Almost every American food classic comes with an origin story, and many of those stories are more legend than record. Here the legends meet the evidence: towns still arguing over the hamburger, a cookie that was likely no accident, a cheese snack born of wartime research, and people history nearly forgot, like the young bacteriologist who made the TV dinner work and the enslaved chef behind Jefferson's macaroni.
Every tile in a American Food Classics game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Dishes
nine stories
1Four places, one hamburger
On the tile: Hamburger1885-1900Legend
At least four places claim the hamburger. Seymour, Wisconsin, and Hamburg, New York, both point to fairs in 1885, and a Texas state representative has championed Fletcher Davis of Athens. New Haven's Louis' Lunch says Danish immigrant Louis Lassen served broiled ground beef between toasted bread to a customer in a hurry in 1900, and in 2000 the Library of Congress recorded his claim. New Haven's backers point out that the rival stories rest on oral history rather than documents. Louis' Lunch still serves its burgers on toast, not a bun.
A favorite story says cartoonist Tad Dorgan coined the name hot dog at New York's Polo Grounds in 1901, drawing sausages as barking dachshunds in rolls. Historians have never found that cartoon, despite his enormous body of work. The name was already college slang. Wagons sold hot dogs at the Yale dormitories by the fall of 1894, and the Yale Record of October 19, 1895, described people munching hot dogs through an entire service. A 1906 Dorgan cartoon about hot dogs is set at a bicycle race in Madison Square Garden.
Nothing sounds more homegrown than apple pie, but the first recorded recipe was written in England in the late 1300s, and it called for figs, raisins, pears and saffron along with the apples. The apples were newcomers too. The only apple native to North America was the tart crab apple, and colonists brought European cuttings and seeds to Jamestown. Americans made the pie their own anyway. By World War II, soldiers told journalists they were fighting for mom and apple pie.
No bill of fare survives from the 1621 harvest feast at Plymouth, but a letter helps. Colonist Edward Winslow wrote that Governor William Bradford sent four men fowling, and that the Wampanoag, who likely outnumbered the colonists more than two to one, arrived with five deer. Culinary historians believe seafood such as mussels was served. Potatoes were not, and there was no pumpkin pie: the colony lacked butter, wheat flour and an oven. Cranberry sauce was unlikely too, since the Mayflower's sugar was nearly or fully gone.
Thomas Jefferson often gets credit for bringing macaroni and cheese to America. He did fall for European food in France, where he lived from 1784 to 1789 and served as American minister from 1785, and the Library of Congress holds his drawing of a pasta machine. But the cooking was done by James Hemings, the enslaved chef who went with him to Paris and is believed to have trained there. According to Monticello, a macaroni recipe in Jefferson's handwriting was most likely dictated to him by Hemings or by his other chef, Edith Hern Fossett.
Legend credits Gennaro Lombardi with America's first pizzeria, supposedly licensed in Lower Manhattan in 1905. Pizza historian Peter Regas found a more tangled story. Filippo Milone, an Italian baker who likely came to New York in 1892, appears to have run pizzerias first, and Regas suspects he started at least six, possibly including the Spring Street shop that Lombardi, then about 18, took over. Regas also found an ad for a pizzeria napoletana from 1898. Milone died in 1924 and lies in an unmarked grave in Queens.
7Ketchup was a fish sauce before it met the tomato
On the tile: Ketchup1812
Ketchup's ancestor was a fermented fish sauce from southern China, called something like koe-cheup in the Southern Min dialect. British traders acquired a taste for it by the early 1700s and adapted it at home, making ketchups from oysters, mushrooms, walnuts and even peaches. The first known recipe for a tomato version, in 1812, is credited to James Mease, a Philadelphia scientist, who praised tomatoes, then called love apples. Heinz introduced its blend of tomatoes, vinegar, sugar and spices in 1876 and sold it in glass bottles so shoppers could see what they were buying.
Eggs Benedict was created in America's Gilded Age, and two famous New York establishments claim it. Delmonico's points to its chef, who published a recipe for Eggs à la Benedick in 1894. The Waldorf Hotel's story says that same year a hungover regular ordered buttered toast, crisp bacon, two poached eggs and a pitcher of hollandaise sauce. Neither tale has won outright, but both are close to today's dish: English muffin halves topped with Canadian bacon, poached eggs and hollandaise, the French sauce of egg yolks, butter and lemon.
