[Music] did you know that the sandwich was invented by a compulsive gambler that the Chinese fortune ability is not from China that the first hamburgers were thought to contain body parts since the earliest days Americans have collected recipes from far-flung lands then we season a spicy bacon boil simmer export and we reinvented from cultures around the world we gathered our favorite foods and we made them our own hot dogs and ice cream cones hamburgers and pizza fried chicken and the sandwich the foods we eat have become emblems of America itself they're fast fun and a little funky Lester pickled onions always that's the old-fashioned way chopped liver okay corned beef russian dressing I just love it they're mass-produced and custom-made two on the plate where's the road it's plain cheese pie well done and each food has an amazing story to [Music] the story of American food is the story of American ingenuity an uncanny ability to take food from somewhere else bring it here and make it well more interesting of course no one did this better than America's immigrants especially those who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many came with just the clothes on their backs and something priceless the recipes for their own unique foods we are a mixture of the eating habits of the many cultures and the many peoples who have come together in the United States we've made the cultural diversity of the United States part of ourselves in their everyday lives and we enjoy doing it still there wasn't always so much to enjoy imagine a world in which pizza didn't have cheese where there was no peanut butter to go with your jelly and where the hotdog was served if we dare say without a bun [Music] the hot dog [Music] an American gastronomical icon almost synonymous with American culture itself no matter how you eat yours with mustard pickles onions or kraut just about everyone likes hot dogs at home over the campfire at the game or on the beach and the story of the hot dog is a very American tale spiced with immigrant dreams hard work movie stars and inspired hustle [Music] the hot dog has an ancient and noble ancestry because undress the dog is really just a simple sausage and sausages are as old as civilization itself in ancient times butchers needed a way to preserve and store precious meat to keep it from spoiling sausages were simple enough to make chop the meat fine mix in pepper and other spices squeeze it into a piece of animal and tested after preserving it by smoking or drying and could keep for months even years the ancient Greeks made sausage Homer describes it in the Odyssey the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine tried to outlaw sausages in 300 AD because he thought they were too bound up in Rome's older pagan ways no use Constantine may as well have told his people to stop drinking water but that's all ancient history the humble hot dog as we know it dates from the 19th century when German immigrants brought over the sausages destined to become world fancy by the 1850s the so called wienerwurst or frankfurter after Frankfurt the supposed city of its birth could be found in New York's Berlin groceries the delicatessens these sausages were usually beef with a little pork or lamb tossed in 100 sausage makers trick was to add a little Biel which made the sausages plump up when they were needed a hot dog special factory that is still familiar today in the late 1800s grinders were invented that could chop the meat into a super fine national a hungry diner could chew and swallow a fraction under a minute an early fast-food so now America had itself a real wiener but before America fell hard for this Teutonic tidbit there was still one crucial ingredient missing the bun and how it met the sausage is a tale of heated debate some say that the original meeting place was the one most commonly associated with the dog today the baseball park a 1901 a man named Harry Stephens sold ice cream at the Polo Grounds home of the New York Giants legend has it that one cool day when ice cream wasn't selling Harry Stephens had an inspiration he ordered his crew by Frank foods from surrounding German shops to make them easy to hold he slapped them on to Vienna bread rolls the new snack caught on some vendors called them Red Hots others nicknamed them dachshund dogs after the long skinny German boot and hot dog lore has one man putting the two names together the sports cartoons ta Dorgan drew a cartoon having the vendors say get your Red Hots and get your red hot dogs here now no one has ever found this cartoon whoever named the hot dog there's no question where the dog became famous New York's Coney Island and the man who started that association was German immigrant Charles Feldman in the late 1860's Feldman was a meat pie lender on the skinniest bit of land at the bottom and according to Coney Island history Feldman was the first one to put a dog in a bun he got nervous when his competition started selling sandwiches which were easy for the busy customers to eat on the go so Felton rigged a small charcoal stove towards wagon boiled frankfurters and then wrapped them in toasted ones within ten years Felton's Coney Island wagon had grown a development's ocean pavilion hotel and restaurant it was a huge success serving 7,000 people at