Crazy culinary creations

Horace Walpole coined the term "serendipity" to refer to the talent for making desirable discoveries by accident possessed by the heroes of a fairy tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip." I don't know if the princes were good cooks, but fortuity often plays a significant role in the culinary world.

Consider, for example, pink lemonade. In her account of circus life and legends, Linda Granfield points out the reason the drink is so often associated with the big top. It was invented there.

The first batch of the stuff was concocted by the manager of a circus lemonade stand who, having run out of water, in desperation seized on a bucketful he came across in the dressing area of the bareback rider. The fact that the water was slightly pink, owing to the fact that a pair of red tights had been rinsed out in it, did not stop the enterprising mixologist. His new drink quickly sold out and soon pink lemonade became the "drink of circuses."

That story demonstrates that not only is necessity often the mother of invention, but that many an invention is merely an accident encountering a receptive mind. Indeed, even if you discount Charles Lamb's satirical version of the discovery of roast pork, it's clear that the history of food is replete with such occurrences.

Not a few classic concoctions were the result of culinary misadventure. Perhaps the most elegant is puff pastry. It was invented in 1654 by a French pastry cook apprentice who forgot to add butter to a batch of dough and attempted to correct his mistake by folding lumps of butter into the dough after the fact. Imagine his surprise when the dough was baked and the butter's moisture produced steam which lifted the pastry into distinct layers.

Similarly, another emblem of haute cuisine, crêpes Suzette, was first created by accident, according to Henri Charpentier. He claimed to have stumbled upon the classic dessert preparation while a young chef at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo in 1896 as he was putting together an intricate sauce for crêpes. When the cordials he was using accidentally caught fire the startled Charpentier quickly plunged the crêpes into the boiling liquid. When he served the dish to his patron, the Prince of Wales, it was a hit and he named it after the Prince's dining companion at the time, Suzette.

Not all serendipitous culinary discoveries, of course, are French or particularly sophisticated. That All-American treat, the brownie, is a case in point. Though the origin of the bars is uncertain, everyone seems to agree they were not created on purpose. One legend has it that brownies were invented by a clumsy baker who dropped a chocolate cake. Most food historians, however, theorize that the first brownie was the result of someone forgetting to put baking powder in cake batter that might have already been overloaded with chocolate, butter, and sugar. Either way, brownies were a happy mishap.

Perhaps the greatest culinary accident of all time, at least to my mind, was the one that took place in 1933 at Whitman, Mass. It was then and there that Ruth Wakefield, proprietor of the Toll House Inn, prepared a batch of her basic butter cookies and added some chopped semisweet chocolate expecting it to melt into the batter while in the oven. It didn't. Instead the chocolate morsels retained their shape and the chocolate chip cookie was born.

America's favorite snack food was likewise invented unintentionally, in fact, out of a fit of pique. It happened in the summer of 1853 at the Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. A dinner guest at the lodge, rumored to be Cornelius Vanderbilt, complained about the French fries he had been served. They were too thick, so he sent them back. The chef prepared a second batch, more thinly cut. These too were rejected. Finally, in exasperation, the chef determined to hoist the picky diner on his own petard by preparing a batch of fries cut unappetizingly paper-thin. But to his surprise, the patron loved the browned, crispy, heavily salted fries and before long potato chips became all the rage.

Other serendipitous culinary creations include popsicles (invented by an 11-year old boy who mistakenly left a container of flavored soda water, with the stirring stick still in it, on the back porch in freezing weather), fudge (probably the result of a botched batch of caramel or toffee), the ice cream cone (created spontaneously at the St. Louis World's Fair when an ice cream merchant who had run out of dishes used Persian waffles from a neighboring stand as a substitute), the French Dip sandwich (originated by a French lunch counter worker who carelessly dropped a sandwich into a pan of juices just prior to serving it), Worcestershire sauce (the product of chance fermentation lasting several months), the Parker House roll (which came by its unique shape when a baker angered by a quarrel with his sweetheart threw pieces of dough into a pan, clenching each one in his fist as he did so), and St. Louis gooey butter cake (the consequence of adding the wrong proportions of ingredients to a cake batter).

In light of all these successful failures I'm already beginning to salivate at the thought of the next culinary accident just waiting to happen.

Crêpes Suzette

This dessert is so famous, as Julia Child notes in her classic "The French Chef Cookbook," that few of us can say "crêpes" without automatically adding "Suzette." Once considered the epitome of sophisticated desserts and to require the experienced hand of a ma"tre d'hôtel, preparation of this dish has been made somewhat easier by the advent of ready-made crêpes which are now regularly available at the supermarket. This recipe is adapted from "The Joy of Cooking."

Ingredients:

1/2 stick butter

1/2 cup fresh orange juice

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1/3 cup sugar

zest of 1 orange

10 tablespoons Grand Marnier

2 tablespoons Cognac

12 sweet crêpes

Directions:

Put butter, juices, sugar and zest in a skillet or chafing dish and bring to a boil, stirring until sugar is melted. Continue to boil until slightly thickened, about 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in two tablespoons of the Grand Marnier and the Cognac and boil for another 30 seconds. One by one place the crêpes in the sauce for about 15 seconds, allowing each to heat through. Fold each crêpe into quarters to form a ruffle-edged triangle with browned side facing out. Place two folded crêpes on each of six plates, overlapping slightly in the center, and pour remaining sauce over. Heat remaining 1/2 cup Grand Marnier, pour over crêpes and ignite. Serves 6

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