Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  Pie: 5th Century B.C., Greece

  Although baking bread and confections began in ancient Egypt, there is no evidence that civilization’s first bakers ever stumbled on the idea of stuffing a dough shell with meat, fish, or fruit. That culinary advance was made in ancient Greece, where the artocreas, a hash-meat pie with only a bottom crust, endured for centuries. Two features distinguished those early pies from today’s: They had no top crust, and fillings were never fruit or custard, but meat or fish.

  The first pies made with two layers of crust were baked by the Romans. Cato the Elder, a second-century B.C. Roman statesman who wrote a treatise on farming, De Agricultura, loved delicacies and recorded a recipe for his era’s most popular pie, placenta. Rye and wheat flour were used in the crust; the sweet, thick filling consisted of honey, spices, and cheese made from sheep’s milk; and the pie was coated with oil and baked atop aromatic bay leaves.

  The first Western reference to a fruit pie—and a true dessert pie—appears surprisingly late in history: during the sixteenth-century reign of England’s Elizabeth I. Though home bakers may have used fruits such as apples and peaches, it is known that the queen requested pitted and preserved cherries as substitutions for the traditional fillings of meat or fish. Before the Elizabethan era, “pie” meant “meat pie,” a meal’s main course. The word’s antecedent, pi, referred to any confusing jumble or mixture of things: meats to the early Britons, and to the earlier Greeks, a perplexing and endless array of digits generated by dividing a circle’s circumference by its diameter.

  Once the dessert fruit pie appeared, its references and fillings proliferated. Interestingly (perhaps following the queen’s lead), the preferred fillings initially were not cut fruits but berries, a 1610s British favorite being the dark-blue hurtleberry, which resembles a blueberry but has ten nutlike seeds; in America by 1670, it was called the huckleberry, the basis for huckleberry pie and the quintessentially American name of an adventure-some boy surnamed Finn.

  Cookie: 3rd Century B.C., Rome

  Today’s cookies are crisp or chewy, round or oval, plain or studded with nuts, raisins, and/or chocolate chips. In the ancient past, such options did not exist; a cookie was a thin unleavened wafer, hard, square, bland, and “twice baked.” Its origin and evolution are evident in its names throughout history.

  The cookie began in Rome around the third century B.C. as a wafer-like biscuit—bis coctum in Latin, literally “twice baked,” signifying its reduced moisture compared to that of bread or cake. To soften the wafer, Romans often dipped it in wine.

  But it was precisely the wafer’s firmness and crispness that earned it the echoic Middle English name craken, “to resound,” for on breaking, it “crackled.” The craken became the “cracker,” which in concept is considerably closer to the modern food the Roman cookie most closely resembled. Though neither the bis coctum nor the craken would satisfy a sweet craving, both were immensely popular foods in the ancient world because their low moisture content served effectively as a preservative, extending their home shelf life. As pies for centuries were meat pies, cookies were plain biscuits; sweetness did not become a cookie hallmark until after the Middle Ages.

  The modern connotation of “cookie” is believed to have derived from a small, sweet Dutch wedding cake known as koekje, a diminutive of koek, Dutch for a full-sized “cake.” Made in numerous variations and never “twice baked,” the sweeter, softer, moister koekje, etymologists claim, at least gave us the words “cooky” and “cookie,” and probably the dessert itself.

  In America, “cooky” and “cookie” became vernacularisms in the early 1700s. But the written history of the sweet remained scant compared to that of other foods, primarily because cookies did not become truly popular—and certainly not brand-name sweet temptations—until about a hundred years ago. As we’ll see, several of those early commercial successes are still selling today.

  Animal Cookies: 1890s, England

  For Christmas 1902, thousands of American children received a new and edible toy: animal-shaped cookies in a small rectangular box imprinted to resemble a circus cage. The box’s string handle made it easy to carry and suitable as a play purse, but the white string had been added by National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) to encourage parents to hang the boxes of Animal Crackers as decorative Christmas tree gifts.