once many buying Franks at a dime apiece then on a momentous day in 1950 the hotel hired a young roll slicer named nathan handwerker these were the days before automation so every roll had to be hand sliced my father when he thought about the roll you know came in he had his hand there and he had he was nice you know he's pretty fast he's pretty good in it Handwerker was a Jewish immigrant fresh from Poland he worked hard and he was liked by everyone and when a couple of the regular customers at Felton's a pair of struggling actors named Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor told him he should start his own shop Handwerker considered it he saved his money one story says he did it by eating nothing but the hotdogs he could get for free at work and after saving $300 nathan quit Feldman's for the chance to take his own bite out of the american free Nathan's Coney Island hot dog stand opened on a corner just down the street from Feldman's in 1916 Nathan set out to make a better hot dog by first changing the blend of spices and I father asked my mother she cooked in the family those days and the Esther to see if he can develop the spice formula they can give to the spice manufacturer who sold to the meat people of manufacture are the hot dogs Nathan's dogs were a little more peppery than Feldman's and a little juicier they were all beef they used lots of pungent garlic and they were wrapped in a natural intestine tasting which made them crunch when you victim but most importantly Nathan sold them for just a nickel half the price of a Feldman flank the first price war in hotdogs history and wouldn't you know it it backfired a lot of people in here opened up with a five-cent Frankfurt in the stuntman's was ten they were little worried and kind of food in the early days cheap hot dogs were being made out of dubious bits and pieces of pigs and cows Nathan was using quality beef but how to convince people about it he offered free pickles free root beer but nothing worked finally he came up with one of the greatest publicity stunts ever he offered free meals to doctors at the Coney Island Hospital on one condition they show up at his stand wearing their white lab coats once the public saw doctors eating in Athens well the health concerns over a nickel dog were cured an important step in making Nathan's famous was the arrival of the subway in Coney Island in the early 20s and the building of the boardwalk in 1923 the beach front was transformed into the so-called subway Riviera [Music] as beachgoer stepped out of the station the first thing they saw was Nathan's now no trip to Coney Island was complete without pushing her way to the block long counter for a crackling natural casing Nathan's you just take a look at the subway and you just see thousands of people coming off and walking to the beach and if it rains in the middle of the afternoon and people the people would be coming off the beach everybody on the counter would say they're coming off and he'd just be del usually be overflowing into the streets and it would just go on would seem like an eternity the best of the griddle met at Nathan's could sell 60 hot dogs a minute the hot dogs popularity surged when the talented grill men plied their trade of Nathan's stand magic tavern and that magic attracted some very familiar faces Babe Ruth took his dogs with mustard onions and sauerkraut it was whispered on the boardwalk that he ate ten or twelve dogs between the games of a doubleheader evil but truth celebrities who had survived on nickle hot dogs from Nathan's in their wardrobe days came home to Coney Island he got every celebrity imaginable and so in the mythology of Nathan's hot dogs Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor and all the famous celebrities who played vaudeville in those days went to the stand gave him publicity now Nathan's really was famous but the Hollywood glamour was only part of the hot dogs magic it was the everyday folks lining the counter that really made the Franks of famous the beauty of the American hot dog is it is a democratic food and it is served to everybody no matter what the social level by the mid-1960s in a mere 50 years nathan handwerker 'he's company had sold 600 million hotdogs but the hotdogs had one more door to knock on the door to the American hole and that was open by Oscar Mayer jr. Oscar Mayer gets hot dogs out of the ballpark and out of this the street food category into the home largely by marketing to kids in the 30s and 40s the Meyer family owned a successful meatpacking business in Chicago they were among the first to slap their company name on every package of meat they supplied to the supermarket and they helped make the hot dog a favorite with the help of a publicity stunt Oscar Meyer presents Wienermobile off the rolls in 1936 Kaji Meyer dreamed up the 13-foot Wienermobile he hired a [ __ ] actor put him in a chef's outfit called him a little Oscar and sat him in the bumper seat the Wienermobile spread the fame of Oscar Meyer on the hotdogs through the appetites of children it turned out to be the perfect food for campfire cooking and for young mothers hot dogs were precooked easy to prepare easy to chew and kids genuinely liked them they knew that kids go shopping with their mothers get them to buy these hotdogs