Chicago (1893)
Hot buttered popcorn & Cracker Jack
Anyone who claims popcorn first appeared at a Worldâs Fair will undoubtedly face challenges from those with Native American or Mesoamerican ancestry.
Historical records show the Great Lakes Iroquois popped corn in heated crockery as far back as the 1600s. Thanks to discoveries in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we know that flint corn â the popping kind â has been grown in North America since approximately 2000 BCE.
Popcorn and the Fairs didnât seem to converge until the late 19th Century. Thatâs when receipts confirm popcorn vendors paid for concession licenses at Philadelphiaâs 1876 Centennial Exhibition.
However, some exciting developments in popcorn innovation were showcased at 1893âs Columbian Exposition. First and foremost, Charles Cretors demonstrated his steam-powered popcorn machine to those strolling along the Fairâs Midway Plaisance. His contraption â which looked like a steampunk baby buggy â was inspired by a peanut roaster heâd modified after becoming disillusioned with its intended function.
Unlike other popping equipment at the time, Cretorsâ invention distributed heat evenly so more kernels would pop. Until then, almost all popcorn was made in wire baskets over an open flame. It was also hand-seasoned with butter and salt, resulting in a snack that was either soggy or too dry. Cretors provided a workaround, as his machine popped kernels in a blend of butter and salt for a more uniform taste and texture.
Cretorsâ seasoning hack wasnât his only contribution to increasing popcorn consumption in the U.S. He also added wheels to his popcorn machine, making the snack readily available to the masses. Previous set-ups werenât as ingeniously mobile as Cretorsâ wagon. Within a decade of Cretors hauling his popcorn machine down to Jackson Park, similar wagons appeared outside silent movie theaters across the country.
While many theater owners initially viewed the aroma of popcorn as an unwelcome distraction during screenings, most came around. During the Great Depression, operators realized a 5- or 10-cent bag of popcorn could be the difference between solvency and ruin. When one such theater owner, Glen Dickinson, Sr., learned that popcorn was more profitable than movie tickets, he purchased farmland and began raising corn.
Just as popcorn and the movies have become synonymous, people often associate Cracker Jack with baseball. Yet the song âTake Me Out To The Ballgameâ wasnât written until 1908. While lyricist Jack Norworth is responsible for making Cracker Jack part of our popular culture, its launch pad was the 1893 Fair.
Cracker Jackâs creator, German immigrant Frederick âFritzâ Rueckheim, was lured to Chicago more than 20 years before the fair to help clean up the Great Fire of 1871. Rueckheim invested $200 in a pre-existing popcorn stand shortly after his arrival. He eventually bought out his partner and recruited his brother Louis to help grow the operation.
Over time, the brothers experimented with different complements to their popcorn. An early molasses-and-peanuts version is what reportedly debuted at the Fair. Like Cretors, they werenât an official vendor, so verifying the brothers were there is difficult. Itâs probable, though, as the Chicago History Museum confirms the Rueckheims had established a three-story factory on S. Clinton Street by 1893. Current Cracker Jack owner Frito-Lay also asserts the brothers were selling their product to throngs of fairgoers.
In an interesting twist, the doubters â like Northwestern Universityâs Bill Savage â are also right when they argue Cracker Jack wasnât at the Columbian Exposition. In one small way, it wasnât. The name, a synonym for excellence, wasnât registered until 1896. Before this, Cracker Jack was simply known as "Candied Popcorn and Peanuts." Catchy, huh?
Hot dogs
âGreat minds think alikeâ isnât just an adage; itâs a literal fact. No less than five men came up with whatâs now known as the hot dog.
The man who gets the official credit is Charles Feltman, yet another German immigrant. While thereâs a story about how Feltman sold his frankfurters from a modified pie wagon, historian Bruce Kraig says thatâs likely untrue.
Though Feltman was a baker who once owned a pie wagon, he was also a restaurateur. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink states that Feltman began selling his âred hotsâ on Coney Island in the early 1870s.
While public records show many men sold hot dogs in the late 19th Century, the men who popularized the hot dog were all at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Two of them, Austro-Hungarian Ă©migrĂ©s Emil Reichel and his brother-in-law Samuel Ladany, had secured a concession stand in the âOld Viennaâ section of the Chicago Fair, conveniently located by one of the Midway Plaisance entrances.