Pearle Wait, a cough syrup maker in upstate New York, added fruit flavors to gelatin in 1897, and his wife, May, named it Jell-O. Sales were slow, so in 1899 he sold the business to Orator Woodward for $450. Woodward's advertising and recipe booklets made it a hit, and by 1906 sales topped $1 million. Cooks soon molded vegetables and even chicken into gelatin salads. The first popular one, Perfection Salad, was not a Jell-O recipe at all: it took third place in a recipe contest run by the Knox Gelatine Company around 1905.
Classic diners look like train cars, so many people assume they were built from old ones. A few were, but most descend from horse-drawn lunch wagons that sold coffee and sandwiches to night-shift workers in the 1880s and 1890s. As the wagons grew, adding kitchens, counters and room inside, they took on a long, boxy shape. Around 1900 they lost their wheels and became stationary lunch cars, built in factories and shipped by rail. As the story goes, a journalist in 1924 suggested calling them dining cars, later shortened to diners.
Train passengers in the 1870s often had one hour at a stop to find a meal, and the food was poor. Fred Harvey took a better idea to the Santa Fe Railway and in 1876 opened a dining room in its Topeka depot. His restaurants served steaks on imported linens and fine china. Men had to wear coats, and spare alpaca coats were kept on hand so no one was turned away. Harvey replaced his male waiters with the Harvey Girls. When he died in 1901, his empire had 45 restaurants and 20 dining cars.
Joe Horn and Frank Hardart borrowed the idea of an automatic restaurant from Germany and opened America's first Automat in Philadelphia in 1902, then brought it to Times Square in 1912. Diners dropped nickels into a slot, turned a knob and lifted a small glass door to take a sandwich, a slice of pie or macaroni and cheese, while unseen workers refilled the compartments. Coffee poured from silver dolphin spouts and cost a nickel until 1950. The last Horn & Hardart Automat closed in New York in 1991.
After Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the meatpacking industry, ground beef became a prime suspect, since it was easy to pad with fillers and scraps. Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson set out to change that when they opened their first White Castle in Kansas in 1921. The restaurants were sheathed in gleaming porcelain and stainless steel, and the meat was ground on the premises. Ingram even commissioned a medical school study to show that hamburgers were healthy. His system inspired later chains, including McDonald's.
Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened McDonald's Bar-B-Que in San Bernardino, California, on May 15, 1940, a drive-in where carhops served customers in their cars. In 1948 they rebuilt it around the Speedee Service System: a short, standard menu, lower burger prices, an assembly-line kitchen and walk-up service instead of carhops. In 1954 Ray Kroc, a milkshake machine salesman, visited because the brothers had ordered several of his mixers. In 1961 they sold him the McDonald's name and concept for $2.7 million.
Harland Sanders began serving meals to truck drivers at his service station in Corbin, Kentucky, in 1930. His title was honorary: Kentucky's governor made him a colonel by ceremonial decree in 1935. In 1939 he used pressure cookers to perfect quick-fried chicken with his secret 11 herbs and spices. His first franchisee was far from Kentucky: Pete Harman of Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1952, whose restaurant one biographer credits with the famous bucket. Sanders was 65, living on a $105 monthly Social Security check, when he took to the road signing up franchisees.
Troy Smith had three failed restaurant ventures behind him when he opened the Top Hat Drive-In in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1953. Traveling in Louisiana in 1954, he saw a food stall with homemade intercoms that let customers order from their cars, and he had one made for the Top Hat. He added a canopy and carhops on roller skates, and each order came with a mint. When the Top Hat name turned out to belong to another business, the owners borrowed from their slogan, Service with the Speed of Sound, and chose Sonic.
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro. Refused service, they stayed in their seats until the store closed. The next day more than 25 students joined them, and by the fifth day about 300 had. Protests and boycotts cut deeply into the store's sales, and on July 25, 1960, the counter was integrated. The first Black diners served there were not the students but four Woolworth employees, invited by the managers to sit and eat.
After a big storm, emergency managers have watched an unusual gauge: Waffle House. The idea came out of Florida's 2004 hurricane season, when Craig Fugate ran the state's emergency management division; he later led FEMA under President Obama. Because Waffle Houses serve hot meals around the clock, their condition says a lot. A full menu is green. A limited menu is yellow. "If a Waffle House is closed because there's a disaster, it's bad," Fugate said. "We call it red." The index is unofficial, but when Fugate moved to FEMA, he said, it "had followed me there."
