Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  As it dawned on townspeople that breakfast cereals were awfully easy to make, imitators sprang up. Soon, it appears, almost everyone in town was at it. By the turn of the century at least forty-four companies in Battle Creek were churning out breakfast cereals with names like Grip Nuts, Hello-Billo, Malt-Ho, Flake-Ho, Korn Kure, Tryabita, Tryachewa, Oatsina, Food of Eden and Orange Meat (which, like Grape-Nuts, contained none of the implied ingredients).18 Without exception these products were sold as health foods.*25 Each packet of Grape-Nuts contained an illustrated leaflet, The Road to Wellville, explaining how a daily dose of the enclosed toasted wheat and barley granules would restore depleted brain and nerve cells, and build strong red blood. For a short but deliriously exciting time fortunes were there for the taking. A Methodist preacher named D. D. Martin cooked up some healthful goop on the kitchen stove, dubbed it Per-Fo and immediately sold the formula for $100,000. Curiously almost the only person in Battle Creek unable to capitalize on Kellogg’s invention was Kellogg himself. Not until 1907, when he at last brought to market his cornflakes, did he begin to get the credit and wealth his invention merited.

  Preoccupation with health-enhancing qualities became a theme for all manner of foods. Moxie, known for its soft drinks, was founded in 1885 as the Moxie Nerve Food Company of Boston, and Dr Pepper, founded in the same year, was so called not because the name was catchy but because it sounded sternly healthful. For a time, it seemed that no food product could hope to sell unless it dealt vigorously with a range of human frailties. Quaker Oats claimed to curb nervousness and constipation. Fleischmann’s Yeast not only soothed frayed nerves and loosed the bowels, but also dealt vigorously with indigestion, skin disorders, tooth decay, obesity and a vague but ominous-sounding disorder called ‘fallen stomach’. Fleischmann’s kept up these sweeping claims – occasionally added to them – until ordered to desist by the Federal Trade Commission in 1938 on the grounds that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support any of them.19

  Against such a background it is little wonder that Americans turned with a certain enthusiasm to junk food. The term junk food didn’t enter the American vocabulary until 1973, but the concept was there long before, and it began with one of the great breakthroughs in food history: the development of a form of edible solid chocolate.

  Though a New World food (the Mayas and Aztecs so prized it that they used cocoa beans as money), chocolate took a long time to become a central part of the American diet. Not until just before the Revolution did it become known in colonial America, and then only as a drink. At first chocolate was so exotic that it was spelled and pronounced in a variety of ways – chockolatta, chuchaletto, chocholate, chockolatto – before finally settling in the late eighteenth century into something close to the original Nahuatl Indian word, xocólatl. Chocolate came from the cacao tree, which somehow became transliterated into English as cocoa (pronounced at first with three syllables: co-co-a).20 The chocolate bar was invented in England in the 1840s and milk chocolate in Switzerland some thirty years later, but neither became popular in America until Milton Stavely Hershey gave the world the nickel Hershey bar in 1903. (The price would stay a nickel for the next sixty-seven years, but only at a certain palpable cost to the bar’s dimensions. Just in the quarter-century following World War II, the bar shrank a dozen times, until by 1970, when it was beginning to look perilously like an after-dinner mint, the bar was reinvigorated in size and the price raised accordingly.)

  As is so often the case with American entrepreneurs, Milton Hershey was an unlikely success. His formal education ended with the fourth grade and he spent decades as a struggling, small-time candy maker before suddenly and unexpectedly striking it rich in middle age with caramels, a new sensation that swept the country in the late nineteenth century.

