The Origin of Famous Restaurant Dishes
for example ...How did Buffalo Wings get their name?

The purpose of this lesson is to stimulate thought and discussion about how certain dishes that you see on restaurant menus got their name, and how they were created.

Food origins are often still in debate, but this shouldn't really bother us, even though we may never know for sure the exact story, it makes our minds probe and think about the different possibilities. Food history is a bit like a detective story where you take this clue and that clue and put the puzzle pieces together.

A good example of this is the Reuben sandwich. There are two stories that are conflicting and you can see in this article by Jim Rader how you go about verifying the facts and arrive at a possible conclusion.
Read about the origin of the Reuben sandwich here .

Food origins can be a great topic of discussion at a restaurant with your guests , if you mention something like, hmm I wonder how Cobb Salad got it's name?

It is fun to just go to a search engine like www.google.com and type in .....history or Beef Wellington....or .....origin of donuts .....and see what you get. I hope that you share with us any information you find on the dishes that we will discuss in this email and send it to us. We will share it with the whole group.

If you have any dishes that you wonder about the names of drop us a line.
Email us at Chefs at the Food History Project   

Potato Chip | Waldorf Salad | Buffalo Wings | Cobb Salad | Baked Alsaka | Beef Stroganoff

My personal Food History Projects

How about those Potato Chips...
That are served with your burgers and sandwiches.

While this is not a dish like Crepes Suzette or Beef Wellington, but it definitely has its place in this lesson.
As it is definitely born out of the restaurant experience as many of our favorite foods are. So when you order a sandwich with potato chips next time you will have a story to tell your dining companions.

1853, Saratoga Springs, New York

As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America's favorite snack food. Potato chips originated in New England as one man's variation on the French-fried potato, and their production was the result not of a sudden stroke of culinary invention but of a fit of pique.

In the summer of 1853, American Indian George Arum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. On Moon Lake Lodge's restaurant menu were French-fried potatoes, prepared by Crum in the standard, thick-cut French style that was popularized in France in the 1700s and enjoyed by Thomas Jefferson as ambassador to that country. Ever since Jefferson brought the recipe to America and served French fries to guests at Monticello, the dish was popular and serious dinner fare.

At Moon Lake Lodge, one dinner guest found chef Crum's French fries too thick for his liking and rejected the order. Crum cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, met with disapproval. Exasperated, Crum decided to rile the guest by producing French fries too thin and crisp to skewer with a fork.

The plan backfired. The guest was ecstatic over the browned, paper-thin potatoes, and other diners requested Crum's potato chips, which began to appear on the menu as Saratoga Chips, a house specialty. Soon they were packaged and sold, first locally, then throughout the New England area. Crum eventually opened his own restaurant, featuring chips. At that time, potatoes were tediously peeled and sliced by hand. It was the invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s that paved the way for potato chips to soar from a small specialty item to a top-selling snack food.

For several decades after their creation, potato chips were largely a Northern dinner dish. In the 1920s, Herman Lay, a traveling salesman in the South, helped popularize the food from Atlanta to Tennessee. Lay peddled potato chips to Southern grocers out of the trunk of his car, building a business and a name that would become synonymous with the thin, salty snack. Lay's potato chips became the first successfully marketed national brand, and in 1961 Herman Lay, to increase his line of goods, merged his company with Frito, the Dallas-based producer of such snack foods as Fritos Corn Chips.

Americans today consume more potato chips (and Fritos and French fries) than any other people in the world; a reversal from colonial times, when New Englanders consigned potatoes largely to pigs as fodder and believed that eating the tubers shortened a person's life—not because potatoes were fried in fat and doused with salt, today's heart and hypertension culprits, but because the spud, in its unadulterated form, supposedly contained an aphrodisiac which led to behavior that was thought to be life shortening. Potatoes of course contain no aphrodisiac, though potato chips are frequently consumed with passion and are touted by some to be as satisfying as sex.

Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this story you will love "Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Thing". It is in print and I got my copy at Barnes and Nobles.

