Freeze a jolly good fellow
MARION McMULLEN LOOKS BACK AT INVENTORS WHO HAVE GIVEN US FOOD FOR THOUGHT
CLARENCE BIRDSEYE chilled the competition 90 years ago when he introduced something shoppers had never seen before... frozen food.
His brain wave came after he spent five years as a fur trapper in Labrador in Canada and noticed how the local Inuits froze food supplies to make them last.
The process led to him returning home and experimenting with quick freezing, and on March 6, 1930, shoppers in Springfield, Massachusetts, found frozen peas in their grocery stores for the first time.
It marked the start of a new era of food shopping with people able to buy out-of-season produce and food from the other side of the world.
“Quick freezing was conceived, born and nourished on a strange combination of ingenuity, stick-to-itiveness, sweat and good luck,” the American inventor explained.
His frozen foods reached the UK in 1938 with the BirdsEye burger launching in 1950 followed by fish fingers in 1955.
Clarence changed the way we shopped and cooked, but never stopped inventing throughout his life and patented more than 300 ideas.
He once explained: “Inventing is only one of my lines. I am also a bank director, a president of companies, a fisherman, an author, an engineer, a cook, a naturalist, a stockholder, a consultant and a dock-walloper. Whenever anyone asks me what I am, I become rather confused because I don’t know which of these occupations to give. To be perfectly honest, I told a young friend, ‘I am best described as just a guy with a very large bump of curiosity and a gambling instinct.’”
Twelve-year-old Helen Dalzell, from Halifax, came up with her own idea for Birdseye in 1967 when she suggested the triangular sausage.
She met with the company’s meat product development manager Howard Abbott at the Hilton to cook and taste the new product, but the idea never caught on.
Brothers Will Keith and Dr John Harvey Kellogg changed breakfast time forever in 1889 when they tried to make granola for patients at their health sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. They flaked wheat berries by accident and came up with the recipe for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.
They hired 44 staff in 1906, to begin manufacturing and selling the breakfast cereal, and launched All-Bran 10 years later, but UK consumers had to wait until 1922 before they could tuck in.
Dr Kellogg is also one of several people credited with the invention of peanut butter and served a form of nut butter to his patients at the sanatorium and also offered meat alternatives and soy milk.
He once wrote: “There is nothing necessary or desirable for human nutrition to be found in meats or flesh foods, which are not found in and derived from vegetable products.”
Kellogg’s Rice Krispies joined the breakfast cereal range in 1928 and became famous for its “snap, crackle and pop” slogan.
The breakfast cereal also led to the TV debut of Jonathan Ross. The presenter was 10 when he appeared in the Rice Krispies advert in 1970.
It was marketed as “the talking cereal” because of the sound it made when milk was poured onto it and was originally sold by door-to-door salesmen.
Combining a flavoured syrup with carbonated water proved a lifechanging moment for American pharmacist and former Confederate colonel Dr John S Pemberton in 1882.
His partner and bookkeeper Frank M Robinson is said to have come up with the name for the new beverage – Coca-Cola. The drink sold for five cents a glass at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta and in the first year they sold on average nine glasses a day.
Now Coca-Cola is sold all over the world. Nearly two billion servings of Coca-Cola Company products are served every day.
Dom Perignon had everyone popping their corks when he accidentally discovered the process for champagne in 1693.
The Benedictine monk is credited as the inventor of the famous bubbly and legend has it his words on first tasting the sparkling French wine were: “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars.”
Champagne has now become a celebration drink. Napoleon Bonaparte famously declared: “I drink champagne when I win, to celebrate, and I drink champagne when I lose, to console myself.”
British wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill later echoed the sentiment saying: “I could not live without champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.”
Churchill was such a fan of the fizz that champagne makers Pol Roger sent him a case every year on his birthday. They also put a black border on their bottles to Britain following his death at the age of 90 in 1965. In 1984 they named their prestige cuvée after him.
He famously said during the Second World War: “Remember gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s champagne.”