Three Eponymous Foods

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, Tracy Yeah, and listeners. I am clearly on a roller coaster cycle of like super Downer episode, light and Fun episode, Super Downer episode, Light and Fun episode. I'm sorry, I don't know what's going on. You gotta do what you gotta do. I think I because of where we're all at mentally, and like evolution did not prepare us to deal with the ongoing kind of stress of a pandemic, my brain is very much gravitating towards a lot of dark things in a not bad way. I am fine, but I always have had that proclivity and it's kind of augmented now. But then I always feel like, oh, I gotta bounce back by doing something late and thankfully today we are on a light wek um and it is about one of our favorite subjects. That means this is a food episode. I can't even describe the weird circumstance that happened, but through this complete happenstance, I saw a reference to a food that was named for someone recently, and then I found myself wondering if that had been a real person. I have a whole secondary thing with it that I'll talk about in the behind the scenes, and if it was a real person, who that real person was? And then soon I was down this eponymous foods rabbit hole and it was very, very fun. So, uh, if Tracy and everyone else will come along with people will explore three of these foods. But I feel like this could be the start of a a recurrent theme. As anybody knows from any episode on food that we have done before, they're often a lot of fuzzy details and variations on origin stories. That's often just how it happens when there's sort of a culinary accident or an experiment that turns out well. It's not always doc event and carefully so, I have tried to capture all of the most popular versions of any of these origin stories or note when things have differed significantly. So grab a snack and we will dive right in. We're going to start with one of the world's most popular varieties of fruit, and to tell that fruit story, we have to talk about Maria Anne Sherwood. Maria Anne Sherwood was born in seventeen nine and Peasmarsh, Sussex, England. Her father, John Sherwood, was a laborer, Her mother was Hannah Wright Sherwood, and Marie was baptized on January eighteen hundred at St Peter and St Paul Church in the same rural community where she was born. As she grew up, she didn't really receive much in the way of a formal education, but she did learn about farming through her parents and she worked as a farm laborer just as they did. At the age of nineteen, Maria got married to another farm laborer named Thomas Smith, who was her same age. Their wedding was held in Ebony, Kent at the parish church on August eight, eight nineteen. Since neither Maria nor Thomas could write, they both signed their wedding paperwork with a mark. The newlyweds settled in Beckley and East Sussex, which is where Thomas had grown up, and they started their family there. They had a total of eight children over the course of the next nineteen years, although three of those children died as infants. In eighteen thirty eight, Maria and Thomas made a huge change. They set sail for Australia and as part of what's often called the bounty scheme. In the decades leading up to the eighteen forties, Britain had gone through a series of events that had led to a lot of economic distress. There was the US were of Independence, the French Revolution, and a subsequent war with France. All of that had been extremely costly. There was also an agricultural crisis and a food shortage as a series of harvests failed. As the industrial age started, a workforce that was already flooded with men who had served in the war saw shrinking job numbers and the rise of workhouses, and one of the ways that was proposed to deal with these problems was a scheme that would take some of those tradesmen and agricultural laborers and send them to the New South Wales colony in Australia to both relieve the conditions in England and create infrastructure and a food system for that new colony. The rules of that program changed over the years, but by the time the Smiths were recruited, any settler who was already in New South Wales who wanted labor for their enterprise could pay agents in Britain to recruit skilled emigrants and then have them as employees when they arrived in Australia, provided they passed inspection. All of this is a very abbreviated version of a much bigger and very complex topic. We are just introducing it here to explain exactly how this farm family from East Sussex picked up their lives and moved to the other side of the world. While a lot of the scholarship on the bounty scheme suggest us that in a lot of the cases the people being shipped to New South Wales were not really up to snuff in terms of work experience, the program rarely accepted families. The Smiths were both knowledgeable and farm practice and had five children. There was Thomas age sixteen, Stephen age thirteen, Charles age eight, Sarah who was six, and then one year old Maria Ann. They all made the journey together and they're reported as traveling aboard the Lady