  In 1900 he sold his caramel business for $1 million – this at a time when $ 10 was a good weekly wage – and turned his attentions to the still fairly novel process of making milk chocolate. This new venture was such a huge and instantaneous success that within three years he was able to embark on building his own model community, complete with streets named Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, near his birthplace of Derry Church in central Pennsylvania. Among the names Hershey considered for the new town were Ulikit, Chococoa City, and Qualitytells, but eventually he decided on Hersheykoko. For reasons lost to history, the postal authorities refused to countenance the name and he was forced to settle on the more mundane, but unquestionably apt, name of Hershey. As well as the world’s largest chocolate factory, the town of Hershey boasted several parks, a boating lake, a museum, a zoo, a professional ice hockey team and the usual complement of banks, stores and offices, all owned by Mr Hershey. Hershey ran the town as a private fiefdom. He prowled the streets looking for malingering municipal workers, whom he would instantly dismiss, and personally supervised (with a certain presumed keenness) the censoring of movies at the local bijou. But he also engaged in many charitable works, most notably the building of one of the world’s largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere) and endowing it with most of his fortune, some $66 million (today worth $1.7 billion).

  The first true candy bar – that is, one containing ingredients additional to chocolate – was the Squirrel Brand peanut bar introduced in 1905. But the golden age of candy bars was the 1920s. Several classics made their début in that busy decade – the Oh Henry! and Baby Ruth bars in 1920, the Milky Way and Butterfingers in 1923, Mr Goodbar in 1925, Snickers in 1930. The Baby Ruth, originally called the Kandy Kake, was not, as is often supposed, named for the baseball player – in 1920 Babe Ruth had only just joined the New York Yankees and the bulk of his celebrity lay before him – but for the daughter of President Grover Cleveland. This bonny infant had indeed captured America’s heart and gained the affectionate sobriquet Baby Ruth, but that had been more than twenty years earlier, so the choice of her nickname for a candy bar in 1920 was a trifle odd. Still, it was perhaps no odder than Oh Henry!, named for a fresh-faced youth whose droll quips to the girls at the George Williamson candy factory in Chicago provoked the constant cry, ‘Oh, Henry!’

  Among the many hundreds of other candy bars loosed on a willing nation during the decade were Big Dearos, Fat Emmas, the Milk Nut Loaf and the intriguing Vegetable Sandwich. Made of chocolate-covered vegetables it was sold with the solemn assurance that ‘it will not constipate’. As might have been predicted, constipation was not a compelling consideration among America’s children and the Vegetable Sandwich soon disappeared from the scene. Equally improbable, I would have thought, was the Chicken Dinner candy bar, so called because it was supposed to engender the feeling of well-being provided by a steaming roast chicken dinner. Though few people were able to make the leap of imagination necessary to equate a five-cent chocolate peanut roll with a well-balanced meal, the Chicken Dinner sold well and survived into the 1960s. Curiously, none of these products was known as a candy bar. The term is not recorded in print until 1943.

  The 1920s saw the birth of many other well-loved snack foods, including such perennial mainstays of the American diet as the Good Humor bar in 1920, the Eskimo Pie a year later, Popsicles in 1924, Milk Duds in 1926, and Dubble Bubble Gum in 1928. This last was invented by Frank H. Fleer, whose earlier bubble gum, Blibber-Blubber, was something of a failure – it tended to dissolve in the mouth but to stick tenaciously to everything else, including Junior’s face, when popped – but who had made a fortune with an earlier invention, Chiclets.

  All of these, however, paled in comparison with a dietary behemoth that emerged from the shadows in the 1920s and took its place at the top of the table. I refer of course to the hamburger.

  No one knows where the first hamburger was made. The presumption has always been that it came to America from Hamburg, Germany, in the same way that the frankfurter came from Frankfurt and that baloney hailed from Bologna. However, this overlooks the niggling consideration that Hamburg has never had any tradition of serving such a di
sh. Given its central role in the American diet, the evidence as to when the hamburger first appeared and why it was so called is vexingly uncertain, though there is no shortage of claimants for the title. Among the more insistent, if not necessarily most likely, contenders have been the towns of Seymour, Wisconsin, and Hamburg, New York, both of which claim to have been the birthplace of the hamburger in 1885. Seymour attributes the invention to one Charles Nagreen and unequivocally advertises itself as the ‘Home of the Hamburger’, though its supporters tend to grow quiet when asked to explain on what basis Nagreen chose to commemorate a distant German city. More plausible, on the face of it, would appear to be the claim of Hamburg, New York, whose proponents believe that it was the inspired creation of the brothers Frank and Charles Menches, who developed it at the Erie County Fair in 1885.

