Food inventions, part one
So there you are, holding something in your hand and thinking: who came up with this? How do you get the idea to put tea in a paper bag? And who thought of keeping stinky sauce in the cellar for two years and then selling it anyway?
Stinky sauce from the cellar
The inventors of Worcestershire sauce (pronounced: woester sauce) are listed on every bottle: John Lea and William Perrins. In 1838, the two pharmacists try to recreate Lord Marcus Sandy’s favorite sauce. After years in India, he misses that delicious sauce he always put on his food back home. He doesn’t have a recipe, so he describes the taste and smell as accurately as possible. John and William experiment away, but the result smells so awful that they really can’t sell the sauce in their pharmacy. They put it in the cellar, where they find it again two years later. Actually tastes pretty good, they conclude. Luckily, there was no food inspection service at the time, because calmly selling stinky sauce two years later… that really wouldn’t be possible today.
With the bag and all
You want to sell large tins of tea, but customers want to taste the tea first. How do you solve that? Thomas Sullivan makes small silk bags, puts a tablespoon of loose tea in them and sends them to his customers as sample packages. They have no idea what Sullivan intends, so they throw the tea, bag and all, into the boiling-hot water. Voilà, the first tea bag is a fact. The German Adolf Rambold further develops the tea bag: no silk bag but paper, with a staple and a little label, and applies for a patent in 1929.
Coffee filter bag empire (Scrabble word)
Yuck, coffee grounds at the bottom of your cup. A daily annoyance for Melitta Bentz. That’s why she puts ground coffee in a piece of folded filter paper, torn from her son’s school notebook, and pours hot water over it. She shows her invention to friends during their weekly coffee gathering, and they are enthusiastic too. Melitta applies for a patent in 1908, starts her own coffee filter company (with starting capital of 73 pfennig, which can’t have been very much) and when she and her husband demonstrate coffee filters at a trade fair, they immediately sell 1,200. Well, that’s a success. The company still exists, with descendants of the original Mrs. Melitta on the board of directors.
A lazy teenager and seven fruit flavors
You know those adorable images of American children making lemonade from squeezed lemons and sugar, then selling it by the side of the road? Eleven-year-old Frank Epperson does the same in 1905, but at the end of the day he doesn’t feel like cleaning up his mess. He leaves everything outside, and during the night a stirring stick freezes into a glass of lemonade. That’s the first popsicle, according to Frankie. He calls it an ‘Epsicle’, applies for a patent and sells them in seven fruit flavors at the fair. Later, a large ice cream factory takes over the patent and calls the frozen treats popsicles, as they are still known in America.
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