Nugent. They arrived in Sydney, Australia on November eight. Yeah, the Lady Nugent has its own whole history as like a prison ship for a while and then um as an immigration ship later, but once Maria and Thomas had made it to their destination, and they all made it more or less intact. Thomas sought out work and found it in a district which is charmingly called Kissing Point. That's in an area called RDE that's a suburb of Sydney, and the draw to Kissing Point was its fruit production. Thomas was able to harley his years of farming experience and knowledge to get a job with an established fruit grower making five pounds per year, and the Smith's family made Ride their permanent home. Maria had one more child after they had settled in New South Wales. That was a son named William, who was born several years after they had moved in May of eighteen forty two. Maria's husband, Thomas may also have taken on a side job working for Major Edward Darville on his estate. That information has been relaid through family stories though, and it's not documented, so it's not totally clear. But Thomas Smith did save up money over the years, and in the eighteen fifties he was able to purchase two parcels of land that were adjacent to the field of mars Common in Ride. The field of mars Common was land that had been set aside as a public space in eighteen o four, so that meant that the Smith's new orchard property, which is about twenty four acres, was right next to undeveloped space. In eighteen seventy four. A significant portion of the Field of Mars Common was cleared and sold off as farms and homes after the passage of the Field of Mars Resumption Act, but part of it remains undeveloped as a wildlife refuge. The area in which the Smith orchards were cultivated is now known as Eastwood, and the first of the apples, which we would now know as Granny Smith, were said to have been discovered by Maria, having sprung up quite by accident. In the Perth Sunday Times, a story appeared on November two titled the Granny Smith Apple the Story of its Origin, and this actually recounts a story that had already appeared in a much smaller publication called Farmer and Settler, and they ran a version of the piece in June of that year. The Farmer and Settler right up is the first known account of the origin of the apple in print, and it was the work of writer H. J. Rumsey, who in his research, interviewed two men who had known Maria Smith when she was alive. The two gentlemen where fruit grower E. H. Small and Harry Johnston. According to Mr Small's story, Maria had taken some gin cases home from the Sydney markets and there had been some Tasmanian grown apples in them. She referred to these as French crabs, and those fruits were rotting, so she dumped them out near the creek on the Smith property. But then sometime later She's found a small apple seedling growing among the ferns by the creek and it was producing fruit. This was an apple that was different for many that she was familiar with. And remember, this isn't like a person who is not knowledgeable about fruit, so she was like, this is something unique. Maria, who had come to be known among locals as Granny as she aged as kind of a sweet nickname, wanted to get the opinions of other fruit experts about this seedling and its fruit, so she called in E. H. Small's father, who was also an expert orchardist. E H was just a boy of twelve at the time, but he went with his father and Mrs Smith to examine this seedlinging, and as a boy tasted one of the seedlings apples himself, he declared it delicious. After consulting with Small, Maria decided that she would start cultivating the trees, but she only had a couple of years to do so before she died. So a couple of notes on apples and their propagation. Almost all apples require cross pollination. That means they have to be pollinated with pollen from a different apple species to produce fruit. The Granny Smith apple as we know it today is an exception. It can self pollinate, although it normally produces a better result if it's cross pollinated. But it's obviously different from a crab apple, which is what Maria Smith had dumped out. Crab apples are just really small apples, and the French crabs that she mentioned are a type that's often used for jellies and jams, So it seems most likely that the seeds from those French crabs had grown into trees that were pollinated with pollen from some other tree nearby. This is an area that was known for its fruit, including many orchards. The resulting fruit produced seeds that eventually became this new apple tree that Maria Smith found in the ferns. None of the accounts of Maria Seedling have any dates or timelines mentioned between when she dumped out the rotted crab apples and when she found this new tree. So there's this there's some guesswork here. Yeah. There was even one right up about it that I read that said there's a little bit of a mystery because in one account she had suggested that the land had been cleared in between the time that she had dumped those rotted French crabs and when she found this tree. So it's a little like, well, then, how