Feel like a calamity in the kitchen? You might just be on track to inventing a world famous recipe Read on for some favourite ‘mistoveries’ over the centuries, and the weird and wonderful stories behind them.
1. Chocolate Chip Cookie
This breaktime favourite almost never was – or at least, wasn’t intended to be. As the story goes, in the 1930s a restaurant owner in Massachusetts added pieces of chocolate to her cookie mixture, hoping they would melt and turn it brown. The chocolate, however, had other plans, remaining intact and adding contrasting chunks of cocoa deliciousness to the cookie’s soft crumble. The rest, as they say, is history. Fortunately for us, the inventor must have missed her physics lesson when the rest of the class learnt that chocolate will only melt into a mixture with a boiling point matching, or higher, than its own.
2. Tarte Tatin
This upside-down French dessert was stumbled upon in a hotel owned by two sisters in the 19th Century. When making an apple tart, one of the sisters accidentally over-cooked the apples. To rescue it and disguise the error, she popped the pastry over the top. Et voilà – a dessert favourite was born!
View our Wimbledon Eton Mess Recipe
3. Ice lolly
One San Francisco day in 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson left a glass of powdered soda and water on his front porch, with a stirring stick still in it. After a chilly night, he noticed the next morning that the drink had frozen with the stick still in it. When he gave it a pull, the popsicle was born.
4. Bakewell Tart
This sweet treat was invented by error in the derbyshire town of bakewell, by a member of staff at a local inn. when a visiting nobleman requested a jam tart, the inn’s cook made a complete mess of the recipe – but his guest was absolutely delighted with the result, and so are we!
5. Beer
10,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, which is now known as the region around modern Iraq, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and south-west Iran, people stored their harvest grains in order to make bread. It is said that a certain batch got wet and fermented over time, and the owners decided to imbibe the frothy amber concoction, thus sampling the very first beer!
6. Crisps
On receiving repeated complaints about his potatoes being too thick and soggy from a patron at the Moon’s Lake House restaurant in 1853, chef George Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thinly that the customer wouldn’t be able to eat them with a fork. Expecting to prove a point, Crum was astonished when the customer was ecstatic with what he’d done, and the recipe became a regular on the lodge’s menu (and a world famous snack).
7. Eton Mess
As the popular myth goes, Eton Mess, the creamy compound of cream, meringue and strawberries, was created when somebody at the school dropped a meringue dessert, and (perhaps adhering to the ‘five-second rule’) opted to serve it anyway.
View our Eton Mess Recipe
8. Tofu
While it’s impossible to pinpoint it precisely, one popular origin story of tofu claims that in ancient china, boiled, ground soya beans were accidentally mixed with impure sea salt containing calcium and magnesium salts, causing the gelatinous creation.
View our Tofu Recipes
9. Sandwich
The first written record of the word ‘sandwich’ appeared in 1762, around the time that John Montague, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, was a member of an exclusive gentleman’s gaming club. Montague spent long hours gambling at the restaurant, often refusing to get up to eat. He ordered his valet to bring him his meal between two slices of bread, and others later requested ‘the same as Sandwich’.
Make your own eton mess,tarte tatin or try one of our tofu recipes.