  The design of the animal cookies had originated in England in the 1890s, but the American manufacturer displayed advertising genius with the package design. Labeled “Barnum’s Animals” in the decade when P. T. Barnum was popularizing the “Greatest Show on Earth,” the box immediately captured the imaginations of children and adults. And whereas British animal crackers came in only a handful of shapes, the American menagerie boasted a circus of seventeen different creatures (though the cookies came in eighteen distinct shapes): bison, camel, cougar, elephant, giraffe, gorilla, hippopotamus, hyena, kangaroo, lion, monkey, rhinoceros, seal, sheep, tiger, zebra, and sitting bear. The eighteenth shape was a walking bear.

  Although a box of Animal Crackers contained twenty-two cookies, no child that Christmas of 1902 or thereafter was guaranteed a full representation of the zoo. This was because the machine-filled boxes could randomly contain, say, a caravan of camels and a laugh of hyenas but not so much as a lone kangaroo.

  The randomness added an element of expectancy to a gift box of Animal Crackers, a plus the company had not foreseen. And soon parents were writing to Nabisco and revealing another unanticipated phenomenon (either trivial or of deep psychological import): Children across America nibbled away at the animals in a definite order of dismemberment: back legs, fore-legs, head, and lastly the body.

  Fig Newton. Whereas the shapes of Animal Crackers made them a novelty and a success, there was another cookie of the same era that caught the imaginations of Americans for its originality of concept.

  In 1892, a Philadelphia inventor named James Mitchell devised a machine that extruded dough in a firm wraparound sandwich that could hold a filling—but a filling of what? Mitchell approached the Kennedy Biscuit Works in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and after testing his machine, they decided in 1895 to manufacture a stuffed cookie containing the company’s first and most successful jam: figs. The snack’s name generated debate. Management agreed it should include the word “fig” and, for local marketing purposes, the familiar name of a nearby town. “Fig Bostons” and “Fig Shrewsburys” did not sound as appealing as the suggestion made by an employee who lived in Newton, Massachusetts. Thus was named the newest sweet in American cookie jars at the turn of the century.

  Oreo. Following the success of Animal Crackers, Nabisco attempted several other cookie creations. Two of them were to be eaten once and forgotten; one would become the world’s all-time favorite seller.

  On April 2, 1912, an executive memo to plant managers announced the company’s intentions: “We are preparing to offer to the trade three entirely new varieties of the highest class biscuit.” The memo predicted superior sales for two of the cookies. One, the “Mother Goose Biscuit,” would be an imaginative variation on the company’s successful Animal Crackers, “A biscuit bearing impressions of the Mother Goose legends.” How could Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella cookies fail? (No one questioned if there was something macabre in cannibalizing beloved little girls, or stopped to consider which appendages children would eat first.)

  The second cookie with great expectations was, according to the memo, “a delicious, hard, sweet biscuit of beautiful design” exotically named “Veronese.” The third new entry would consist of “two beautifully embossed, chocolate flavored wafers with a rich cream filling,” to be named the “Oreo Biscuit.” Relatively few people ever got to taste a “Mother Goose” or a “Veronese,” but from Nabisco’s soaring sales figures, it appeared that every American was eating Oreos. Today the cookie outsells all others worldwide, more than five billion being consumed each year in the United States alone.

  From its original name of �
�Oreo Biscuit,” the cookie became the “Oreo Creme Sandwich,” and in 1974, the “Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie.” What no archivist at Nabisco knows with certainty is the origin of the term Oreo. Two educated guesses have been offered: that the first chairman of the National Biscuit Company, Adolphus Green, coined the word from oros, Greek for “mountain,” since the cookie as originally conceived was to have a peaked, mountain-like top; or that the name was suggested by the French for “gold,” or, since on the original package, the cookie’s name was scrolled in gold letters.

  Graham Cracker: 1830s, New England

  The graham cracker originated as a health food, and in Britain it is still known as a “digestive biscuit.” It is also probably the only cookie or cracker to have sprung from a faddish health craze and religious movement, Grahamism, which swept New England in the 1820s and 1830s.