mom I want this hot dog so of course mothers give in they don't want to hear it the American dog itself was still evolving most of today's dogs don't have any skin at all the meat is chopped and mixed squeezed into a plastic casing and cooked in the shape of winter and then the casing is peeled away leaving the meat behind and although most dogs are all beats there are chicken dogs turkey jobs even some which harken back to the bad news there's some real old-time hotdogs next which will serve you things like cowlicks cow ears pork snouts you will see it lymph glands there are brands which do it that's the way they used to be made once upon a time sleek and streamlined plump and juicy we all love a good hot dog you might even say it's out of this world and by the 1970s hot dogs were literally dogs were just one of the comfort food sent by NASA into space to fulfill the astronauts hunger for a taste of the good old US of A but the astronauts dogs had to fly without their traditional co-pilot there was just no room in the capsules for the yeast risen buns [Music] we now return to American eats history on a one piece of pie just the word start your mouth water everyone knows what they like on her pizza year after year the number one topic is pepper boy and we're just as sure about what we know like at the bottom of the popularity charts you guessed it anchovies on average Americans down a hundred acres worth of pizza every day that's 350 slices per second Pizza has been around in one form or another since the ancient Greeks old-world tribes baked pizza by putting bread dough on the hearth stone next to the fire they brushed the top with olive oil and herbs even wine and toppings vegetables and a smidgen of cheese sound familiar the first focaccia bread it was the Greeks who came up with the handle idea leaving a puffy rim of crisply baked crust for grabbing on to the Romans grabbed it and they took it to hit him and a good thing too because it was Italians or more precisely the people of Naples who added a key ingredient the tomato and they did it out of economic necessity Naples was at the heart of an impoverished region few people had the money to eat well in their search for something that could make life a little better Neapolitans turned to the tomato and the good news about the tomato is you can plant the tomato and three or four months later you've got all a lot of fruit to eat they took a powerful hunger to get Neapolitans excited about the tomato since most Europeans thought the tomato was useless or worse it was a member of the nightshade family of plants and shrubs some of which are poisonous and there were other charges against it the Squishy was red it was not the right color that didn't taste the right way so there all sorts of reasons on why I was not adopted but of course it tasted good so after it was shown that you could enjoy it and survive it caught on gradually becoming the key ingredient of southern Italy's rustic cuisine in 1889 Pizza was elevated to a position of national pride when Italy's Queen Margherita paid a visit to Naples a local Baker made her a pie that featured the colors of the nation's new flag tomatoes for the red basil for the green and from the white soft sweet mozzarella cheese traditionally made from the milk of water buffalos [Music] in bringing the Queen the first pizza margarita this pioneer nailed down another landmark the first recorded pizza delivery the next delivery came soon after that but this time the destination was all the way across the Atlantic and the delivery man up two year old boy Gennaro Lombardi arrived in New York from Naples around 1895 one of four million Italians who came to America between 1880 and 1920 trained as a baker back home he found work in a grocery store as soon as he landed every day a parade of workers came and went past the store to factory jobs so he started to make pizza he persuaded the owner of the grocery store that he wanted to make pizza and the people would pick up their pizza in the morning when they went to work and work they did back home most of the new immigrants had been farmers but here they put in six long days a week in the factories driving America's Industrial Revolution peaceful like 14-hour days then they used to take the pizza needs to put on the radiator in the factory and they would have them for their lunch and when they worked late they would have a for their dinner Lombardi wrapped his pies in paper and cardboard tied them up into bundles and sold them cooled out of the shop window only one kind of pizza dough tomato and mozzarella finally at the age of 24 he opened his own business his pies always sold out like in 1905 the city declared that the owner business should have a license he was the first guy down there to get a license she wanted it be a real true American to books that was a any hunger than the wind as if it was a diploma from Harvard in Little Italy at the turn of the century Lombardi perfected his trademark pie in gar and crunchy with slabs of mozzarella and tomato sauce cook quickly in a coal-fired oven for an even dry bake the temperature right now where the : right in in the middle of the coals burning is 2,000 degrees in the pizza in the pizza oven itself it varies between 700 and 800 degrees I can run a locomotive on