[From: Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Thing" Charles Pantati, ISBN 0-06-096419-7 (pbk) ]

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Waldorf Salad
this one is over a century old


Waldorf salad [WAWL-dorf] Created at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the 1896 not by a chef but by the maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf salad was an instant success.the original version of this salad contained only apples, celery and mayonnaise. Chopped walnuts later became an integral part of the dish. Waldorf salad is usually served on top of a bed of lettuce.

Click here to find the original recipe

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Buffalo Wings
didn't know a buffalo had wings ......

The Chicken Wing is a most delicious part of the chicken and needs no
introduction here.

But how has the chicken wing become a part of the American culture?

Chicken wings that have been baked or fried and coated with a
signature spicy hot sauce and served with bleu cheese dressing and celery
sticks have become known all over the world as Buffalo Wings. They have
nothing to do with a buffalo but have a lot to do with a restaurant in Buffalo, New
York, called the Anchor Bar.

They are a tribute to American ingenuity. They use a part of the chicken that was often used for chicken soup or thrown away. They are a tribute also to the "serendipity" that is also a part of
our heritage, in that the dish seems to have not been planned but just sort of
happened, like lots of things we have in American culture. Although like
most dishes there is some question over its true origin, this story is for
the most part undisputed. Theresa Bellisimo seems to have stumbled upon
this combination quite by accident.

Read more about the origin of this dish here
Buffalo Wings

How does a dish like this become a part of so many menus and have the kind
of appeal that would lead a major pizza chain, Dominoes, to put them on
their menu? In many homes the Superbowl munchies would be incomplete now without these
wings. Are they really that good? Well maybe you should find out. They are
the kind of dish that you make up and people go WOW these are dang good!
They are not pretty or artsy or chic ...they are just very good and have a
delicious combination of flavors that induce people to order them over and over.

Part of the celebration of this dish is that a family has trademarked it,
marketed the sauce, and made their restaurant a place that celebrities want
to visit when they come through Buffalo. This is an example of the American
dream, part of what this country was built on. I know there is a desire for gain
mixed in with the commercialization of almost anything, but often that is how a good thing
like a recipe gets spread amongst us.

Now ...do you want to order some of that special Wing sauce that has that
trick flavor? Or do you want to express your Yankee do-it-yourself
tradition and try the reasonable copycat version that reveals what is so special
about the sauce?
To order the sauce from the Anchor Bar go here
http://www.buffalowings.com/

Just remember when you serve these you are displaying the country's colors
with red chicken, and the white and blue that the blue cheese dressing
represents. (Perhaps here we should give credit to the French, for
inventing Bleu Cheese, and to the Spanish-Americans for the Tabasco sauce! Another
great example of our multi-cultured country!)

This is a good hands-on meal and one that is truly satisfying. Enjoy these
"Wings of the free" as you watch a ball game or share good
conversation ...and give a toast to democracy and the American dream.

For the recipe for buffalo Wings go here

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Cobb Salad
Is there corn cobb's in this salad ?

Cobb salad was created at the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Here's the official story ... or legend, if you will ... as recorded by the Brown Derby itself:

"One night in 1937, Bob Cobb, then owner of The Brown Derby, prowled hungrily in his restaurant's kitchen for a snack. Opening the huge refrigerator, he pulled out this and that: a head of lettuce, an avocado, some romaine, watercress, tomatoes, some cold breast of chicken, a hard-boiled egg, chives, cheese and some old-fashioned French dressing. He started chopping. Added some crisp bacon -- swiped from a busy chef.

"The Cobb salad was born. It was so good, Sid Grauman (Grauman's Chinese Theater), who was with Cobb that midnight, asked the next day for a 'Cobb Salad.' It was so good that it was put on the menu.

"Cobb's midnight invention became an overnight sensation with Derby customers, people like movie mogul Jack Warner, who regularly dispatched his chauffeur to pick up a carton of the mouthwatering salad."