  The Reverend Sylvester Graham was a Connecticut eccentric, congenitally prone to poor health. He married his nurse and became a self-styled physician and temperance leader, preaching impassioned lectures on white bread’s evils, nutritional and spiritual. Derided by Ralph Waldo Emerson as the “poet of bran,” the Reverend Graham did advocate many healthful things, if fanatically: little consumption of oil; no red meat, alcohol, or refined flour; frequent bathing and exercise; and brushing the teeth daily. He believed that the way to bodily health and spiritual salvation lay in diet, and his disciples, “Grahamites,” in accordance with his philosophy of “Grahamology,” followed a strict vegetarian diet, drank only water, and slept with windows open even in winter.

  His teachings against commercial breads, cereals, and flour—in favor of coarse bran—incurred the wrath of New England bakers. They frequently harassed Graham on speaking tours and picketed outside his hotels. In 1837, he published a treatise urging Americans to eat only home-baked breads, pastries, and crackers, and his name became associated with a variety of unprocessed products: graham flour, graham cereal, and the graham cracker. Eventually, bakers adopted a more conciliatory attitude, and capitalizing on Graham’s popularity, they, too, offered a line of whole-wheat goods, including the graham cracker.

  Due to Grahamism, a new breakfast trend developed in America. One of the Reverend Graham’s New York followers, Dr. James Caleb Jackson, advocated cold breakfast cereal, a bold reversal of the traditional hot morning gruel, but one that quickly caught on. The food would not become a true American tradition, however, until the 1890s, when another health-conscious physician, Dr. John Kellogg, who breakfasted daily on seven graham crackers, created his own “Battle Creek health foods,” the first being Granola, followed in 1907 by Corn Flakes. The prototype of packaged cold cereals was Dr. James Caleb Jackson’s own effort, Granula, a “granular” bran whose name was a compression of “Graham” and “bran.” As for “Dr.” Sylvester Graham, despite a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, and high-fiber diet, he remained a sickly man and died at age fifty-seven.

  Chocolate Chip Cookie: Post-1847, United States

  Although history does not unambiguously record the origin of the chocolate chip cookie, we can be certain that there was no such confection prior to 1847, for before that time, chocolate existed only as a liquid or a powder, not as a solid.

  The route to the chocolate chip cookie began in Mexico around 1000 B.C. The Aztecs brewed a chocolate ceremonial drink, xocoatl, meaning “bitter water,” made from pulverized indigenous cocoa beans. In the Nahuatl dialects of Mexico, xocoatl became chocolatl. Spaniards introduced the New World drink to Europe, where chocolate remained a beverage until 1828. That year, a Netherlands confectioner, C. J. Van Houten, attempting to produce a finer chocolate powder that would more readily mix with milk or water, discovered the cocoa bean’s creamy butter. In 1847, the British confection firm of Fry and Sons produced the world’s first solid eating chocolate. Chocolate chips became a reality; the cookie a possibility.

  Legend has it that the first chocolate chip cookies were baked around 1930 at the Toll House Inn, on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts.

  Built in 1708 as a tollgate for travelers halfway between Boston and New Bedford, the house was purchased in the late 1920s by a New England woman, Ruth Wakefield, and renovated as an inn. In her role of resident cook and baker, Mrs. Wakefield added chocolate pieces to her basic butter cookies, creating the Toll House Inn cookie, which would become a national product. For chocolate bits, Mrs. Wakefield laboriously diced the Nestle Company’s large Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar. The company, impressed with her recipe, requested permission to print it on the chocolate bar’s wrapper, in exchange for supplying Mrs. Wakefield with a lifetime supply of free chocolate.

  For almost a decade, housewives and professional bakers had to hand-dice Nestle’s chocolate bars to make Toll House cookies. To ease the chore, the company scored the bar and even sold a special chopper. Finally, in 1939, with Toll House cookies a national craze, Americans were introduced to Morsels, the commercially packaged chocolate chip, an innovation that further popularized the cookie and became its generic name. From bis coctum to craken to chocolate chip, the cookie had come a long way.

  Doughnut: 16th Century, Holland

  For over two hundred fifty years, doughnuts, which originated with Dutch bakers, did not have holes in the center; the hole was an American modification that, once introduced, redefined the shape of the pastry.