this oven that's how intense the heat is so that's why my pipes come out play with the way they do this is Victor my head pizza chef Lombardi style pizza became New York style pizza because Gennaro trained many of New York's first Pizza chefs he was happy to take new immigrants fresh off the boat from Naples and give them a job but of course family came first his kids and their kids all took their turn before his ovens and old man Lombardi was never an easy man to bake for you have to really prove yourself in that area before my grandfather was with the war let us even make the part for years Pizza remained a well-kept secret hidden in New York's Little Italy but by the 1920s pizzerias began to spread to Massachusetts Connecticut and beyond in Chicago a new style of Pizza it was called deep-dish pizza its inventor was Chicago and Ike Seoul who wanted a pizza pie special enough to deserve a sit-down meal in 1943 after experimenting with variations on the pizza theme Sewell and a partner came up with a two inch deep crust packed with gobs of mozzarella cheese meat and vegetables and baked in a heavy iron pan a pizza that weighed in at twice the bulk of a New York Pie they named their establishment Pizzeria Uno and thanks to pizzaiolo Chicago became the pizza capital of the Midwest but still Pisa was not a national fad that took a war [Music] in 1943 and some of the most bitter fighting of World War two American GIs fought their way through Sicily wanded the Italian coast and then slide their way to Navy's the American boys were welcomed as heroes by the Opus who served them pizza [Music] [Applause] [Music] the GIS brought their taste for their newfound treat back to America by the late 1940s pizzerias were popping up all over the country and they added a gimmick to bring them in a pizza chef throwing the dough high in the air and catching it before he rolled it out to show the drugs how to pull the people and he's doing something magical what a piece of dough is swinging up in the air it's in Section two give me the works ear up to the Bell hostess brothers naturally the next step in making pizza big was in making it small a slice the slice changed everything in the fifties and it's really only in the 50s that Americans of differing backgrounds start to eat pizzas in large numbers usually in corner Italian run of pizza places with pizza in such high demand the next development was inevitable the pizza chain in 1958 entrepreneur brothers Dan and frank kearney rented a tiny brick building in Wichita Kansas and opened up pizzeria we borrowed $600 my mom and I went to get started and bought a bunch of old Evans we had an assignment was given to us that would take wholly the number of letters and three letters after the word pizza and after several meetings my wife came up with the idea that it would be pizza have to insist was unnatural the Carney brothers worked late into the night and still remember walking home dark smelling like pizza but after months of experimentation don't a frickin Pizza Hut was a success but it took another pair of brothers from Detroit Jim and Tom Monaghan to take the next giant step in pizza history the Monaghan's figured they'd clean up if the longest strip their customers had to make was to the telephone the Monaghan's took a successful idea home delivered pizza and added a classic American flavor but guaranteed they promised delivery in under 30 minutes their original store Dominic's became Domino's their first three stores are still commemorated in the three dots in their logo but as the popularity of Pizza soared the quality suffered first of all there were only so many old-world pizza makers around it was much easier to get the ingredients ready-made from an outside supplier koulev ins had given way to efficient gas models new dough machines had replaced the old laborious kneading by hand and with refrigeration there was no need to make up everything fresh the result was a breakthrough for the pizzeria owner and a sad day for the customer pretty soon it all started tasting the same whether you bought your pie in New York or st. Louis there was a good chance he could have the same pizza for better or worse in any of a hundred cities but not all pizza was bland and the phone sure didn't stop ringing at the pizzeria by 1970 Pizza was the number one home-delivered meal in America beating out Chinese food [Music] today there are more than 60,000 pizzerias in this country and Americans by 4.2 billion pizzas every year cook right there's nothing like that perfect combination of dos spices tomato sauce and cheese the sauce that is using we make fresh every day the fresh mozzarella has to be cut like this because if you try to shred it like the regular processed cheese it will come out like mush now it's gonna go right into the oven that's it simple good ingredients hot oven four minutes the pie is out in and out in four minutes toppings broke everything crystal that's the perfect plane classic pizza a Lombardi classic pizza she's beautiful forgot I can't say nothing else we now return to American eats history honored one on a super hot grill in Wichita Kansas a meatball sizzles in a pile of crackling onions and sizzles and sizzles but it's not cooking fast enough the hungry customers are waiting at last in a fit of rage the