How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun

by Josh Chetwynd

  Originally known as the “devil’s wine” (and not because of the fun it caused), the drink’s carbonation sent vintners into mad fits—or worse. You see, the bubbles in sparkling wine were the product of fluctuations in the weather. Though winemakers didn’t know it at the time, vino begins to ferment during mild weather and then stops if the weather gets too cold during the winter months. In those situations a second fermentation occurs when warm days return. This double fermentation creates a build-up of carbonation.

  The results were both physically and economically dangerous. Many winemakers wouldn’t go down into their cellars unless they were wearing an iron mask as the fear of bottles suddenly bursting was legitimate. (At one winery, three men lost eyes thanks to glass explosions.) Financially, the situation wasn’t any better. One firm started a season with 6,000 bottles only to end it with 120. In the northern Champagne region, where only their sparkling wine can be called by the famed name today, particularly cold winters followed by a second fermentation in the spring led to a great number of these bubbly explosions.

  It was so bad that most were flabbergasted by these occurrences. “These phenomena are so strange . . . that no one will ever be able to explain them,” one scientist said. “All these accidents are so varied and extraordinary that even the most experienced professional cannot foresee them or prevent them from happening.”

  A monk helped prove that man of science wrong. Pierre Pérignon came from a well-to-do family and could have followed his father into the civil service. Instead, he felt a religious calling and became a Benedictine monk. In 1668, at the age of thirty, Dom Pérignon (as he became known) took responsibility for business affairs at the Abbey of Hautvillers. Located in Champagne, Hautvillers made wine, which had once been the toast of France. But because of poorly maintained grounds, competition from elsewhere in the country, and exploding bottles, the business was in serious financial jeopardy.

  Pérignon, who would oversee the cellar until 1715, turned the venture around by applying exacting standards for all its wines—sparkling or otherwise. Many incorrectly credit Pérignon with inventing champagne. In reality he fought to keep bubbles out of his wine. Claude Möet probably deserves the most credit for creating a broad champagne market and others also played key roles in corralling the bubbles. But one essential innovation that Pérignon did bring to the area’s famed bubbly was the cork.

  One day, two Spanish monks came to stay at Hautvillers on their way to Sweden. Pérignon noticed the unique stoppers in their water jugs and asked about them. They were from the bark of trees that grew in Catalonia and proved a great way to seal bottles. Before then Pérignon was using wood pegs covered in hemp soaked in olive oil. While many historians point out that cork stoppers had been around before, Pérignon’s cork introduction to champagne—along with the creation of thicker bottles innovated in Great Britain—proved essential in holding back the carbonation, keeping not only royals but us regular people effervescent ever since.

  Coca-Cola: Headaches and prohibition

  America was in need of healing following the Civil War, and one of the unlikeliest medicines to come out of the reconstruction years was Coca-Cola. Today, we know it by its corporate ingredients—one part soft drink and one part marketing juggernaut—but back in the late nineteenth century Coca-Cola was created as a “nerve tonic” with the purpose of remedying such maladies as depression, hysteria, anxiety, and indigestion.

  The drink’s inventor, John Pemberton, probably knew a lot about the post-traumatic stress caused by the war. He’d been a cavalry officer in the Confederate army. A well-respected pharmacist by trade, he settled in Atlanta following the hostilities and began producing patent medicines. Like so many others, he was looking to make a buck by developing problem-solving products for just about any ill. “Someone in need of a hair-straightening ointment or a remedy for a cough that refused to go away might have purchased one of Pemberton’s products,” wrote Constance L. Hays in her book The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company.

  It was in this snake-oil-salesman environment that Pemberton created his secret formula for Coca-Cola in 1886. The early drink did have coca leaf extract (street name: cocaine) along with caffeine from cola nuts and heaps of sugar. Back then the narcotic was legally utilized in many goods. In truth, a syrupy elixir for all ages wasn’t his initial plan. At first Pemberton rolled out a drink called French Wine Cocoa, which had many of the same ingredients as his sweet family-friendly classic but with a major difference: It featured alcohol. Combining the ups of sugar, caffeine, and Colombian marching powder with a boozy downer produced a beverage that sold well in the southeast. But when Atlanta decreed a prohibition on alcohol in 1886, he was forced to innovate a softer drink.

