Accidental foods: when kitchen errors turn into culinary delights

Have you ever made a delicious mistake in the kitchen? You’re not alone. Some of our most beloved foods came about thanks to a cook’s error.

I wonder if beer was brewed by mistake all those thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia? Alcohol was surely a happy accident, discovered soon after the first people started cultivating cereals such as barley and wheat. If you were storing cereals packed full of natural sugars, it makes sense that they could have naturally fermented when they came into contact with wild yeasts floating around in the air.

In Michael Pollan's fantastic Netflix series Cooked, based on his brilliant book of the same name, the American food writer mentions a theory that beer came before bread, and it was this fermentation process that inspired the first loaf. So perhaps it was the probable accidental brewing of beer that led to the deliberate development of bread.

In the past 200 years, the stories of unintentional inventions in the kitchen have been more closely recorded. It’s claimed that John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins were testing a recipe for a Worcestershire sauce in their pharmacy in the early 1800s. They screwed up and the product was deemed inedible. They stored the barrel, in which they’d been brewing their sauce, down in their basement only to rediscover some time later to that the sauce had matured into something quite delicious. They launched their first bottles of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, using the same process, in 1838.

There's a popular story around the invention of crisps. Though recipes for thin slices of fried potatoes appeared as early as 1822 in William Kitchiner's cookbook The Cook's Oracle, most people attribute the invention of this most wondrous of savoury snacks to a disgruntled chef called George Crum, working in Saratoga Springs in New York.

Apparently, in August 1853, Crum became annoyed with a customer who kept sending his fried potatoes back to the kitchen, saying they were too thick. In an act of revenge, he passive-aggressively sliced the potatoes super thin and sent them back out to the customer. Much to his surprise (and possibly his chagrin), the customer loved them. Saratoga Chips was a popular name for potato chips in the US right until the mid-20th century.

Plenty of our favourite sweet treats were invented by mistake. Perhaps most famously, the Tart Tatin was baked by accident by Stéphanie Tatin sometime in the late 1800s in the hotel she ran with her sister Caroline.

Bassett’s & Co claim that their Liquorice Allsorts came about when sales representative Charlie Thompson dropped a tray of sample sweets in front of a client in 1899. The sweets got all mixed up as a flustered Charlie rushed to gather them up. The client commented that this new creation of mixed sweets was quite interesting. Soon after the company launched their Liquorice Allsorts to huge and long-lasting success.

Fortuitously frozen On a cold San Francisco night in 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson absent-mindedly left a glass jar of soda, complete with a mixing stick, out on his front porch overnight. He was amazed when he woke up the next morning to find that the soda had frozen solid. To his delight. when he went to remove the stick from the jar, the frozen block of soda came with it. Nine years later, at the age of 20, Epperson patented this idea under the name Popsicles.

A year before Epperson’s epiphany, Syrian immigrant Ernest Hamwi was working at a big event in 1904 in St Louis, selling zalabia, a waffle-like pastry. The vendor next to him was Arnold Fornachou, who was selling ice-cream. The story goes that Fornachou ran out of plates on this particularly busy day, so Hamwi rolled up one of his waffles around a scoop of ice-cream. Hamwi went on to found the Missouri Cone Company in 1910 and to issue a patent for a pastry cone-making machine in 1920.

Perhaps the most unexpected story behind an accidental food invention lies with good-old Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. In 1894, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. He was also an Adventist, which meant he followed a stark, vegetarian diet and enforced the same on his patients. He believed that people ran the risk of losing the run of themselves when they ate sweet or spicy foods.

One day, Kellogg and his younger brother Will were distracted in the middle of cooking wheat for the patients’ supper. When they returned to the task, they found that the wheat had gone stale. They tried to roll out the wheat to see if they could salvage sheets of dough, but instead they were left with flakes. They toasted those up and served them to their patients.

Kellogg believed that his cornflakes could cure, or at least reduce, the evils of masturbation. I know! I’m as surprised as you are. This was according to his Adventist beliefs, where diet was considered a major influencer in the sins of the flesh, which they believed was at the root of all insanity. Now, there’s some food for thought for the next time you start your day with a bowl of Kellogg’s Cornflakes.