how did this happen? But it does bear enough resemblance to to a French crab apple that people still think that's the origin point that then got cross pollinated with another species of apple. Maria Smith died on March nine, and her husband, Thomas died six years later. Orchardist Edward Gallard, who was a friend of the family, bought part of the family property from their surviving children, and he continued to cultivate Granny Smith apples until his death in the nineteen teens. Those tart apples had the characteristics that continue to make them popular today. They had an excellent resilience in baking so they don't disintegrate, and an acidity that accentuates sweet flavors. Although it actually was not initially recognized for its excellence in dessert baking, it was used for cooking things that were not so sweet At first. Gallard and other orchardists in New South Wales continued to cultivate the apple trees that Maria Smith first discovered as an accidental seedling. In the early eighteen nineties. Fruits produced by the Granny Smith trees were starting to win prizes in Australia, particularly as a cooking apple, and in Granny Smith apple trees are planted in large numbers that the Bath Frost Experiment Farm that was part of Australia's still new Department of Agriculture. The apples were all so part of the list of fruits suitable for export that the Department of Agriculture compiled in and the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales, which came out in August of the Granny Smith apple is referenced by that name in a section titled Fruits to Export and how to Export Them. It had this brief descriptor quote. Granny Smith's seedling, a New South Wales seedling raised from seed of the French crab near Ride on the Paramatta River. One of the things that helped the Granny Smith apple secure its position of popularity around the globe, it's just how sturdy it is. That firmness of the fruit that makes it great for baking, also makes it pretty easy to transport compared to some other softer apples. And that's also thanks to a relatively thick skin, so it stays marketable for longer and shipping. But as it shipped around the world from New South Wales, it also of course started to be cultivated on new continents. In the nineteen thirties, European grow started introducing it into their orchard and then in the nineties seventies it finally became popular in North America. Today, there's a Granny Smith Memorial Park on the eastwood Land that was once the southern boundary of the Smith orchard. There's a playground area, a wide open green space for playing in a monument placed there by the New South Wales by Centennial Council. Coming up, we are going to talk about one of the simplest and most delicious dishes known to humankind. There's gonna be some cheese, but before we do that, we will have a quick sponsor break. Alrighty, the next person that we are talking about is Ignacio Anaya. If you're scratching your head wondering what food is named after him, we will only need to remind you that the nickname for Ignacio is Nacho. That is right. Nacho's have a traceable lineage, and they were named for their creator. And while they seem like they us have been around forever, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Uh, Nacho's as we know them, are not that old. Just to avoid confusion, even though Ignacio did go by Naco most of the time, We're mostly going to refer to him by his given name rather than his nickname, just so that we don't constantly say Nacho over and over and over. Ignacio and I I was born in San Carlos, Chihuahua, Mexico, on August. His parents died when he was very young, and he was raised by a foster mother. One of the memories about her that and I would recount later in his life was that she often made him Cassidas, which he loved. Andia had a number of jobs in his early life, and he lived in a few different places, but eventually he ended up working at a restaurant in Piedro's Nigres, Mexico, called the Victory Club for reference. Piedro's Negres is about one fifty miles west of San Antonio, Texas, and it is just a short jump across the US Mexico border from Eagle Pass, Texas. Ignacio had worked as a waiter over the years, but he was the restaurant's maitre d by the time he created his now famous snack. One afternoon in ninety three, he was working in the restaurant in the time in between the lunch and dinner service, and several wives of officers from Eagle Pass came in. The story has been told a number of different ways. In one version and I told the press that after several rounds of drinks, these four ladies asked for some fried tortillas, and as he explained, quote, well, since no one was in the kitchen for about an hour, I went in slice of tortilla and four pieces, put some cheese and a slice of hallepenia on top. And stuck it in the oven for a few minutes. That cheese was reported as Wisconsin cheddar, and the hallapenos are pickled. So that story has appeared in print in a lot of different ways, with various changes to the details. In two thousand two, Anaya's son, Ignacio and Iya Jr. Said that