The hot dog bun seems to be a later invention, as Reichel and Ladany purportedly served their âVienna sausageâ in a French roll topped with mustard and onions. Their mixture of beef and spices was considerably milder in flavor compared to the sausages Feltman sold at the time. Though there are no sales receipts, the Fair itself had over 27 million attendees.
Reichel and Ladanyâs success at the Worldâs Fair encouraged them to found the Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Company that same year, which was ultimately renamed Vienna Beef in 1929. If youâve ever passed a hot dog cart in Chicago, youâve likely seen the companyâs garish logo.
The 1893 Fair also propelled another family business with a familiar name. Oscar Mayer and his brother Gottfried supplied many of the Fairâs sausage vendors and were an official sponsor of the German display. While the two Germans started their company as a North Side butcher shop, they too moved into manufacturing after the Fair.
Given the Germans and Austrians mentioned above, itâs certainly reasonable to assume that the names commonly associated with hot dogs â frankfurter and wiener â are derived from two cities renowned for their prized sausages, Frankfurt and Vienna (Wien). And for what itâs worth, no one at the 1893 Fair called hot dogs âhot dogs.â
For many years, it was widely believed that sportswriter and New York Evening Journal cartoonist Tad Dorgan coined the term hot dog. He was supposedly at a New York Giants baseball game when he heard a vendor pushing his âred-hot dachshunds.â Itâs said Dorgan doodled a wiener dog in a bun, which he labeled a âhot dogâ due to his inability to spell dachshund.
Itâs a nice story, but there are two problems with it. One, Dorgan wasnât living in New York when he was supposedly at the game. And two, thereâs no record of the cartoonâs existence despite the widespread availability of Dorganâs work.
The name is more likely the result of snarky college kids. Students at Yale University had taken to calling lunch wagons âdog wagonsâ because they believed that the frankfurters contained dog meat.
Entomologists Dr. Gerald Cohen, Barry Popik, and David Shulman wrote a monograph about this, sharing that they found a reference to âhot dogsâ in an 1895 issue of The Yale Record. The term quickly spread to other colleges in the northeast, including Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton.
One wiener purveyor, Billy Adams, was clearly in on the joke as he named his vending business the Yale Kennel Club. His wagon was adorned with paintings of various dog breeds, but primarily hounds and dachshunds. The Kennel Club was also decorated with stained glass art featuring even more dogs.
Yale students apparently referred to the stained glass as âmemorial panels.â Should you ever doubt the value of an Ivy League education, let this anecdote change your mind.
Brownies
When you think of fair food, you probably donât think of a slice of cake. However, it was the first thing socialite Bertha Palmer thought of.
As chair of the Expositionâs Board of Lady Managers, she asked her pastry chef at the Palmer Hotel to create a small cake-like dessert for the boxed lunches distributed at the Womenâs Building.
In response, pastry chef Joseph Sehl created a proto-brownie that the Palmer Hotel still serves today. Dense and fudgy â courtesy of eight eggs â Sehlâs âchocolate barâ wasnât as sweet as modern brownies despite being topped with an apricot glaze.
Interestingly enough, Sehlâs then-nameless dessert wasnât referred to as a brownie prior to 1898. The brownie name was likely inspired by author and illustrator Palmer Coxâs popular sprite characters, The Brownies, which first appeared in 1883. The Brownies had an enormous cultural impact at the time, inspiring the names of the Girl Scoutsâ junior division and Eastman Kodakâs portable film camera.
Bringing this all full circle, the Brownies visited the Fair in the 1892 story âThe Brownies In September.â They came to Chicago to assist with the construction and were disappointed that the Womenâs Building had already been completed. Itâs too bad they didnât stick around for dessert.
Aunt Jemima pancake mix & Cream of Wheat cereal
Convenient breakfast foods were a big deal at the 1893 Fair. Unfortunately, they were served up with a hearty portion of Old South romanticism.