  One story that’s a myth: the addition of carbonated water was an accident. In reality, sparkling water had been around for about seventy years before Pemberton’s invention—and was regularly utilized in the making of many of these tonics. Some even believed that fizzy water could cure shingles.

  So did the original Coca-Cola really have a healing value? The man who initially built Coke into a massive brand, Asa Candler, was allegedly convinced of it. As a child, he’d fallen out of a horse-drawn carriage, an accident that left him with migraine headaches. He found that Coca-Cola erased the pain. Candler was so impressed that he purchased the formula and the rights to sell the drink from Pemberton not long after its invention.

  Candler would continue to push it as a vitality-restoring wonder in the early going. “The medical properties of the Coca Plant and the extract of the celebrated African Cola Nut make it a medical preparation of great value, which the best physicians unhesitatingly endorse and recommend for mental and physical exhaustion, headache, tired feeling, mental depression, etc.,” he wrote to a Georgia doctor in an 1890 Coca-Cola sales pitch.

  If it did have restorative properties, we wouldn’t know today because while many of the original ingredients remain, cocaine, as we’re all aware, is not one of them. By the beginning of the twentieth century, narcotics were a no-go for drinks and Candler removed the drug, advertising the modification throughout the country. (Some say a minute amount of cocaine remained in the formula until the 1920s.) The decision to distance the drink from the drug was a good move as attitudes had absolutely changed. Instead of referring to Coke as a medicine, many in the South for the first few decades of the 1900s remembered its drug lineage, giving the drink a different nickname: dope.

  Coffee: Dancing goats

  Before there were perky baristas and skim latte lovers, there were goats. Yes, coffee’s pioneers were those cloven-hoofed beasts and if they could talk they would have likely asked for double-caf hold the liquid.

  The most pervasive explanation of coffee’s beginnings takes us to Ethiopia circa AD 850, where a humble goatherd named Kaldi was having headaches with his flock. Kaldi, who would cover great ground with his animals, found himself in a slightly new area one day. The goats grazed on bushes full of red-cherry-looking local beans. Clearly, Kaldi had no idea that centuries later these beans would make Starbucks billions. He was just concerned when the evening came and his goats were practically dancing around instead of taking a rest. (This probably shouldn’t be surprising as studies have shown that a single cup of coffee two hours before bedtime can more than double the time it takes for an average adult to fall asleep; one can only imagine what gnawing on the actual beans did to these four-legged friends.)

  Perplexed by his flock’s late-night activity, Kaldi showed the beans to either (depending who you believe) members of a local monastery or a group of traveling monks, who were resting in the same area. Whomever he gave the berries to, they loved their pick-me-up qualities and began experimenting, leading to the invention of coffee.

  Like most of these early tales, it’s hard to know where truth and myth diverge. It’s safe to say that religious figures, like those in Kaldi’s story, played a role in the spread of the drink. Priests and monks found that
coffee’s properties helped keep them sharp during long religious ceremonies. Moreover, coffee emerged as a popular drink in the Islamic world, where stimulating alcoholic drinks were banned.

  The first written mention of coffee as a drink came from an Arabic physician named Rhazes in the tenth century. The drink’s popularity picked up in the thirteenth century when farmers in Yemen began cultivating the beans, roasting them, and giving the brew the name Qahwah (or Kahweh), an old Arabic term for wine.

  If dancing goats are a bit too much to take, there is another accidental coffee story that is on far more solid ground. Well, in reality, it is far more about the ocean than solid ground. Ludwig Roselius was a successful German coffee magnate, buying beans from around the world. In 1903, he received some bad news: A shipment from Latin America had gotten waterlogged on its long voyage.