one of his father's regular customers, a woman named Mami Finance, came in with a larger group of friends tend to twelve women who were officers wives from Fort Duncan Air Base. You may also run across versions that tell this story as being about soldiers from the base, but the ones that are closer to the source all mentioned women, even though the numbers change a little bit. According to Ignacio Anaya Jr. It was Mamie fine And who started touting this dish to her friends, And one version she had asked Ignacio what he called this snack, which she and her friends just loved, because who doesn't. He told her they were Nacho's special or nachos special, And another version of this story, it was fine And who started calling them nachos special. Either way, though she started talking them up to other people. Soon Nacho's Especial appeared on the menu at the Victory Club. In some versions of the story, Ignacio worked at the Victory Club for almost twenty more years until it closed in nine, but he has also often said to have worked at another restaurant called the Maderno for a period of time after the Victory Club and shared his nachos special recipe there. Some quotes even placed the moment of invention at the Maderno and not at the Victory Club, sometimes when they have interviewed the same person just years apart. In nineteen fifty four, a cookbook published by the Eagle Past Church of the Redeemer called Saint Ann's Cookbook contained the first printed recipe for Nacho's especials that included the story of their invention. Not long after the Victory Club closed in nineteen sixty one, Ignacio went into business for himself and opened up Nacho's Restaurant on hwifty seven, just a couple of miles from the bridge that connected Eagle Pass and Piedras Nigress. In nineteen sixty nine, the San Antonio Express and News interviewed a n i Am and printed a story about how even though he had invented what had become an incredibly popular dish over the twenty six years since he threw it together. That afternoon, he had not actually made any money off of it. Ignacio gave a quote to reporter Bill Salter saying, quote, the only man who's making money on nachos is the man who's selling cheese and hallapenos. Ania also told Salter that a friend who was a lawyer had offered to help him patent his dish, but that Anya had turned him down, saying quote, I didn't go with him or want to do it. I thought it would be too much trouble. But of course then I didn't know how popular they were going to become. This is a little different from what his son reported years later and Ignacio Junior's version he had reached out to a lawyer to try to help his dad secure some kind of legal claim to Nacho's telling a reporter in two thousand to quote, I talked to a lawyer in San Antonio. He said, there's not much you can do after seventeen years, it's in the public domain. Although he recognized that another path might have given him more income, Ignaia Sr. Said that he would be just as happy with lots of customers at his restaurant. Unfort sly Later that same year, Operation Intercept caused some very real problems for Anaia and other businesses in Piedro Negras. Operation Intercept was a Nixon initiative that was intended to stop the movement of marijuana from Mexico into the US through spot checks at border crossing points. Even though the bridge from Eagle Pass to Piedro's Negres experienced only minimal slowdowns, as part of this whole initiative, there were a lot of news stories about hours long waits at other points along the border, and that caused a lot of people who would kind of do day tourism trips to Piedro's Negros uh to stop making that trip to Nacho's restaurant. Ignacio reported that there were days of the restaurant had no patrons whatsoever, but due to lack of results from that program, it did not last long. Operation Intercept ended after just a few weeks. Ignacio died in nineteen seventy five. His wife had died nine years before he did, That was in nineteen sixty six. They had raised nine children together, and it wasn't until twenty years later in that Piedras Negras Mexico declared October twenty one as International Day of the Nacho. They also honored Ignacio and i A with a bronze plaque. This declaration and honor were to some degree an effort to stake a claim to the invention of nachos on the part of the Tourism Board of the State of Kawahila. Naturally, a dish as popular as nacho's has some other claims to the origin, and even people who say that melted cheese on tortillas has just been a part of Mexican cuisine for way longer than sixty years. Yeah, there are even some quotes that you can find from Ignacio Anaia saying essentially the same thing, like I didn't patent it because it's just cheese on tortillas. Everybody does that um. Ignacio's son, Ignacio Jr. Often served as a judge at the annual nacho competition that was part of a three day festival Piedro's Nigras started holding every year around International Day of the Nacho. Although he sampled nachos topped with all kinds of different ingredients over the years, including caviare uh, he always loved the