  The deep-fried batter doughnut originated in sixteenth-century Holland, where it was known as an olykoek, or “oil cake,” named for its high oil content. Made with sweetened dough and sometimes sugared, the oil cake was brought to America by Pilgrims who had learned to make the confection during their stay in Holland in the first two decades of the 1600s. Small, the size of a walnut, the round oil cake in New England acquired the name “dough nut,” while a related long twisted Dutch pastry of fried egg batter became known as the cruller, from the Dutch krullen, “curl.”

  The hole in the doughnut’s center appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, the independent creation of the Pennsylvania Dutch and, farther east, a New England sailor. Hanson Gregory, a sea captain from Maine, is said to have poked holes in his mother’s doughnuts in 1847, for the practical reason (also stated by the Pennsylvania Dutch) that the increased surface area allowed for more uniform frying and eliminated the pastry’s soggy center. Today Hanson Gregory’s contribution of the hole is remembered in his hometown of Rockport, Maine, by a bronze plaque, suggesting that in America, fame can be achieved even for inventing nothing.

  Chewing Gum: 1860s, Staten Island, New York

  The action of chewing gum, through exercising the muscles of the jaw, relieves facial tension, which in turn can impart a general feeling of bodily relaxation. Gum is part of the U.S. Armed Forces’ field and combat rations, and soldiers consume gum at a rate five times the national average. Thus, it seems fitting that the man responsible for the chewing gum phenomenon was a military general: Antonio López de Santa Anna, the despised Mexican commander responsible for the massacre at the Alamo.

  Santa Anna had reason to chew gum.

  In the 1830s, when Texas attempted to proclaim its independence from Mexico, a Mexican army of five thousand men, led by Santa Anna, attacked the town of San Antonio. The one hundred fifty native Texans forming the garrison retreated into Fort Alamo. The Mexican general and his men stormed the fort, killing all but two women and two children. A few weeks later, charging under the battle cry “Remember the Alamo!” American forces under General Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna and forced Mexico to accept Texas’s secession. Texas became a state in 1845, and Santa Anna, one of the few Mexican commanders not executed for his war crimes, entered the United States and settled on Staten Island, New York.

  The exiled general brought with him a large chunk of chicle, the dried milky sap or latex of the Mexican jungle tree the sapodilla. Known to the Aztecs as chictli, the tasteless resin had been a favorite “chew” of Santa Anna. On Staten Island, the former general introduced chicle to a local photographer and invento
r, Thomas Adams, who imported a large quantity of the gummy resin, then tried and failed to convert it chemically into an inexpensive synthetic rubber. To recoup a portion of his investment, Adams, recalling how avidly his own son Horatio, as well as Santa Anna, enjoyed chewing chicle, decided to market it as an alternative to the then-popular wads of paraffin wax sold as chew.

  Thomas Adams’s first small tasteless chicle balls went on sale in a Hoboken, New Jersey, drugstore in February 1871 for a penny apiece. The unwrapped balls, packaged in a box labeled “Adams New York Gum—Snapping and Stretching,” were sold along the East Coast by one of Adams’s sons, a traveling salesman. Chicle proved to be a superior chew to wax, and soon it was marketed in long, thin strips, notched so a druggist could break off a penny length. It had the jaw-exercising consistency of taffy.

  The first person to flavor chicle, in 1875, was a druggist from Louisville, Kentucky, John Colgan. He did not add the candy-like oils of cherry or peppermint, but the medicinal balsam of tolu, an aromatic resin from the bark of a South American legume tree, Myroxylon toluiferum, familiar to children in the 1870s as a standard cough syrup. Colgan named his gum Taffy-Tolu, and its success spawned other flavored chicles.

  Thomas Adams introduced a sassafras gum, then one containing essence of licorice and named Black Jack, which is the oldest flavored chewing gum on the market today. And in 1880, a manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio, introduced a gum that would become one of the industry’s most popular flavors: peppermint. In the same decade, Adams achieved another first: the chewing gum vending machine. The devices were installed on New York City elevated-train platforms to sell his tutti-frutti gum balls.