Since 1937, more than 4 million Cobb salads have been sold at Brown Derby restaurants, according to the Brown Derby Restaurant Group, which, now that the two original Hollywood restaurants have closed, is what the company calls itself. It licenses the restaurant name for merchandise (including bottled Cobb salad dressing), as well as to Disney, which opened a reproduction of the original Brown Derby in Orlando, Florida, in 1989 and, in 1990. signed a 20-year agreement for Brown Derby restaurants in Tokyo, Paris and Anaheim, California. You can read all about The Brown Derby and its glamorous customers in The Brown Derby Restaurant: A Hollywood Legend, which includes many of the Derby's recipes.

Footnote: There's also a legend about how the Brown Derby got its name: One night, Herbert Somborn, an ex-husband of Gloria Swanson, remarked -- speaking of the mood of Hollywood in the roaring 20s -- that "You could open a restaurant in an alley and call it anything. If the food and service were good, the patrons would just come flocking. It could be called something as ridiculous as the Brown Derby." Hence, a restaurant shaped like a hat opened near Hollywood and Vine in 1926.

The Original recipe can be found here

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Baked Alaska

1867 - Charles Ranhofer, chef at the famous Delmonico's restaurant in New York, created a new cake to celebrate the United States purchase of Alaska from the Russians. Ranhofer is said to have invented it to commemorate Seward's purchase of Alaska in 1867. It was, at first, called Alaska-Florida Cake, but was soon changed to Baked Alaska. It was a spectacular cake, topped with solidly frozen ice cream, the whole enveloped in meringue, then browned and served still warm from the oven. It is possible that what Ranhofer deserves is the credit for popularizing an already known dessert.

The key to success for this recipe is to keep the ice cream as cold as possible and turn up the oven as high as it will go.

For the recipe for Baked Alaska go here

Beef Stroganoff

A combination of beef, mushrooms, and sour cream, Beef Stroganoff was the prize-winning recipe created for a cooking competition held in the 1890s in St. Petersburg, Russia. The chef who devised the recipe worked for the Russian diplomat Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, a member of one of Russia's grandest noble families.

How to support this Website.

My personal food History Projects.
My idea of a project is that it is something that grows and evolves out of an idea or a curiosity.
If you would like to create a similar project of your own always feel free to email me with questions.

Recipes from a German Grandma.
Our family wanted to preserve the heritage of my Grandmother that came over on Ellis Island
from the old world, and brought so much of the culture, the recipes, the home remedies, back when survival took a lot of wits and a housewife (hausfrau) was such a vital part of the household. So we wrote a book that has been very popular with recipes and anecdotes of family that lived in Portland Oregon in the early 1900's.

We found out there are a lot of German-American People that have had a similar heritage so the book brings back lots of memories as well as giving them recipes to recreate a lot of the German meals that they grew up with.

IF you would like to see our history project Recipes from a German Grandma click here

Here is a sample of the book we produced Recipes from a German Grandma

The History of Vanilla
This is a fascinating story of how vanilla became the most popular flavoring in the world.
It led me making my own vanilla extract, falling in love with the fresh beans and now I sell the vanilla beans
and help others make their own extract and other recipes as well.

Read about the history of vanilla here

If you are interested in making vanilla extract go here

If you would like some vanilla beans go here

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The Reuben Sandwich

The deficient documentation of food terms is a serious issue if you want to go beyond folklore and get at some real history. But I know the evidence is out there. I got an object lesson back in 1989 when I got in a tussle with an Omaha newspaper columnist over the origin of 'Reuben sandwich'. The tussle began when R.G. Cortelyou, an Omaha resident, sent me the July 24, 1989, column by Robert McMorris in the 'Omaha World-Herald'. McMorris had read the etymology of 'Reuben sandwich' in the 'Random House College Dictionary', which read 'after Arnold Reuben (1883-1970), U.S. restaurateur who first created it.' Random House, it turned out, had trod on a local legend (not by my foot--the etymology was written before my tenure at Random House).

According to Omaha lore, the combination of rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut had been dreamed up in 1925 to feed participants in a late-night poker game at the Blackstone Hotel in downtown Omaha by a local grocer, Reuben Kulakofsky. Charles Schimmel, the hotel's owner, was so taken with the sandwich that he put it on the hotel restaurant menu, designated by its inventor's name. Fern Snider, a one-time waitress at the Blackstone, entered the Reuben in a national sandwich competetion in 1956; her entry won--hence one of the earliest pieces of documentation for the name of the sandwich, an OED cite from 1956 from the food services journal 'Institutions'.