The legend says that in 1853 Cornelius Vanderbilt sent back his fried potatoes at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, and chef George Crum sliced new ones paper-thin to spite him. Vanderbilt's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, T.J. Stiles, concluded there is no truth to the tale. Most of Crum's 1914 obituaries do not mention chips, and at least five people have been credited. An 1849 newspaper already praised Eliza, the Lake House cook, for crisping potatoes, and an English cookbook of 1817 included potatoes fried in slices.
2George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter
On the tile: Peanut Butter1884-1916Myth busted
George Washington Carver is often credited with inventing peanut butter. He did not. Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Canada patented peanut paste in 1884, and John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal pioneer, patented a process for making peanut butter in 1895. A St. Louis snack maker may have been selling it by 1894. Carver's real work was helping Black farmers in the South rebuild soil worn out by cotton, with crops like peanuts and sweet potatoes, and finding hundreds of uses for the peanut. His 1916 pamphlet of 105 peanut recipes did include peanut butter.
One of the two men behind the cotton candy machine was a dentist. William Morrison and candy maker John C. Wharton co-patented a device that forced melted sugar through small holes in a heated bowl spinning 2,200 times a minute. At the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, the machine's fairy floss drew curious crowds in the Palace of Electricity, though many visitors hesitated until they were assured it was candy and not cotton. It won a prize for novelty of invention and sold tens of thousands of souvenir boxes.
Fortune cookies arrive with the check at Chinese restaurants, but their roots are Japanese. By the 1870s, shops near Kyoto sold tsujiura senbei, larger, darker crackers made with sesame and miso, with a fortune tucked into the fold. Japanese immigrants likely brought the idea to California, and San Francisco's Benkyodo bakery claimed it pioneered the vanilla and butter flavor and built a machine to mass-produce them around 1911, though Los Angeles businesses made rival claims. When Japanese Americans were forced into camps during World War II, their bakeries closed, and Chinese American makers took over the trade.
In 1912 Clarence Birdseye, a Brooklyn-born biologist, went to Labrador to buy and sell fox furs. Watching how the Inuit people handled fish in the extreme cold, he saw that fish frozen fast enough kept its appearance, taste and texture. Back in the United States he founded a company in 1924 to sell quick-frozen fish, meat and vegetables, and test-marketed them in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1930. The cold had to hold all the way to the store, so Birdseye leased specially designed freezer cases to retailers, and in 1944 the company began leasing refrigerated boxcars to ship frozen food nationwide.
Ruth Wakefield made the chocolate chip cookie famous at her Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, and legend says she invented it by accident, perhaps after running out of nuts. Author Carolyn Wyman, who spoke with former employees and Wakefield's daughter, says slapdash mistakes did not fit that tightly run kitchen, and Wakefield once told a reporter she came up with the recipe on a flight home from Egypt. Pastry chef Stella Parks has even found ads for chocolate chip cookies from 1928. Nestlé introduced its Toll House Morsels in 1940.
During World War II the Army's Quartermaster Corps bought more than 100 million pounds of cheese for rations in a single year, and it wanted to cut the weight and bulk. In 1943 George Sanders, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist, created the first cheese powder by grating cheese and then drying, grinding and dehydrating it. When the war ended, manufacturers had plenty of dehydrated cheese left over. In 1948 the Frito Company used it on cheesy cornmeal puffs called Chee-tos. The hyphen was dropped in 1998.
Percy Spencer left school in the fifth grade, taught himself engineering and rose at Raytheon, where his methods raised wartime production of radar magnetrons to 2,600 a day. In 1945 he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted while he tested an active magnetron. He tried popcorn kernels, which popped, and an egg, which burst. Raytheon filed a patent that year and in 1947 introduced the Radarange, nearly six feet tall and 750 pounds. Beyond the $2 bonus Raytheon typically paid for patents, Spencer never profited from it.
Swanson's TV dinner reached stores on September 10, 1953, and its origin story involves some 260 tons of unsold Thanksgiving turkey riding back and forth in refrigerated rail cars. Who turned that turkey into a dinner on a tray is disputed. Salesman Gerry Thomas said he sketched the three-part tray, while others credit the Swanson brothers. One contributor nobody disputes is Betty Cronin, a 21-year-old bacteriologist who worked out how every part of a meal could heat properly in the same time. She later said she had never had a TV dinner in her home.