simple version that his dad created the best, although he did at one point mentioned to a reporter that nachos would beef for chicken and guacamole made for a pretty tasty meal. Of course, nacho's have evolved since this origin. Point. You might be thinking of the version with a cheese sauce rather than melted cheese, wondering where that comes from. That's thanks to a man named Frank Liberto. He was CEO of Rico's Products Company, which specializes still in concession foods. Liberto introduced nachos with a pompable cheese sauce in Arlington's Stadium in n and then, after a slow start, this version caught on with food distributors, in part because they found that nachos drove drink sales up. People balance the spice of the jalapenos, and I would argue also the saltiness of the chips. I was thinking too that the salt was probably a factor there. Um, Okay, we have got one more eponymous food story to cover, but before we do, we're gonna pause for a word from stuff you missed in history classes. Sponsors. So this last one that we're going to talk about is a story that has two very different dates attached to it, but both of those dates relate back to the man for whom the dish was named and the same location. So we're going to talk about both of the ways the Cops Salad is said to have come into existence, and then the many variations on the second version of the story. So the Cops Salad is also associated with the famous Los Angeles restaurant chain, The Brown Derby, which operated from the original Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Ambassador Hotel. Was built in the shape of a Derby hat with a sign on top of it that read eat in the Hat, and from the very beginning it was a popular spot with screen stars. Everybody from Mary Pickford to Charlie Chaplin was known to eat there. The Derby moved down the street in nineteen thirty seven, and not just in name, the actual building was picked up and moved down the block and then renovated in the process so that it had more seating space because the original one was quite small. In the meantime, another Brown Derby had opened on the corner of Hollywood and Vine in ninety nine, and that Hollywood location was even more popular with actors because of how close it was to the studios. In one a location was added to the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, and then another was open in Las Felis, and each of these locations has its own story in its own connection to Hollywood and Los Angeles history. Robert Cobb was born in eighteen ninety nine, and there's not exactly a wealth of information about his early years, but by the time he was in his mid twenties, he was working alongside director Herbert K. Somborne and screenwriter Wilson Meisner and their new restaurant venture, and he was a co owner. And the story of the salad falls from a couple of different places on the timeline, sometimes starting all the way back to the very early days. Perhaps the least favored version of the Cobb Salads origins is that it was created at the opening of the Hollywood Brown Derby by executive chef Robert Crease in honor of the owner. That makes a lot of logistical sense. That's probably why it's the least favored version. It's not very full of you know, um puff or story. The more popular version is a lot more colorful, so that version of the stories that's the scene in N seven, and even this one story has some branching variations. The least showy version of this one is that around midnight, after a full day of work and without stopping to eat, Bob Cobb was ravenous, so the head chef at the time, Paul J. Posti, created a salad with basically what they still had on hand after the end of the whole dinner shift, and then he offered that to his boss. This is also pretty believable, and once again that makes it less beloved than some of the other versions. Yeah, the next iteration includes those key catalysts from the previous one that Bob Cobb was very hungry, that it was very late, that he had not eaten all day because the restaurant was so busy, But in this take on it, he went to the kitchen himself and rooted around for whatever he could find and then just started adding various leftover items to a bed of lettuce. The final version sort of is that Cobb was in a restaurant at or after midnight once again, but in this version, said Grauman, owner of Grauman's Chinese theater was with him, and it was Sid who was hungry, and so Cob put together a salad for his friend of snack on. This one has an added detail that Graunman either had a sore tooth or had a recent dental procedure that led Cob to chop all the ingredients into easily swallowed pieces that would not require a bunch of chewing before he tossed the salad with dressing. So we said that was sort of the last version, because sometimes that Cobb and Graunman together story gets some facts switched around, but it stays essentially the same at its core. You might see a version of it where it was Cobb who was a hungry one, but Sid Grauman was there and was intrigued by the restaurant tours midnight snack, and so he asked for one himself. But the detail