In a reply to Mr. Cortelyou I questioned the existence of Reuben Kulakofsky outside of Omaha folklore and challenged him to come up with evidence documenting an Omaha origin for the Reuben sandwich. Cortelyou--not very ethically to my mind--sent my letter without my permission or knowledge to McMorris, who pilloried me in his column for Aug. 23 ('Amazing. The man admittedly knows nothing about the Reuben, but he has doubts about Reuben Kulakofsky, somehow equating him with folklore figures like Paul Bunyan. One wonders how Rader feels about the Earl of Sandwich.') To my delight, though, he challenged his readers to come up with evidence for the sandwich ('Any of you out there have older Blackstone menus that document the Reuben's existence?').

One of McMorris's readers produced a Depression-era menu--though datable only by its reference to 'world confusion' and exaggerated pessimism,' as a sort of apology for the sumptuous decor--from the Plush Horse, a newly opened restaurant in the Blackstone Hotel that offered under sandwich specialties a 'Rueben' [sic] for 50 cents. Another reader produced a menu containing the sandwich from the coffee shop of the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, which was actually dated: October 9, 1937. McMorris stated in his column of Sept. 13 that he planned to send copies of this material to me. Unfortunately, he never came through, despite a couple of pleading letters on my part.

Mr. Cortelyou, who initially provoked the exchange, did some research on his own, however. He sent me a copy of a menu from the Plush Horse held in the library of the Douglas County Historical Society. The 'Rueben' (same spelling as above) is now 60 cents. This menu too is undated but a note at the bottom states 'All prices are our ceiling prices or below. By O.P.A. regulation, our ceilings are based on our highest prices from April 4 to 10, 1943.' The Office of Price Administration, which regulated prices during World War II, ceased operations in 1946, so it is probably safe to date the menu from somewhere in the period 1943-46 (assuming prices were raised as soon as regulations were lifted). This is the earliest attestation of at least a variant of 'Reuben (sandwich)' that I have in hand.

Another item Cortelyou sent me was a copy of an obituary for Reuben Kulakofsky that appeared in the 'Omaha World-Herald'. Kulakofsky, who had been co-owner of a wholesale grocery, the Central Market, died in Omaha on March 6, 1960, at the age of 86. The obituary says nothing about the Reuben sandwich.

In a letter sent directly to McMorris, I relented and said that Random House would change its etymology to reflect Reuben Kulakofsky's role as the probable originator of the sandwich. In retrospect, I think this was a hasty decision. At the time, I had not really examined Arnold Reuben's claim.

Arnold Reuben, a German immigrant, opened his first restaurant in New York at 802 Park Ave. ca. 1908 (sources differ on the exact year); he relocated to Broadway and 82nd St. several years later, to Broadway and 73rd St. (near the Ansonia Hotel) in 1916, and to 622 Madison Ave. in 1918. In 1935, the formal opening of Reuben's Restaurant at 6 East 58th St. was attended by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Reuben's Restaurant remained at this location until 1965 or 1966. The 'N.Y. Times' columnist Marian Burros recalled the decor in a Jan. 11, 1986, column: 'Italian marble, gold-leaf ceiling, lots of walnut paneling and dark red leather seats--to a small-town girl it was the quintessential New York restaurant.'

Burros recalled the apple pancakes and cheesecake, but she says nothing about Reuben sandwiches. About 1964, Reuben sold his interest in the restaurant to Harry L. Gilman and retired to Palm Beach. He died Dec. 31, 1970, at the age of 87. His obituary in the 'Times' (Jan. 1, 1971) contains most of the above information, but says nothing about Reuben sandwiches. The restaurant's offerings are described as follows:

The after-theater diner typically orders one of the outsized sandwiches or may have the house specialty -- cheese cake. Or he may order one of Reuben's more ambitious sandwiches which bears the name of a show business celebrity. Chopped-liver connoisseurs favor Reuben's. Its Jewish delicacies include matzoth-ball soup and borscht.