Giuseppe Argiro, a former coal miner who founded the Country Club Bakery in Fairmont, West Virginia, is credited with inventing the pepperoni roll in 1927. He remembered fellow miners eating bread and pepperoni at work and baked the two together; the grease leaves an orange-red spot at each end. In 1987 the roll's future looked shaky when the U.S. Department of Agriculture wanted to reclassify the bakeries as meat packers, under stricter rules. Senator Jay Rockefeller took the issue to the Secretary of Agriculture, and the USDA backed off.
Nashville hot chicken comes with a revenge story. Andre Prince, owner of Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, says her great-uncle Thornton Prince was known as a ladies' man in the 1930s. The story goes that after he stepped out one Saturday night, the woman in his life doused his Sunday fried chicken with a heap of hot pepper. The punishment backfired. He liked it, shared it with friends and opened a chicken shack. Prince's still serves hot chicken on white bread with pickles, and the family has been selling it for more than 70 years.
Tampa and Miami both claim the Cuban sandwich: pork, ham, Swiss cheese, yellow mustard and dill pickles on Cuban bread. Most food historians agree it was invented in Tampa's Ybor City, where Cubans came to make cigars and mixed with Italian and Spanish neighbors. Tampa's version adds Genoa salami, a nod to those Italians. In 2012 the Tampa City Council officially named it the Historic Tampa Cuban Sandwich. Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado replied, "Tampa certainly has a tradition, but salami is for pizza."
In 1993 Rhode Island's legislature voted coffee milk the official state drink. It is milk stirred with sweet coffee syrup, and the state says it was first introduced in the early 1920s. A Johnson & Wales culinary professor links the syrup to the state's large Italian immigrant population and its love of coffee. Add ice cream and it becomes a coffee cabinet. The state says the name comes from an originator who kept his blender in a kitchen cabinet, but a third-generation soda fountain owner says he has heard that without knowing for sure.
Order New Mexican food in New Mexico and you will likely be asked, Red or green? It means red or green chile. In 1996 the legislature made it the official state question, to signify the chile industry's importance to the state economy, and in 2000 chile was the state's top cash crop by sales. The village of Hatch calls itself the Chile Capital of the World. The crop is sensitive to drought and picked by hand, and a law that took effect in 2011 made it illegal to call chiles New Mexican unless they were grown in the state.
Buffalo's Anchor Bar long got the credit for Buffalo wings. By Frank and Teressa Bellissimo's telling, in the mid-1960s they began frying wings, breaking them into pieces and tossing them in hot sauce, the recipe today's wings most closely resemble. But John Young, a Black restaurateur, opened Wings and Things in Buffalo in the 1960s, serving whole breaded wings in his own mumbo sauce. In 1981 he told a newspaper that Mr. Bellissimo used to come in and eat his wings. Young is now recognized as the first to open a Buffalo restaurant centered on wings.
In 1895 Lyman T. Davis of Corsicana, Texas, sold chili for five cents a bowl from a wagon downtown. He began canning it in 1921 and around then named it Wolf Brand, in honor of his pet wolf, Kaiser Bill. After oil was found on his farm, he sold the business in 1924. The new owners sent salesmen out in Model T trucks with cabs shaped like cans, each with a live wolf caged in the back. In 1977, after lobbying by Wolf Brand and other chili makers, Texas made chili its official state dish.
Chicago's deep-dish pizza, with its sauce on top of the cheese, came out of a restaurant that opened in 1943 in a lumber baron's old mansion on East Ohio Street, later famous as Pizzeria Uno. Beyond that, the paper trail is thin. City cultural historian Tim Samuelson tends to credit owner Ric Riccardo with the idea and his partner Ike Sewell with making it famous. Rudy Malnati Jr. says his father, who later managed the restaurant, helped create the recipe, but Samuelson found no documents to back that up.
Chattanooga Bakery began in 1903 as a way for a Tennessee flour mill to use its extra flour, turning out cookies, crackers and fig bars. About 1919, one of its traveling salesmen came back with requests for a baked good that was more than a cookie, both filling and cheap. The bakers answered with marshmallow creme spread on a cookie and covered in chocolate. The Moon Pie cost a nickel and became a staple snack across the South. By the early 1990s the family-owned bakery was making some 300,000 a day.