cook raises his spatula I am pure nary history that pesky meatball is squashed into a flat patty it cooks fast it's tasty and the cook notices it fits just perfectly on a round bun [Music] that's just about anyone to name the most American food of all time and they'll tell you flat-out the hamburger and they'd be right 96% of Americans eat at burger joints at least once a year but our beloved burgers started out at the very bottom of the food chain once sneered at by the upper classes as blue collar fool fit only for factories the hamburger crossed all class and cultural boundaries to become America's keulen era calling card [Music] to find the beef we travel back to the thirteenth century Russia it was the nomadic horsemen of the Russian steppes that partners who launched the meat on its pasture glory the Tartars were known to tenderize meat under their saddles often it was shredded with a knife and flavoured with a little onion but not cooked steak eaten by the Tartars was raw in the early 1700s German visitors to Russia brought the simple recipe although in the port city of Hamburg German ships added raw egg onions and one more vital touch they cooked it now the beef was juicy savoury and hot was still oneness to earn its bun the beef would have to cross an ocean first the first German immigrant sailors from the port of Hamburg brought the recipe to American shores with them when they brought it to this country it was still just a ground steak it wasn't a sandwich and when the immigrants arrived here it became known as steak cooked in the Hamburg style Delmonico's the hoity-toity restaurant where the swells hung out a New York City had Hamburg style steak on the menu by 1834 but without a bun it was still just so much chopped meat so who married bunda burger eyes with a hot dog there are more than a few contestants for that honor luis lassen owner of an eatery in New Haven Connecticut claimed he invented the handheld burger for a customer on the goal in 1900 a guy named Frank mention said he started at all at the Akron County Fair in Ohio in 1892 but the town of Seymour Wisconsin insists that native son charting a green was inspired to create the hamburger while selling Hamburg style steaks at the local County Fair in 1885 well-dressed people of the day we're getting grease on their clothes you know from handling the meat and all this and the wrapper or whatever so I got this great idea hey why not take the meat patty slap it between two pieces of bread but the first recorded evidence of beef with bun comes at the 1904 World's Fair in st. Louis Missouri and that keulen Airy carnival a newspaper reported that a vendor caused a sensation with a novel invention called the hamburger though the vendor was never named the hamburger took off pushcart selling five cent burgers as well as other quick meals became as familiar to factory workers as the whistle at the time for multiple factory ships kept these places with hungry workers day and night chefs had to grind out philly meals in short order lunch carts horse-drawn lunch carts you would call this the very first days of fast food because this was the time when things were moving so quickly that people began to eat on the run on their lunch hours but middle-class eaters still turned their noses up at the future king of American food suspicious of the greasy eateries and fearing for their health they claimed that ground beef was really ground for a sinister reason to allow butchers to sell off spoiled meat or even worse Upton Sinclair's classic book of the jungle written in 1906 claimed that Chicago slaughter yards were so brutal and filthy they were grinding up parts of their employees after the book came out meat sales dropped by more than half Sinclair's expose spurred a cleanliness campaign the likes of which the country had never seen cleaned up factories in Chicago were actually opened to the public and slaughterhouse Tours became tourist attractions still the hamburger had yet to turn its greasy spoon reputation into a squeaky-clean luckily hamburger Walt a Swede from Kansas rose to the challenge Jay Walter Anderson was a short-order cook with an even shorter temper it was Walt who smashed that meatball in a fit of rage back around 1915 and just squashed it down and it became a patty and from there he found a roll to put it on and unsubstantiated but that is the saddest beginning of our modern hamburger Walt started his very own Wichita hamburger stand in 1916 installed a counter three stools and a piece of flat iron for a griddle he opened three more stands by 1920 and hoped to open more for help wall turn to respected Wichita real-estate man Billy Ingram he went to my grandfather and my grandfather said that he would help him buy this corner lot and he would go into partnership with him just on this one Ingram and Anderson tackled the down-and-dirty burger image with a clever gimmick hygiene they borrowed $700 to build a glorified cement cube with a griddle and five counter stools they painted the store white inside and out for the name they chose two words that sent a clear message white for purity and castle for strength and permanence they borrowed the castle like look of the place complete with battlements in the turret from Chicago's water tower a national symbol of endurance