Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (74 page)

The pretzel is one of the few foods to have played a role in the history of warfare. Early in the sixteenth century, Asian armies under the Turkish-Mongol emperor Babar swept into India and parts of Europe. A wave of Turkish forces encountered resistance at the high stone wall surrounding the city of Vienna. Following several unsuccessful attempts to scale the wall, the Turks planned to tunnel secretly beneath it, and to avoid detection, they dug at night.

Snack foods. Instruments to prepare homemade potato chips (top); A monk shaped the pretzel after the folded arms of children in prayer
.

Turkish generals, however, were unfamiliar with the working hours of Viennese pretzel makers, who to ensure the freshness of their specialty, baked from midnight to daybreak. A group of bakers, toiling in kitchen cellars, heard suspicious digging and alerted the town council; the local military thwarted the invasion. Viennese pretzel bakers were honored for their part in the victory with an official coat of arms that displays a pretzel, still the bakers’ emblem today.

Popcorn: 3000
B.C
., Americas

Not all corn pops. Ideally, a corn kernel should have at least 14 percent water content so that under heat, the water expands to steam, causing the nugget to explode into a puffy white mass.

The art involved in popping corn is at least five thousand years old, perfected by the American Indians. They clearly appreciated the difference between sweet corn (for immediate eating), field corn (as cattle feed), and so-called Indian corn, which has sufficient water content for popping.

Popped corn was a native Indian dish and a novelty to the early explorers of the New World. Columbus and his men purchased popcorn necklaces from natives in the West Indies, and in the 1510s, when Hernando Cortes invaded the territory that today is Mexico City, he discovered the Aztecs wearing amulets of stringed popcorn in religious ceremonies. The dish derives its echoic name “popcorn” from the Middle English word
poppe
, meaning “explosive sound.”

The Indians developed three methods for popping high-moisture corn. They might skewer an ear of popping corn on a stick and roast it over a fire, gathering up kernels that popped free of the flames. Alternatively, the kernels were first scraped from the cob, then thrown directly into a low fire; again, those that jumped free were eaten. The third method was the
most sophisticated. A shallow clay cooking vessel containing coarse sand was heated, and when the sand reached a high temperature, corn kernels were stirred in; cooking, they popped up to the surface of the sand.

Legend has it that the Plymouth Pilgrims enjoyed popcorn at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621. It is known that Indian chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag tribe arrived with ninety of his braves bearing various foods. Massasoit’s brother, Quadequina, is supposed to have contributed several deerskin bags of corn already popped.

Popping corn was simplified in the 1880s with the introduction of specially designed home and store popping machines. But at the time, corn could be purchased only in enormous quantities, and often still on the cob. The 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalogue, for instance, advertised a twenty-five-pound sack of popping corn, on cobs, for one dollar. The problem with buying popping corn in quantity was that storage depleted the kernels of their essential water content. Today food scientists know that if the internal moisture falls below about 12 percent, kernels open only partially or not at all. Charred, unpopped kernels are now called “duds” and are rare, which was not the case in the nineteenth century, when they were cursed as “old maids.”

The first electric corn popper in America appeared in 1907, at a time when electrical appliances were new, often large, and not always safe. A magazine advertisement for the device pointedly addresses these two drawbacks: “Of the host of electrical household utensils, the new corn popper is the daintiest of them all,” and “children can pop corn on the parlor table all day without the slightest danger or harm.”

The advent of electric popping machines, and the realization during the Depression that popcorn went a long way in stretching the family food budget, heightened the food’s popularity. But it was in the lobbies of movie theaters that popcorn became big business. By 1947, 85 percent of the nation’s theaters sold the snack, and 300,000 acres of Midwestern farmland were planted annually with Indian popping corn.

The arrival of television in the ’50s only increased Americans’ demands for corn, to pop in the kitchen between programs. A mid-decade poll showed that two out of three television watchers munched popcorn as often as four nights a week. Not all brands, though, were of equivalent quality; some yielded an annoyingly high number of duds. It was the quest to produce a high-quality popcorn that led Orville Redenbacher, a graduate in agronomy from Purdue University, to experiment with new hybrids of Indian popcorn.

Agronomy, the science and economics of crop production, was an established field of study by the 1950s, having contributed to improved management of America’s farmlands. In 1952, Redenbacher and a college friend, Charles Bowman, produced a corn whose kernels seldom failed to pop—and popped into larger, puffier morsels. But the quality hybrid was comparatively expensive, and popcorn companies that Redenbacher approached declined to sell his product, believing that snack food had to be
low-priced. Convinced that popcorn lovers hated duds as much as he did, Redenbacher began packaging his corn and selling it to retail grocers. Its quality proved worth the price, for it became America’s best-selling popcorn, contributing substantially to the 192 million pounds of corn popped annually in electric poppers, in fireplaces, and atop stoves. Today the average American consumes almost two pounds of popcorn a year.

Peanuts: 1800s, United States

As a plant, the peanut is prehistoric; as a snack food, it is comparatively modern. And its name is a misnomer, for the nugget is not a nut (which grows aboveground on trees) but a legume, a member of the bean family, and one whose seed pods grow underground.

