How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (15 page)

We are certain many Native American tribes produced maple syrup before the arrival of European settlers. The Algonquin called the maple sugar
sinzibukwud
(meaning “drawn from wood”) and the Ojibways named it
sheesheegummawis
(“sap flows fast”). In addition, tomahawks might have been used to cut gashes in maple trees as part of the extraction process. Tribes were known to use sharp instruments, rather than spigots utilized by Westerners, to get the sap out.

As for Woksis and Moqua’s role, the story appears to have gotten its start in modern literature from an 1896
Atlantic Monthly
article written by Rowland E. Robinson. His telling of the tale isn’t quite as, well, sweet as the current narrative. Robinson depicts Woksis as a grump who before going off to “the chase” for the day tells his wife to cook up some moose meat. He warns her that if she does a bad job “she might be reminded of the time he stuck a stake in the snow.” (I’m not sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound good.) Moqua promises “strict compliance” and starts melting some snow in a pot for water. She then goes about her business making new moccasins for Woksis. Moqua gets so focused on her work that she doesn’t notice that the frayed bark cord used to hang the pot over the fire is about to break until it’s too late. All the water spills out of the container and Moqua gets nervous and runs outside. There she pulls some sap from a great maple as a water alternative (in this version, the tribe knew about maple juices as a “pleasant drink” but hadn’t figured out its broader uses).

Moqua refills the pot, but becomes aghast when she sees the sap has boiled away and the meat has become dark and shriveled. Now she’s really freaked out remembering that whole stake-snow thing. She bolts from the dwelling just as the huffy Woksis returns. When she doesn’t hear any angry comments from her husband, she returns to find her man in pure syrup heaven. He even goes so far as to break the pot to get the remnants of the treacle.

Could Robinson have gotten it right? His writing in the
Atlantic Monthly
possessed a breathless style that tastes a bit like pure hokum. Still, there are few other competing origin stories and there was at least one contemporary official source that vouched for Robinson’s trustworthiness: the Vermont Department of Agriculture. They wrote in 1914 that Robinson told tales of “picture pioneer life in the Green Mountain State with a charm and accuracy equaled by few, and surpassed by none.”

Marmalade: Stormy oranges

Marmalade has long been a British breakfast staple. Chunks of Seville oranges mixed with sugar to produce what’s known as “chip marmalade” is
the
traditional spread with toast on cold misty mornings from Edinburgh to London. But the first mass producer of the condiment may have never gotten into the business if not for a fortuitously ill-fated voyage.

Janet Keiller was the wife of a store owner in Dundee, Scotland, in the eighteenth century. One day, her husband came home with an odd purchase: Seville oranges. Unlike the sweet succulent fruits our kids eat during halftime at soccer games, these oranges were tart and would have been a tough sell as a peel-and-eat treat. In fact, they were often used at the time as a souring agent for British sauces. Janet was probably confused at the purchase. Her husband likely explained he was being enterprising. The oranges weren’t bound for Dundee (historians believe they were on their way to Leith for the markets either there or in Edinburgh). But the ship carrying the cargo had been battered by a storm and was forced to take refuge in Dundee’s harbor. Unable to complete its journey, the ship’s captain looked to unload some goods at a cut rate.

Now it was up to Janet to make something of this bargain. Marmalade had long been used as a word for a product very different from the spreadable bittersweet confection we know today. The term comes from the Portuguese word
marmelada
, which means quince paste. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it was a hard paste that could be cut and served as a dessert. By the end of the sixteenth century all types of fruits, including plums, dates, and strawberries, were being used for this purpose.

Nevertheless, it’s likely that Janet was aware of a new kind of smooth spreadable marmalade that had become popular in Scotland in the years around the time of her husband’s purchase. But she put her own spin on it. Opting to save on the labor normally required to grind down the oranges, she shred the fruits for a more chunky option. “Janet Keiller did not invent orange marmalade,” wrote C. Anne Wilson in
The Book of Marmalade
(yes, there is a definitive tome on this topic). “But she contributed to the establishment of the ‘chip’ style as Scotland’s very own marmalade.”

Before long, Janet’s jars were flying off the shelves of the family store. Seeing a business opportunity, the Keillers were the first to establish a factory to mass-produce marmalade (some suggest it was Janet’s son or even later generations of the family who keyed the business’s boom). The working classes liked it because, as a spread on toast, it was an inexpensive form of nourishment. Also, unlike many jams, which were seasonal, the resiliency of the Seville orange meant that marmalade could be produced year-round. From there the delicacy quickly spread and became a must on breakfast tables across the British Empire. By 2010, though, marmalade had transformed into a bit of a relic of a bygone era. One survey found that approximately 80 percent of the spread is sold to people over the age of forty-five. Youthful buyers will have to be found if marmalade hopes to weather the storm once again.

Mayonnaise: Victory spread

To the victor goes the spoils and when it came to eighteenth-century French politician and commander Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, the spoils were slathered with an improvised new condiment.

With the exception of a couple of World Wars, the French and British have been scrapping on battlefields around the world for centuries. In 1756 the two countries were tussling over the island of Minorca, off the coast of Spain. The rock had tremendous strategic value so when duc de Richelieu captured its key city, Port Mahon, the French leader was ready to rejoice.

Not that it took too much to get the duke in a celebratory mood. Legend has it that he enjoyed eating dinner in the nude. With this level of commitment to meals plus the added pressure of celebrating a huge win, duc de Richelieu’s chef wanted the victory feast to be special.