It all began in 1888 when Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood started operating a small grist mill in Missouri. Although neither had a culinary background, they began developing a pancake flour formulation that only required the addition of water. This âinnovationâ was intended to help them repackage and sell their excess flour.
After some trial and error, they settled on a blend of wheat and corn flour, salt, and lime phosphate (which acts similarly to baking powder). While Rutt and Underwoodâs creation was revolutionary enough to see their business acquired within a year, it was a former slave from Kentucky who made their mix a fixture in kitchens across America.
Rutt was inspired to rethink the branding of his one-time âSelf-Rising Pancake Flourâ after seeing a minstrel show where men in blackface sang about Old Aunt Jemima. However, it was the Pearl Milling Companyâs second owner â R.T. Davis â who brought the âmammyâ to life.
In a booth meant to mimic the shape of a flour barrel, Nancy Green served pancakes to fairgoers while singing and telling sanitized stories about her life on a Southern plantation. These tales were inspired by the elaborate backstory featured in a pamphlet Davis had commissioned.
In it, Aunt Jemima was characterized as a former house slave for one Colonel Higbee, a fictitious Louisiana man whose plantation was known for fine dining. As the story goes, a former Confederate general who fondly remembered her pancakes put her in touch with Davisâs company, which paid her in gold to oversee the construction of a factory that would produce her pancake mix.
Fairgoers quite literally ate this story up. So much so that Fair officials presented Green a special award for showmanship, while Davis received as many as 50,000 orders from eager distributors.
The character of Aunt Jemima proved so popular that paper dolls appeared on boxes of pancake mix. There were dolls for Jemima, her husband Mose, and their four children, Abraham Lincoln, Dilsie, Zeb, and Dinah. Of course, in a sign of the times, a racial slur for African youth was used in place of the word âchildren.â
These paper dolls depicted the family both before and after the sale of her famous recipe. The âpresaleâ dolls featured everyone in tattered clothes, while the âpost-saleâ dolls came with elegant clothing that could be cut out and placed over the family, some of whom were dancing barefoot.
The 1893 Fair might have made one black woman a household name, but it did very little to promote the successes of African Americans after theyâd been released from the bonds of slavery. This exclusion was despite the efforts of the Women's Columbian Association and the Women's Columbian Auxiliary Association to encourage greater inclusion.
In response to public pressure from the two Columbian Associations, the Fair did allow a âNegro Dayâ where Frederick Douglass spoke. Tellingly, the associated picnic was prohibited from being held on the fairgrounds.
Unlike many black people, Green ended up being a fixture at the Worldâs Fairs. According to her obituary in the Chicago Defender, she played the role of Aunt Jemima until she died in 1923. She appeared at every World's Fair but one.
Interestingly enough, Aunt Jemimaâs husband wasnât always Mose. Itâs said he was initially called Rastus but was renamed to avoid confusion with the mascot of another brand.
That brand, Cream of Wheat, was introduced to the masses in the same year and place as Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour. For the uninitiated, Cream of Wheat is a porridge-like breakfast that visually resembles grits but has a much smoother texture.
Cream of Wheat was created to move surplus grain, much like Rutt and Underwood had intended with their Aunt Jemima mix. Though âChefâ Rastus was presented as the face of the brand, the breakfast item was the brainchild of Scotsman Tom Amidon.
Amidon was the chief miller at Grand Forks, North Dakotaâs Diamond Milling Company. He proposed the millâs owners package up a convenience food made from a portion of the wheat berry typically discarded during flour-making.
After Diamond Milling augmented its regular flour shipment with ten cases of Cream of Wheat, food broker Lamont, Corliss & Company telegrammed requesting an additional 50 cases. The distributor sent the following wire the next day: âFORGET THE FLOUR. SEND US A [RAILROAD] CAR OF CREAM OF WHEAT.â
Cream of Wheatâs Rastus never had the rich backstory of Aunt Jemima, but he did have the same roots as a character in minstrel shows. Whereas Aunt Jemima actually resembled Green, Rastusâs initial likeness was merely a generic drawing from the package designer.
Cream of Wheat didnât quite have the draw of Aunt Jemima, but fairgoers seemed to like its heartiness and ease of preparation. Who knew casual racism could be so palatable?