I have not pieced together all of the subsequent history of the restaurant, but by the early 1980's it was on the corner of 38th St. and Madison Ave.; the current Manhattan phonebook gives its address as 244 Madison Ave.

Arnold Reuben had a son, Arnold Jr., who worked in the restaurant from ca. 1930 to the time of the 58th St. place's closing in 1965/66. I have not been able to determine if Arnold Jr. retained any relation with the restaurant afterward, though he was associated with a firm that sold by mail-order 'Arnold Reuben Jr.'s Cheesecakes, A Slice of New York' into the early '90's. Arnold Jr. died in Seminole, Florida, on May 30, 1997, at the age of 88 (obit in 'St. Petersburg Times', June 1, 1997).

Now to the origin stories. In 1976, Craig Claiborne in the 'N.Y. Times' 'De Gustibus' column queried his readers about the origin of the Reuben sandwich. The replies were summarized in his May 17 column. The Omaha origin was given more serious consideration, though Reuben Kulakofsky was identified as 'Reuben Kay.' (Probably via the Claiborne article this name found its way into the 'Webster New World' 3rd ed. etymology of 'Reuben sandwich'; according to another McMorris 'Omaha World-Herald' column (Jan. 31, 1986), Reuben and various other members of the Kulakofsky clan were sometimes referred to by the first letter of their surname.) However, Claiborne also printed extracts from a letter from Patricia R. Taylor of Manhattan, the daughter of Arnold Reuben Sr. (and presumably brother of Arnold Jr.), part of which runs as follows:

I would like to share with you the story of the first Reuben's Special and what went into it. The year was 1914. Late one evening a leading lady of Charlie Chaplin's came into the restaurant and said, 'Reuben, make me a sandwich, make it a combination. I'm so hungry I could eat a brick.' He took a loaf of rye bread, cut two slices on the bias and stacked one piece with sliced baked Virginia ham, sliced roast turkey, sliced imported Swiss cheese, topped it off with cole slaw and lots of Reuben's special Russian dressing and the second slice of bread.... He served it to the lady who said, 'Gee, Reuben, this is the best sandwich I ever ate. You ought to call it an Annette Seelos Special.' To which he replied, 'Like hell I will. I'll call it a Reuben's Special.'

The most interesting thing about this story is that the 'Reuben's Special' is not a Reuben sandwich, though it has certain features thereof: it includes meat, some form of cabbage, and cheese. During the Reuben sandwich debate with McMorris, one of his researchers phoned Reuben's Restaurant in Manhattan and was told that the restaurant carried both a 'Reuben's Special'--described exactly as Ms. Taylor described it--and a Reuben, described as 'corned beef, sauerkraut, and melted cheese' (McMorris 'World-Herald' column of July 27, 1989).

This would seem to settle the matter in favor of the Nebraskans--the sandwich created in New York is connected to the Nebraskan sandwich by onomastic coincidence--were it not for a story told late in his life by Arnold Reuben Jr., who himself claimed credit for the sandwich's origin. As related to the 'St Petersburg Times' (Dec. 1, 1993),

The sandwich, he [Arnold Jr.] says, goes back to the 1930's. The restaurant, which his father founded in 1915 [sic!], was open 24 hours a day, and the younger Reuben worked from noon until 3 or 4 in the morning. He didn't take time to sit down to eat. He had too many customers.
So every day, Reuben asked the chef to make him a hamburger. One day, chef Alfred Scheuing said he was sick of seeing Reuben eating the hamburger.
The chef said, 'I've made some nice, fresh corned beef.' He layered slices onto Russian dark pumpernickel bread, which he had buttered and toasted. Then Scheuing said, 'Let's see what we can do now to make it tastier,' adding Swiss cheese.
The chef also had a huge pot of fresh sauerkraut, which he made the sandwich's finishing touch.

I suppose that if Reuben had told this story about his father, it would be family folklore. The fact that he makes himself a participant means that it is either truth or (charitably) very faulty memory. The only thing that could possibly validate it would be evidence from old Reuben's Restaurant menus attesting to the antiquity of the corned beef-Swiss cheese-sauerkraut Reuben (as opposed to the Reuben Special).