  Unfortunately for both claims, the etymological evidence suggests an earlier birth for the name, if not the dish. There is some evidence to suggest that it may have appeared as ‘Hamburg steak’ on a Delmonico’s menu as early as 1836 or 1837. The first undisputed sighting has been traced to the Boston Journal of 16 February 1884, which wrote in passing, ‘We take a chicken and boil it. When it is cold we cut it up as they do meat to make a Hamburg steak.’ As so often happens with first citations, the context makes it clear that by this time the dish was already well known. Unfortunately, it also indicates that it was a different dish from the one we know today, involving as it did beef cut up rather than ground, and eaten cold. What is certain is that the Hamburg steak was widely called hamburger steak by 1889 (the first reference was in a newspaper in Walla Walla, Washington, suggesting that by this time it was eaten nationwide). That term in turn was being shortened to hamburger by 1901, by which time it had come to signify a patty of ground beef fried on a grill.

  But it was still not a sandwich. It was, rather, a lump of ground beef served bare and eaten with a knife and fork. Who first had the idea of serving it in a bun is unknown and essentially unprovable, though once again there is no shortage of claimants. One such is Louis’ Lunch of New Haven, Connecticut, which claims to have invented the true article in 1900, though some purists dismiss Louis’ on the grounds that it served its burgers (indeed still does) on toasted bread rather than buns. Kaelin’s Restaurant in Louisville, meanwhile, claims to have concocted and named the first cheeseburger in 1934, and I have no doubt that there are many other places around the country making similar heartfelt assertions. At all events, we can safely say that by about 1910 the object that we now know and venerate as the hamburger was widely consumed and universally known by that name. In its early years the hamburger was often regarded by short-order cooks as a convenient way of passing off old or doubtful meat, and by its consumers, in consequence, as an item to be approached with caution. Not until 1921, with the rise of two entrepreneurs in Wichita, Kansas, did the hamburger begin to take its first vigorous strides towards respectability. The men in question were a former insurance executive named E. W. ‘Billy’ Ingram and a short-order cook named Walter A. Anderson, and their brilliant stroke was to offer the world decent hamburgers using fresh meat. Not much fresh meat, mind you. Their steam-fried hamburgers cost a nickel and weren’t much larger. Ingram and Anderson managed to squeeze eighteen hamburgers from a pound of ground beef, significantly less than one ounce each. None the less, people were soon flocking to their tiny cubicle, built of rock-faced concrete shaped vaguely, and a little preposterously, in the image of a castle. They called it White Castle because, they explained, white symbolized purity and cleanliness, and castle suggested permanence and stability.

  Anderson and Ingram hit on three novelties that sealed their success and have been the hallmarks of fast-food service ever since. They offered a limited menu, which promoted quick service and allowed them to concentrate on what they were good at; they kept their premises spotless, which encouraged confidence in their hygienic integrity; and they employed a distinctive, eye-catching design for the building, which made it instantly recognizable from blocks away. Soon there were White Castles all over the country and a following throng of eager imitators – White Tower, White Diamond, Royal Castle and White Crest – some of which survive to this day. The age of fast food was with us, though no one would know it as such for another thirty years. The expression fast food first appeared in 1954. Takeout food was even slower to arrive; its first recorded appearance is not until 1962.21

  Before we part temporarily from the delights of hand-held comestibles, two other linguistic novelties of the early 1900s need mentioning. The first is hot dog. Memorably defined by H. L. Mencken as ‘a cartridge filled with the sweepings of abattoirs’, the hot dog had been part of the American scene since the early 1800s, but had gone under the name of frankfurter or wienerwurst (literally ‘Vienna sausage’, and corrupted to wienie as early as 1867). The modern name didn’t arise until a popular cartoonist named T. A. ‘Tad’ Dorgan drew a picture of a dachshund in an elongated bun in the early 1900s and the term caught on in a big way. It was also helped by the fact that the catch-phrase Hot dog! as a cry of delight or approbation was also sweeping the nation.