  Instead of throwing out the soaked beans, Roselius directed his researchers to conduct experiments to consider the salt water’s impact. Much to everyone’s surprise between the salt water and a process of pressurized steaming to extract the brine, nearly all of the caffeine was removed from the beans. Based on that discovery (plus other breakthroughs using solvents), Roselius brought the first decaffeinated coffee to market. Sanka, which was named after the French combination of sans and caffeine, was introduced to the American market in 1923, leaving people and goats alike in the United States an option for a hot drink before a good night’s sleep.

  Cognac: Savvy Dutch merchants

  For many, the only type of brandy that will do is cognac. Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill were believers in its superior quality. Made in France’s Charente region, cognac was also the civilized drink of choice when it came time for opposing leaders to toast the armistice following the peace treaty signing that ended World War I.

  As sophisticated as it may be—and as much as some might call its creation an art form—the birth of cognac can be directly attributed to a lucky business decision made by some of the most adroit traders centuries ago.

  The concept of distilling alcohol is one that dates back to antiquity. The Moors are widely acknowledged as having developed the process in the seventh and eighth centuries. As devout Muslims, they weren’t much for partying. Instead, they used their stills to produce medicinal spirits and perfumes.

  Nevertheless, distilling became known throughout Europe and could be called upon to brew up some hard-drinking concoctions. Here’s where the Dutch join the story and unwittingly helped elevate the process to a rarefied level.

  Dutch merchants were among the most successful traders in the sixteenth century. Their game plan included encouraging local suppliers to focus on a single crop, helping those producers with techniques to improve yields and offering fair terms for purchase. When it came to wine, they knew where to go: Bordeaux. This region of France was a premier spot to purchase what was an essential commodity throughout the world.

  As much as they were helpful partners, the Dutch traders were also realists. The wine in Bordeaux was good, but local government charged pricey tariffs for shipping the drink out of its port. The Dutch probably crunched the numbers and decided to move on. They went about sixty miles north to Charente and centered their wine trade on the town of Cognac. It didn’t matter that wine produced in this area was considered pretty awful. It was cheap and the local port was duty free. There was also the benefit of large local salt deposits, which offered another commodity to load onto their ships.

  The next obstacle the Dutch faced was maximizing their haul. Again, they had an answer. Rather than loading excessive barrels of wine, they would cut down on the volume of the vino. Their plan was simple: burn off (or distill) water from the wine, leaving less liquid to store on board. As wine typically didn’t travel well, this would have the added bonus of keeping the already subpar alcohol fresher on the voyage.

  At first, they planned to reintroduce water to the concentrated alcohol when they arrived at their destinations, but the merchants shifted gears after tasting the condensed spirit. It was far better than the cheap wine. The Dutch called the new product brandewijn or “burnt wine.” The English, who were regular buyers of Dutch goods, anglicized the moniker to “brandy wine” and in the end called it “brandy.”

  Within the next century, a second key component to cognac’s development occurred: the introduction of double distillation, which smoothed out the drink’s flavor while keeping the alcohol content high. Charente lore attributes double distillation to a knight named Jacques de la Croix Maron. Returning from a crusade in the first half of the 1600s, the knight found his wife in bed with a neighbor and killed them both. Apparently, that was okay with the local folk, but it did trouble the knight’s conscience (you don’t say?). He began having a reoccurring dream that he was burned alive twice in Hell. The knight decided that he needed to burn something that he loved twice in order to rid himself of his guilt. He chose his beloved wine and the result was the double-distilled cognac. Personally, I’m not betting on this story’s veracity. Couldn’t he have come up with something a little more precious? And why did the knight end up on top following a double homicide?

  In actuality, double distillation was probably the invention of a smart businessman who was looking for a competitive advantage. As for the Dutch, they continued to make sharp moves with the liquor. In 1652 they purchased a large swath of land on the Cape of Good Hope, including what would become Cape Town, for some Virginian tobacco and a few barrels of cognac.