For the moment, based on the menus, I must favor the Nebraskan origin, though there is one quite significant thing about the Reuben Kulakofsky story that gives me pause. According to Kulakofsky's obituary, services were held for him 'at the Beth El Synagogue.' He 'was active for many years in Jewish circles.' Kulakofsky was born in Lithuania and emigrated with his family in 1890. 'He was one of four sons and two daughters of the late Lazar Gershon Kulakofsky.' So Kulakofsky was most likely a practicing Jew; his cultural background was unquestionably Jewish. Would this man have improvised a sandwich mixing meat and a dairy product? Even if he didn't eat the sandwich himself, would such a thoroughly goyish concoction have naturally occurred to him as a treat for his poker partners? After all, he was, as far as we know, a grocer, not a chef.

I suppose the same objection might be made about Arnold Reuben, though I really know nothing about the details of his ethnic background. To be sure, a man who supposedly created a sandwich containing both ham and cheese, as he did in his daughter's retelling, was most likely not an observant or even ethnic Jew. Despite a possibly Ashkenazic surname, and the fact that his restaurant served some New York Jewish deli-style dishes, Arnold Reuben may not have been Jewish or may have lost all his Jewish roots. The fact that his son was also named Arnold certainly does not suggest Jewishness; as far as I know, it is not the norm for Americans of even weakly felt Jewish heritage to name a child after a living relative. If I am wrong about this, may someone correct me.

How much evidence is there, really, for the Kulakofsky story? As far as I know, neither Reuben himself nor anyone in his family ever took credit for the sandwich. McMorris claimed, in 'World-Herald' columns of Jan 31, 1986, and several columns of August and September, 1989, that Ed Schimmel, the manager of the Blackstone Hotel, told him the story personally in 1965, and told a Chicago radio talk show host the story on Feb. 28, 1968. Of course, Schimmel was not a participant in the 1920's poker games--he was relating a story told him by his father, Charles, who was a participant. No one who was actually there tells the story firsthand. McMorris (column of Sept. 7, 1989) quotes one Louise Ware, who was a niece of Harvey Newbranch, a one-time editor of the 'World-Herald':

'My Uncle Harvey played regularly in those poker games at the Blackstone,' Mrs. Ware said. 'One time when I was visiting him he asked the cook to make sandwiches 'like we have at the Blackstone poker parties.' He gave her the recipe. 'I don't remember what he called the sandwich, but it was definitely a Reuben because the ingredients were the same--corned beef, sauerkraut, and so forth.'

She said she was equally sure of the year, 1922 [not 1925 as in Schimmel's account--JLR] because: 'I was living in Nebraska City then, and I had to come to Omaha to buy clothes for my first year of college. That's a date you remember.'

Note that in this version the sandwich exists, but is unnamed, and there is no mention of Reuben Kulakofsky.

The first actual--or at least reported--documentation of 'Reuben (sandwich)', as mentioned above, is a menu not from Omaha, but rather from the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, from 1937. This meshes with the first cite in Merriam files, from a 'Hotel Cornhusker' menu, Lincoln, Neb., which described the 'Reuben' as 'corned beef, Sauer Kraut, Swiss cheese on Russian Rye'; the first date on the cite slip is Jan. 19, 1956. Interestingly, Robert McMorris reported (column of Sept. 1, 1989) that an unnamed caller on a local radio talk show claimed that the Cornhusker Hotel was indeed the birthplace of the Reuben sandwich.

So what do I conclude about the etymologies of 'Caesar salad' and 'Reuben sandwich'? 'Caesar salad' does seem to be named after Caesar Cardini; if it isn't, we are looking at a very elaborate hoax and many hoodwinked people. As for 'Reuben sandwich', I'll stick with 'probably' after Reuben Kulakofsky for now, but I have serious misgivings. I hope more evidence shows up. Those old menus are out there somewhere. I suspect the real history of the Reuben sandwich has yet to be written.

Jim Rader , Merriam-Webster Inc.

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