In Strange Food History, we're hitting the books -- to find you the strangest, quirkiest slices of our food heritage.
Today: Sometimes it's the untinentional kitchen mishaps that taste the best.
Culinary accidents tend to veer towards the disastrous. There's the smoke alarm that continually goes off because binge-watching Mad Men takes precedence over remembering a pizza that's in the oven. There's the cocktail rendered undrinkable by a mistaken drop of peppermint extract, the chocolate cake that tastes more like doughy toothpaste when tablespoons, not teaspoons, of baking soda are added. And it's really all too easy to open the wrong side of a container of cayenne pepper and watch in horror as a pot of chili is instantly ruined. (This is precisely why the Food52 Hotline exists.)
Sometimes though, with a little bit of luck, a simple mix-up can lead to a dish that's unexpectedly delicious. Sometimes forgetfulness allows the perfect combination of time and flavor to come together into a genius gastronomical invention, like these ubiquitous foods that came into being simply as very happy accidents:
Cheese
From Camembert to Cheddar, Parmigiano to Paneer, legend has it that all cheese originated with a nomad and a bag of milk. The pouch he was wearing was fashioned from an animal's stomach, which naturally contains rennin, an enzyme that causes milk to coagulate. When his horse galloped along the desert, this churning motion coupled with the heat caused the whey and the curds to separate. Upon opening his pouch, he (bravely!) discovered that the curds were indeed edible. While this tale isn't verified, it's most likely that the first batch of cheese was a result of that combination of milk and rennin coming together under just the right conditions.
Corn Flakes
In 1893, Will Kellog left a pot of cooking wheat on the stove and unsurprisingly, when he returned later it was stale. He and his brother John tried to make dough out of it, but the rollers they pushed it through just broke it down into smaller flakes of wheat. Not ones to give up at that point, they toasted the flakes and served them to patients at the Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium they worked at. Their patients loved them, so they continued to work to perfect and sell their product, initially called Granose. A rift did open up between them when Will wanted to add sugar to the cereal and John did not - it's pretty easy to tell who won that legal battle.
Popsicles
We can thank an absent-minded 11-year-old for the invention of the popsicle. In 1905, Frank Epperson mixed a soft drink with a stirring stick one chilly San Francisco night. He forgot his cup out on his porch and upon returning the next morning found that his drink was frozen solid to the stick. In the 1920s, he patented the delicious result of his carelessness.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn, created the quintessential American cookie without intending to. One day in 1930 while baking a batch of chocolate cookies, she realized she was out of baking chocolate. Thinking that it would melt and create a chocolate cookie, she used a broken-up bar of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate she had on hand. The Toll House chocolate chip cookie was born.
Do you know any other foods that were invented by accident? Let us know in the comments!