after it survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 the day of the dirty greasy hamburger is past pronounced Billy Ingram and he set out to prove it before the very eyes of his customers and he took the good cuts of the meat ground them up right behind the counter in full sight of everybody everybody everybody knew exactly what meat was going into their burger each tassel offered a simple menu burgers hot coffee and cola soda pop all served with a smile at the outset White Castle only employed men a polite and well-groomed Cook's stood over the siz Negro he was under orders to trim his fingernails shaved carefully and keep neat as a pig correct bad over flashy to Russian TV prepared to speak Polish retreat Lincoln also ready to make suggestions no body odor but it was the cleanup man whose sole job was to scrub the utensils and counters all day long who really defined White Castle they used to literally have to clean the inside and the outside of the building daily the White Castle burger was small almost bite-sized it weigh just one ounce fresh burgers and buns were delivered to the castle twice daily a welcome sight for burger skeptics then White Castle embarked on the country's first Fallout burger marketing campaign their target the greatest skeptic of all LA Ingram had an inventive plan which would prove the little burgers that customers fondly called sliders belly bombers and beef cookies were not only safe they were actually good for the University of Minnesota Medical School this is one of my favorite stories and a I think it was for a period of 60 days for two months a medical student ain't nothing but White Castle hamburgers in water and they gauged his nutrition they gauge his health along the way and they proclaimed him to be fully healthy by the end of those two months a normal child a report posted could eat only White Castle burgers and water and grow to be healthy and mature Ingram's ads urged customers to buy them by the sack and they did White Castle spawned dozens of imitators the hamburger which had once been a rough young concoction made to order was transformed into a sleek assembly line leader by 1931 the demand for White Castle beef cookies was so great they went from round to square the better to fit 30 petite burgers snugly on a grill without wasting one iota of space after a Cincinnati grill man discovered a broken patty cooked faster five evenly spaced holes would be pressed into the meat during World War two as America's young men were swept into uniform women took men's places behind the White Castle counter a trend which has continued to this day eventually White Castle restaurants would serve ninety one and a half million hamburgers in a similar the gorillas could produce 3000 burgers an hour and customers could easily eat a dozen and a sale by cleaning up the shop and selling burgers is health food Billy Ingram and Walt Anderson had reinvented the hamburger and had turned it into a national favorite but its greatest days were still to come we now return to American eats history honored one the end of the Second World War seemed to promise unlimited horizons for America that meant the future looked bright for the hamburger which was on the way to becoming our favorite food and modern technology was ready to usher in this burger loving age new automatic burger machines could mold eject and stack almost 2,000 hamburger patties an hour the perfect weapon in the feeding frenzy that was about to hit America and that frenzy would arrive on wheels the 1940s the automobile in America a new era of life on the road as the family car became an essential household tool the drive-in restaurant became the ideal approach to family dining futuristic restaurants sprang up overnight dotting the American highway like space stations with parking lots and now that the hamburgers pedigree wasn't questioned burgers were the perfect drive-in fooled for mom dad and the kids they were easy to make in large numbers and everyone loved them the hamburger of course was the core dish at the drive-ins probably 80% of the original business was in the hamburgers everyone who loved the hamburger everyone wanted a hamburger they'd have me for lunch they have them for dinner and they were reasonably priced but the burger eventually outlived the tribe in which by the 1960s had turned seedy by that time a pair of California driving owners had begun to change the pace that is turn up the pace and clean up the play so to speak the burger was getting ready for the big time Richard and Maurice McDonald had closed down a successful private in San Bernardino in 1948 the change they decided on was stripped-down modern efficiency no more cars and no more hops and most important no waiting the McDonald brothers slashed their menu to nine items hamburger cheeseburger three different sodas milk coffee potato chips and pie no frills customers had to walk up to a self-serve window the new McDonald's concept baffled customers some actually pulled right on up in their cars pumped and waited in vain for a car the opening night was a disaster this was a very radical concept at the time because everyone was very much accustomed to having the car hop come to the window of the driver's side window and drop the Train on the window and the whole process was