  Dorgan was responsible for a slew of catch-phrases, among them cat’s pyjamas, yes man, skiddoo, you said it, drugstore cowboy and yes, we have no bananas, which he had picked up from an Italian fruit-seller and used in one of his cartoons. It became a national catch-phrase (one wonders how anyone found a context in which to employ it) and was soon set to music loosely plagiarized from ‘I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ and became a national sensation.22 (It is striking how many words have come into American English through comic strips. Heebie-jeebies, hot mama, hotsy-totsy, bodacious and horsefeathers were all either coined or popularized by W. B. ‘Billy’ DeBeck in his comic strips involving the characters Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Hooligan was popularised by the comic strip ‘Happy Hooligan’. Keeping up with the Joneses was an expression inspired by a comic strip by I. Bacheller begun in 1911. ‘Popeye’ popularized goon and jeep.)

  At about the time that the hot dog was taking its place in the language, another much-loved snack came to prominence: the ice-cream cone. Its invention is commonly traced to the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair. According to one story (and there are many to choose from), a waffle vendor and ice-cream seller were stationed side by side on the grand concourse and discovered that if they combined their products they could not only produce an appealing and portable treat but one that also eliminated the trouble, expense and hygienic uncertainty of having to supply dishes and spoons. Unfortunately for this story, the ice-cream cone already existed in 1904. A patent had been taken out a decade earlier by an Italian-American named Italo Marchiony. The ice-cream cone may have become popular at the fair – though that in itself is by no means certain – but it wasn’t invented there. In any case, the term is not recorded in general usage before 1909.

  II

  And on to drinking. One of the more enduring misconceptions concerning the Puritans in America is that they abjured alcohol. In fact, they liked a good drink or even a not-so-good one. One of the more popular tipples of early America, especially at weddings and other big social occasions, was sack posset, a concoction made by combining any handy intoxicant, usually ale or wine, with thick dots of curdled milk, which may explain why no one drinks it any longer. The sack in the name has nothing to do with a cloth container, incidentally. It is a corruption of the Latin siccus, meaning dry.

  If colonial Americans were not adventurous eaters, they were happy to take their drinks from almost anywhere. The international pedigree of drinking terminology is evidenced by, among many others, julep, from the Arabic julab; sangría (often called san garee in eighteenth-century America), from the Spanish word for blood; toddy from Hindi tārē or tārē, a kind of palm tree sap; and beer, from the Germanic bēor (and ultimately from the Latin bibere, ’to drink’).

  The early colonists showed a particular fondness for blending odd ingredients – eggs with milk and beer, for instance – and
employed a variety of names to describe the result: mum, perry, switchel, metheglin, egg pop, balderdash (from which comes our word for nonsense), cherry bounce, any number of flips, and cock ale. This last named – a somewhat less than beguiling mixture of chicken soup and beer – is sometimes cited as the source for cocktail. Though cocktail is indubitably an Americanism – its first known appearance was in a newspaper in Hudson, New York, in 1806 – its similarity to cock ale is probably coincidental. Cock ale was never a popular drink – even in that adventurous age few thought of chicken soup as a distinguished addition to the punch bowl – and there is no known link between the two words. So where then does cocktail come from? According to Flexner, the term ‘almost certainly’ evolved ftom the French coquetier, or egg-cup, after a New Orleans apothecary who dispensed concoctions in egg-cups. Other, more literal-minded observers suggest that it has some connection with the tail of a rooster, though quite why the tail of a rooster would suggest a potent beverage is anyone’s guess. A more ambitious and almost certainly fanciful theory is that the cocktail was invented for the daughter of King Oxolotl VIII of Mexico. Her name was Xochitl, which the Spanish translated as Coctel.23 The word also bears a striking, but apparently coincidental, resemblance to a word from the Krio language of Sierra Leone, kaktel, meaning a scorpion, a creature with a notorious sting in its tail. One possibility that seems not to have been considered by any authority, so far as I can tell, is that it might refer to a stiff drink’s capacity to make one’s tail cock up. Applied to horses, the word took on that sense in England at almost exactly the time that it first appeared in a drinking context in America. At all events for most of its early life cocktail didn’t have the whiff of sophisticated refinement now associated with it. In the 1820s, a Kentucky breakfast was defined as ‘three cocktails and a chew of terbacker’.24