for even the blended up aspects of the story that usually lands at the end of all of them is that Graunman loved this dish so much that he came in the very next day and asked for the same thing, and he ordered it as a Cobb salad, and soon that dish became a menu staple and to see why the classic ingredients for a Cobb salad are allegedly the same as it was possibly scavenged from the kitchen, and whatever version of this story that you believe, iceberg and romaine, lettuces, avocado, tomatoes, chicken breast, hard boiled eggs, bacon and rook frot cheese. The dressings components are a matter of debate. It might have contained olive oil, lemon juice, red wine, vinegar, Worcester sauce, garlic, and dijon mustard with just a little sugar, may or may not have included egg yolks. Any of these ingredients could have been in there. Kind of a mystery. Yeah, and today, if you have a Cob salad, even at places that claim they're doing the original, the dressing would probably very a little bit place to place, depending on how they like to do it. All are delicious. But in this case, while the story has a lot of variations, the central theme always remains the same and that it was invented at the Brown Derby, and that it is named for Robert Cobb. And because Holly is sure there'll be folks wondering in the listening audience, the Rion of the Brown Derby that's in Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida, is based on the Hollywood location of that restaurant. It is not shaped like a hat, but you can get a cop salad there. Yeah. Um. I did find one picture that seems to be mislabeled online that claims that it is the Hollywood Brown Derby in Disney's Hollywood Studios, and it is shaped like a hat, but that I think is an older one before it got torn down. And it does have some souvenirs out front, which I think is confusing to people, but none of them are Disney souvenirs if you look closely, so that one is not the one. Um Cobs salad, Uh Yeah, delicious, marvelous, Thank you Robert Cobb. However that came to be. I have listener mail that is also about food, and partially about yucky food, so I'm sorry, but it ends with funniness about cheese, which we've mentioned in two of these dishes, so I'm happy to include it. This is from our listener Shelley, who writes High Holly and Tracy. I just listened to this swill Milk scandal of episode and I was utterly fascinated and totally disgusted in equal measure. Like you mentioned, maybe in the behind the scenes many I'd never really thought about how odd it is that milk was a staple food item way before refrigeration was possible At home. I grew up pretty much just putting milk and tea and cereal. But my husband grew up drinking a glass of milk multiple times a day. Even now in his thirties. Anytime we have pasta with tomato sauce, he always drinks a big glass of milk with dinner. Because, of course, I guess. I was reminded of maybe my favorite scene in the latest installment of Becky Chambers Wayfarer series, The Galaxy and the Ground Within. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's fun, funny, heartwarming and poignant sci fi with incredible world building that both makes you think and want to be best friends with all the characters. But I digress from dairy. There is a scene where several individuals of different sentient alien species are chatting, and one character asked the only other who knows the human, well, if cheese is actually a real thing. The ensuing description of the unfortunate reality of cheese made me laugh harder than I've laughed while reading in a very long time. The cheese making process is described as leaving the milk mixture quote out until bacteria colonize it to the point of solidifying, and I felt hilariously called out as one of the humans so quote bonkers for cheese that they'll ingest a dose of the enzymes needed to properly digest it before they can eat it. Devastatingly accurate for me anyway. Thanks for all the wonderful work you do on the podcast. I always look forward to new episodes. Um, thank you for sharing that. It is one of those things. There are a lot of foods that when I think about them, I'm like, wow, who was like, um, that thing that came out of a chicken's cloaco, We should eat that for sure. I mean, there are many many foods of that nature. I understand how some people land at an entirely plant based diet based where a lot of food comes from. I had parents who had a farm when I was quite young, so I never had any illusions about the origin of animal based foods um and yet still continue to eat them. Um, if you would like to write to us and share your revelations about how cheese is actually kind of gross even though it is magically delicious, or anything else you can do so, you can write us at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History. And if you'd like to subscribe to the show and you haven't gotten around to that yet, finish your snack and then you can do so. That's on the I heart Radio app or anywhere else you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of Heart Radio. 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