just uprooted and once at the self-serve window the customer faced a no choice deal catch a pickle and onion only but within seven months of the first self-serve McDonald's meal lines were 200 hungry customers lon within four years the brothers had sold 21 franchises things that McDonald's were cooking along when former milkshake mixer salesman Ray Kroc bought the brothers out in 1961 and with Crockett to helm the hamburger reached for record speeds by 1963 McDonald's was selling a million burgers a day and turning him out with fries and a shake in just 15 seconds at speeds like that it was no wonder that the hamburger took the lead spot as America's favorite food in 1967 something even bigger happened to the McDonald's hamburger for two years we've been thinking about it and practicing and hoping today that they would let us try it was the big man and after Pittsburgh franchisee Jim della Gotti created the extra-large double burger for his especially hungry customers he worked against all odds to get the McDonald's bigwigs to love it - you can't do anything with that then giving you permission and first they told me to try it with I wasn't allowed to have a different butt or anything so we only had a small small bun and by making my sandwich the way I did it was just too sloppy so after about two days to that I said that's it I wasn't without their permission and got the double cut bun and did it that way the Big Mac became so famous it even got its own theme song to all these special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame-seed bun to all be Betty's special sauce lettuce tomatoes pickles I said tomatoes all right two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions I think they're describing a [ __ ] McDonald's chief competition was Burger King a chain founded in Miami soon after the McDonald brothers souped up their California store Burger King based their appeal on to ideas dining rooms for their customers to sit in and customized meals for picky eaters who didn't want an assembly-line meal as the 60s wound down rising beef costs in the highly competitive fast-food climate forced concessions in cookery frozen patties had long ago replaced fresh ground now heat laughs help cook burgers sit around longer on the shelves at least three times down by 1969 a third contender had joined the burger wolves I'm Dave Thomas I started Wendy's one restaurant and a philosophy don't have hamburgers sitting around calling his restaurant Wendy's after one of his daughters he said no to frozen meat and no to heat lamps he said no to burgers cooked only the company's way Thomas wanted that old-fashioned feeling and that old-fashioned flavor his first menu featured a burger made from fresh meat that went straight from fry cook to customer a bowl of chili and a thick milkshake he called a frosty I never never asked people's opinion there I mean if I talked about open up a hamburger western are staying whatever you want to be the people said well we have too many as it is and you never make it I mean so I never really asked people but I just knew my own what I liked and I thought other people might like the same thing the big tool made room for the big third but not without complaint the burger wars that began before Wendy's arrival continued after spurred on by Thomas's highly successful where's the beef campaign which poked fun at the size inadequacies of his competitors the American appetite for burgers left room for all three the burger world was at peace for the moment we now return to American eats history honored one [Music] fried chicken rolled in flour and spices and fried golden-brown portable provisions America's original finger food for years fried chicken was a regional specialty a favorite of the south it eventually took a civil war and Industrial Revolution and one very famous bearded gentleman to get Fried Chicken to strut north of a mason-dixon line no one knows for sure who first fried chicken in America but it's a good bet that Africans who were brought over to America as slaves brought the recipe there are some culinary techniques and keulen areas sort of hallmarks if you will that are if not exclusive to Africa certainly well evidenced in Africa and one of those is frying in deep oil otherwise known as deep fat fry and so we can in some small way claim to have our own little hand in the frying part of the fried chicken well past the Civil War and emancipation only the wealthy actually ate chicken on a regular basis it was expensive back then reserved for Sunday dinners and holidays hence it's african-american appellation the gospel bird because it was Sunday dinner if it were if it was if you were lucky enough to have it for Sunday dinner it was definitely Sunday dinner after church on Sunday the pastor would come to your house you might have invited him over for dinner and the pastor would come and the idea of the gospel bird would be sitting at the center of the table and all hens stayed off until the preacher got whatever piece the preacher won of course it took more than prayer to put that bird on the table it took work in the late 19th century many farm wives started raising the chickens themselves it was a time when if I'd sticking with something that was walking around your backyard instead of something you