But according to some food historians, the cook did not have everything he needed to put together the perfect meal.

“[E]vidently, he was lacking some cream to mix with the egg yolks and he used oil instead, and the new sauce became mahonaise, which would be a derivation of Port Mahon,” Richard Gutman, curator of the culinary archives and museum at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, told National Public Radio on the 250th anniversary of the tangy condiment’s supposed invention.

The concoction, which was effectively the local Spanish sauce
aioli
minus copious amounts of garlic, was brought back to France where it spread throughout the continent as both a base for other sauces and as a dressing. Keeping with the Anglo-Gallic tensions, the British didn’t embrace mayonnaise until around 1841—eighty-five years after it was created—and many Brits insisted on ditching the French moniker and going with the more bland “salad cream
”
as its name. (Mayonnaise’s migration onto sandwiches would be popularized in the United States, where Richard Hellmann was one of the first to begin selling jars of it for that and other purposes in 1912.)

Some food experts have credited other moments in history for mayo’s entry into our diets. These have included the town of Bayonne in southwest France (along this line of thinking, bayonnaise was changed to mayonnaise somewhere down the road); ancient French chefs who named it after the old French word
moyeu
, meaning “egg yolk”; and Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne, who supposedly lost a key battle to—you guessed it—the British in the sixteenth century because he took so long finishing a chicken meal doused in the sauce.

There are many more alternate origin tales, which begs the question: Why has duc de Richelieu endured as the most popular explanation? Gutman offers this simple reason: “[T]he Richelieu one is compact and nice and the Mahon makes sense.”

Nutella: Post–World War II austerity

Turin is Italy’s chocolate capital. “Every chocolatier has his very own chocolate, his own secret recipes, passed down through the generations,” one local chocolate maker told a reporter in 2004. “In other cities, chefs get up and make croissants in the morning. In Turin, we get up and make chocolate.”

Along with its sweet tooth–inducing industry, the Piedmont region where Turin is located is also known for hazelnuts.
The Oxford Companion to Food
calls the “famous” Tonda Gentile Delle Langhe
variety grown in this area Italy’s best.

One would assume that these two popular elements—chocolate and hazelnuts—would be a perfect marriage blended for every conceivable use (chocolate-hazelnut pasta anyone?). Think again.

Nutella, the wildly successful hazelnut spread (if you’re unfamiliar, just head over to Costco where you can find vats of it), wasn’t the result of someone thinking the two would be a natural mix. Its birth was all about necessity.

Hazelnut-infused chocolate is said to date back to the days of Napoleon, but the first commercial combination of the two products came in the mid-1800s when Italians faced quotas on such luxury items as cocoa beans. To overcome the shortage, chocolatiers Paul Caffarel and Michele Prochet replaced some of the pricey cocoa with hazelnuts to create a new type of chocolate. They named their creation
Gianduiotto
and it became a standard part of the Turin chocolate scene.

Despite the success of Gianduiotto, the chocolate-hazelnut mix didn’t yield any major new products until world events intervened. Following World War II, Italy was in short supply of chocolate. At the same time, the war had limited the country’s exports and Piedmont warehouses were overflowing with hazelnuts that hadn’t found a home. It was the first matter that concerned Pietro Ferrero, a local chocolate maker. He either didn’t have enough or couldn’t afford enough chocolate to fill his shelves. So he turned to the second matter—excess hazelnuts—to solve his problem.

In 1946 he combined toasted hazelnuts with cocoa butter, vegetable oil, and cocoa powder to create his own hazelnut confection. This innovation was sold in loaves so pieces could be cut off (like cheese) and put on bread. Ferrero called it
pasta gianduja
(
pasta
for paste and
gianduja
after a famed Piedmontese carnival character). According to one source, he sold an impressive 660 pounds of his creation in one month that year. Initially spurred by limitations on ingredients, Ferrero was now sold on hazelnuts. In 1949 he rolled out a new extra-creamy, spreadable rendering of his invention. He named this version
supercreama gianduja.

The spread became a must-have at stores where kids would pay to get their bread slathered with the stuff. (In a sort of horror-esque side note, these stores would call their service “The Smearing.”) In 1964, as it became popular throughout Europe, the name was changed to Nutella. According to the book
Why Italians Like to Talk About Food,
the name came from “the Piedmontese add[ing] the sweet Italian suffix—ella to the American root ‘nut.’ Sweet sound, sweet taste.”

Tabasco Sauce: Civil War epic

One has to wonder whether Edmund McIlhenny had a Scarlett O’Hara moment before he invented Tabasco Sauce. McIlhenny’s route to the popular condiment was shaped by the Civil War in a tale nearly as epic as
Gone with the Wind
. Before the conflict between North and South, McIlhenny was a successful banker in New Orleans. And while he loved spicy foods, he probably gave little thought to the production of pepper sauces. But his destiny began taking shape in 1862 when the Union army entered the Queen City, forcing McIlhenny and his wife, Mary, to flee to Avery Island, a strange little piece of land jutting up from the Louisiana Marshes. Mary’s family owned a plantation and salt mines there and the couple thought it would be a safe place to wait out the hostilities. Bad call. The Union army quickly comprehended that Avery Island’s salt deposits were perfect for preserving meat for its soldiers. Not long after taking New Orleans, the northerners laid siege on Avery Island, capturing the salt mines and forcing the McIlhennys to flee again for their lives—this time to Texas.