Native to South America, peanut plants were brought from Brazil to North America—to the area that today is Virginia—centuries before Columbus’s arrival. They flourished throughout the Southeast, where they were grown mainly for feeding pigs, chickens, and turkeys. Only poor Southern families and slaves ate peanuts, which were commonly known as “goobers,” from the Bantu word
nguba
. By the 1850s, “goober” was also a derisive term for any backwoodsman from Virginia, Alabama, or Georgia, and the latter state, for its prodigious peanut crop, became known as the Goober State. It was not until the American Civil War that Northerners really got to taste peanuts.

In the 1860s, when Union forces converged on the South, thousands of hungry soldiers found themselves gladly eating a new kind of pea-size bean from an unfamiliar vine. Soldiers brought the vine,
Arachis hypogaea
, which bears yellow flowers and brittle pods, home with them, but the peanut remained little more than a culinary curiosity in the North. In the 1880s, showman P. T. Barnum began marketing peanuts in nickel-size bags at his circuses, and as Americans took to the circus, they also took to peanuts; as popcorn would become the quintessential movie snack, peanuts became part of the three-ring experience.

Peanut, as a word and a food, entered our lives in other ways. At public entertainments throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the euphemism “peanut gallery” gained currency to designate the remote seats reserved for blacks at circuses, theaters, and fairs. Not until the 1940s would the phrase, reiterated on television’s
Howdy Doody
show, gain wide recognition simply as a grandstand for children. And peanut butter was an 1890s “health food” invention of a St. Louis physician; etymologists do not find the term linked with “jelly” until the 1920s, when the classic sandwich became a national dietary mainstay.

Peanuts were introduced into China in 1889 by American missionaries, who brought along crates of the beans to fortify their conversion efforts. Each Chinese couple who submitted to Christian baptism was rewarded with a quart of peanuts, a trifling amount—or “peanuts,” a connotation
that originated in the American South in the 1830s, since blacks would work, literally, for peanuts. Once introduced into China, the new delicacy was cultivated in every province, and the peanut, around the turn of the century, became an American embellishment to traditional Oriental cuisine.

At that time, two young Italians emigrated to America and established a peanut empire that did much to popularize the bean as a nutritious snack food.

Planters Peanuts
. Amedeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi arrived from Italy and settled with friends in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, opening a small fruit and nut stand. Their roasted peanuts were popular, but manual daily cranking of the roasting machine required effort and endurance. Experimenting with motors, Obici perfected the automatic peanut roaster that became the cornerstone of his business. Billing himself as “Obici, Peanut Specialist,” he attracted customers from neighboring towns with his machine-roasted and salted nuts, and in 1906 he and his partner formed the Planters Peanut Company.

To publicize the lowly peanut, as well as to create a distinctive company trademark, in 1916 the two men sponsored a contest. The winning entry was a fourteen-year-old boy’s crayon drawing titled “Little Peanut Person.” It won the boy five dollars, and an in-house artist, adding a monocle, cane, and top hat, turned the cartoon into Mr. Peanut. The amusing figure, in capturing the public imagination, elevated the peanut to a fun food, to be enjoyed even after the circus collapsed its tent and left town.

In the South during those years, a famed agronomist at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—George Washington Carver—was popularizing the peanut through his own research and recipes, the latter including two foods that would become American firsts and standards: peanut ice cream and peanut butter cookies. Before his death in 1943, Carver created more than three hundred products from the versatile peanut and its by-products: mayonnaise, cheese, chili sauce, shampoo, bleach, axle grease, linoleum, metal polish, wood stain, adhesives, plastics, ink, dyes, shoe polish, creosote, salve, shaving cream, soap, and several kinds of peanut butter. In a short time, the goober had come a long way.

Filberts
. True nuts of the birch tree family, filberts were enjoyed by the Romans, who ate them fresh and dried. Etymologists believe the sweet-flavored nut was named by early Christians for St. Philibert, a French abbot who died in 684 and whose feast day, August 20, falls during the nut-harvesting season. The Old Norman expression for the food was
noix de filbert
, or “nut of Philibert.” Traditionally, the Britons eat filberts with figs, the Chinese with tea, while Americans have long relegated filberts to boxes of mixed nuts.

Walnuts
. The walnut’s history goes back to ancient Persia, where the two lobed seed was so rare and so highly valued that it once served as currency. Cultivation of the nut has been traced from Persia to Carthage to Rome, then throughout Europe and to the New World.

Peanuts, once animal fodder, were greatly popularized by Mr. Peanut. (Clockwise) Walnut, peanut, pistachio, and almond
.

A product of the tree of the genus
Juglans
, the walnut derived its name from a medieval British pejorative. To the British, people and things foreign to their soil were often disparaged as “Welsh.” When the first walnuts arrived in the Isles, they were initially referred to as
wealh hnutu
, “Welsh nut,” which in Middle English became
walnot
.

In America, the walnut was prized by the native Indians and the early colonists, and in seasons of surplus harvest the nuts also served as fodder for swine. Today the United States is the world’s major walnut producer, followed by France, Italy, and China.