrated concentrate form of his Fruit-Smack that could sidestep his shipping problems. It took a while, but by 1927 he cracked it, offering, naturally, six flavors: raspberry, cherry, grape, lemon, orange, and root-beer. Ironically, despite the inspiration for the Kool-Aid mix (avoiding packaging issues), Perkins had problems devising the perfect materials to ship his new powder mix. In the end a brightly colored envelope—a la Jell-O—with a soft waxed paper lining worked perfectly. Before long he had a product that even Jell-O makers would envy. By 1950, he was shipping a whopping 323 million packets annually.
Ovaltine: Foul-tasting health drink
If Ovaltine’s long-departed inventor Dr. Georg Wander were around today, he would surely be confused by the fact that when people consider his drink they likely picture a comfortable little child warming up with a late-night combination of his mix and milk before dozing off to sleep.
Wander had far different, more altruistic intentions for his invention. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Swiss chemist was very concerned about people’s diets. At the time so many individuals suffered from nutritional deficiencies. In particular he worried about children, the infirm, the weak, and even breastfeeding women. Wander pledged himself to coming up with a product that could serve as a “nourishing food supplement.”
As the basis for his new blend, he chose barley malt. Though best known for its role in brewing beer, it had been lauded for its medicinal values for some 2,000 years. Wander developed an inexpensive way to produce malt extract and then fortified it with nutritious things like vitamin D and phosphorous. Wander must have figured he had come up with a valuable way to fight malnutrition.
But his original syrupy mix had a major glitch. Quite simply, even the malnourished want something that tastes good, and the healthy (but bitter) malt invention wasn’t meeting that need. After Wander’s death in 1897, his son Albert took over the family business. The younger Wander recognized what his father had missed. Along with figuring out a way to make a dry powder, he added such ingredients as sugar, eggs, and cocoa to round out the drink’s flavor. In 1904 Albert unveiled Ovomaltine (named for the combination of the Latin word for egg—ovo—and malt).
Albert had a different view of the drink’s value than his father. Wrote one journalist, “[H]e marketed it as an energy drink—the Red Bull of its day, as it were.” Within a few years of its debut, Albert truncated the name of the mix to Ovaltine and began shipping it abroad. When clever marketers in Britain got ahold of it, they started selling the product directly to the youth set as a healthy hot cocoa alternative. Relying heavily on radio advertising, Ovaltine execs sponsored a show called The League of Ovaltineys. It featured a secret society of kids who would give away badges and other goodies to listeners. The Ovaltineys lured audiences as large as five million children, who were expected to follow the group’s code. The rules included the wonderfully self-serving declaration: “Every day [I must] . . . drink my delicious Ovaltine, to make me fit and happy, with a mind that’s brigh
t and keen.” The approach was so profitable that when Ovaltine reached the United States similar tactics were employed with the company underwriting such popular radio shows as Little Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight.
While it wasn’t Wander’s goal or intention to create a good old-fashioned comfort drink, he should rest easy knowing that even today it remains a wholesome option. While the brand has lost its zip in the marketplace, Ovaltine still offers a healthy combination of vitamins A, C, D, B1, B2, and B6 along with niacin and phosphorous.
Pink Lemonade: Accidental carnival creation
The circus is all about hyperbole. Come see the tallest she-man in the world! Watch a blindfolded diver plummet one thousand feet into a goldfish bowl! There is always a fantastic saga to be told. The origins of pink lemonade, which everyone seems to agree was created by circus folk, is no exception. The only question is which mythic yarn you want to believe.
Lion tamer extraordinaire George Conklin offered the most detailed explanation of the drink’s beginnings in his 1921 memoir The Ways of the Circus: Being the Memories and Adventures of George Conklin Tamer of Lions. He claimed his brother, Pete Conklin, made the first brew in 1857. At the time Pete was working with the Jerry Mabie show, which was like working on the biggest touring rock concert today. Mabie’s circus held a record, according to George, for going from town-to-town nonstop for seven years.
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.”
How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Page 12