  Gibson Martini: Wry bartender, ingenious diplomat, or San Francisco pride

  The Gibson martini is an incredibly minor variation on a theme. It gets a special name, even though it’s essentially a standard martini with one notable exception—instead of an olive or lemon peel garnish, a pickled pearl onion or two is used. (Sorry to hardcore Gibson boosters; I realize you may recoil at that assessment.)

  If you do love the onion, you’re probably drinking the Gibson because one tastemaking man was a bit bored at a bar one evening. Charles Dana Gibson was an illustrator and arbiter of chic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His Gibson Girl sketches of an attractive statuesque woman, which appeared in such trendsetting magazines as Life and Harper’s, were considered the feminine ideal of the time.

  Along with drawing fine women, Gibson also liked the finer things in life. To that end, he was a regular patron of The Players, a New York club for the ultra cool in Gibson’s day. At the time of Gibson’s great fame, the man behind the bar was Charles Connolly. Not one to be star-struck, the Irish-born Connolly had served as a confidant for a broad spectrum of luminaries from the great satirist Mark Twain to the esteemed actor John Barrymore. He was congenial, gregarious, and known for his warm smile so it makes sense that Gibson also had an affinity for him.

  One day Gibson came into The Players, saddled up to the bar, and was keen for something out of the ordinary. Chatting up Connolly, Gibson challenged the barkeep to improve upon the already unassailable martini. Showing a sense of humor as dry as the drink, Connolly simply subbed out the olive for an onion and named it after the famous patron.

  While this is the most common account of the cocktail’s origin, other versions do exist. One features the onion as a decoy. In this story, a different Gibson, an American diplomat named Hugh Gibson, didn’t want to get drunk while colleagues and foreign dignitaries boozed. As a result, he got bartenders to pour him water in a martini glass on the sly and substitute the olive with the onion so that he could tell which one was his nonalcoholic drink. The iconic Joy of Cooking said Gibson pulled the stunt because he “found himself obliged to attend a stupefying number of cocktail parties.” Most martini-ologists believe this is a tall tale.

  Then there’s a San Francisco fellow named Walter D. K. Gibson, who has received tribute for the drink’s invention by a number of Bay Area writers. There is evidence to support that this Gibson did invent an eponymous cocktail, but it’s worth noting that even if this West Coast Gibson came first (Walter appar
ently came up with his drink in the 1890s), it didn’t include the all-important onion.

  All this points back to Charles Dana Gibson, whose fame likely led to the spread of Connolly’s onion-inspired work. One would think that only the clout of a man like the illustrator Gibson could have turned such a small substitution into a world-renowned drink.

  Irish Coffee: Dangerous flight

  Joe Sheridan kept it simple when he applied for a job in 1943 at the Foynes Flying Boat Base near Shannon, Ireland. “Dear Sir,” the application letter went, “I’m the man for the job. Yours sincerely, Joe Sheridan.” He didn’t know just how right he was. Within no time, Sheridan, who amazingly did get the position, would capitalize on a blustery evening to create one of St. Patrick’s Day’s most popular libations—the Irish coffee.

  Sheridan’s new job was working at the cafe on base. But this was no ordinary bar and restaurant. Although Ireland was officially neutral during World War II, the country clandestinely ferried high-level Allied VIPs and military personnel on long-haul flights from Europe to a number of locations, including the United States and Canada. Between German fighters and inclement weather, this was not an easy run. Winston Churchill once flew out of Foynes during the war and nearly had to make an emergency sea landing because of a particularly grueling storm.

  It was a night similar to the one Churchill faced that led Sheridan to his delicious and bracing combination of Power’s Irish Whiskey, coffee, sugar, and a dollop of cream on top. Late one winter night in 1943, a plane set out from Foynes to Botwood, Newfoundland, but ran into bad weather. By one account the flight was five hours into its journey when it was forced to turn around and return to the air base. The pilot alerted the Foynes control tower and staff was asked to come back to cater to the passengers who would undoubtedly be weary from ten hours of flying.