buy from the grocery store the chickens used to have a name you know it was Bessie and Lula and you know Mary Belle new machines like the intubated made raising lots of chickens possible in 1880 there were a hundred million chickens in America ten years later that number had doubled now chicken was an everyday food for black travelers not allowed into most restaurants it became the perfect portable meal no knife or fork or fire not much mess easy clearly many carried their meal and a shoe box the original box lunch some of the things that you would have in the shoe box would be peace fruit okay and the piece of fruit was frequently something that was also somewhat juicy not juicy enough to be messy but something where you could have that instead of water an apple was good an orange was good Angie got chicken you got Fried Chicken of some sort coming complete with this little handle and it's bone and this was how you travel but fried chicken was still a southern specialty it would take a cantankerous kernel to harness that spicy special flavor put it in a bucket instead of a shoebox and turn it into a national phenomenon [Music] I did how did he do it Charlie Sanders considered himself a complete Washington a seventh grade dropout he had failed at one job after another streetcar conductor steamboat ferryman railroad fireman and then in 1930 he bought his own service station in Corbin Kentucky right off the interstate highway but after the customers caught the smell of Sanders cooking for his family in the back room Sanders found that the food outsold the gas his specialty a tender fried chicken made with his own spice mixture he called him his 11 herbs and spices his chicken joint got revealed in tribal guides and was put on lists of recommended restaurants in 1935 the governor recognized the self-made man by rewarding him with a very local distinction the honorary title of Kentucky Colonel that's the title familiar to hamburger legend Dave Thomas who once worked for Colonel Sanders that was his role he was a Kentucky Colonel I'm a Kentucky Colonel there's hundreds of Kentucky Colonels but the canola the colonel played the part Harland Sanders liked the sound of his title very much and from then on he called himself Colonel Sanders by the late 1940s Sanders was a Kentucky legend he had found something he was good at but just what Sanders was happy with things as they were his Road took a sharp turn literally so then they moved the highway and that really kind of cut him off traffic slowed to a trickle business died and Sanders sold the restaurant at a huge loss but the colonel was tenacious he cashed his very first Social Security check and set out in his rickety Chevrolet with a bag of spices and a pressure cooker he designed himself his idea was the beginning of franchising he would offer any restaurant owner a taste of his fried chicken if they liked it he would send them a bag of the secret spices already makes his pressure cooker could fry a bird and less than I'm needed with a regular iron skillet on a visit to Salt Lake City in 1952 he tried out his technique on a successful restaurant owner named Pete Harmon Sanders told Harmon I'm making you dinner tonight the colonel was a perfectionist it took them five hours to cook supper so about nine o'clock the chicken coming off and I thought was going to eat and let sure look good and he's and he's oh no we gotta make the gravy and you have to cook those cracklins till they float to get the right flavor so we had dinner at 10 o'clock that night and for you it was good that's the right meat I put the right leader who I had the car there and jumped at the colonel War Department for every chicken he sold using the Colonel's recipe Harmon would give Sanders of five cent royalty now they had to figure out what to call him we tried several names who's already in Utah so it wouldn't be an mean anything Utah fried chicken cook nice as well I never been this guy's from Kentucky and I never been there but to me Kentucky means southern hospitality and good food customers brought up so much of the new Kentucky Fried Chicken that Pete Harmon began opening restaurants that serve only the Colonel's chicken he started serving it in buckets when he purchased 500 surplus cardboard tubs and realized it was the perfect container for a family meal we put 14 pieces of chicken and Buffett fine mashed potatoes and five rolls and you lifted it you didn't feel like you had four and a half dollars worth so we put piney gravy in it and then you you have your monies for us when you live [Music] by 1960 restaurant owners were selling the Colonel's chicken out of 200 restaurants three years after that it was 600 in 1964 Harland Sanders sold his interest to a pair of entrepreneurs but stayed on as the official pitchman the company also slapped the Colonel's picture on the side of every bucket and the colonel himself became an international fried chicken ambassador he traveled the world well into his 80s cutting ribbons of new franchises and extolling the virtues of tender tasty chicken you've heard of that Colonel Sanders secret recipe national story and woe to the franchisee whose food didn't meet the salty tongue Colonel standards and he used to say I ever catch anybody not cooking it right he says I'll back my Cadillac up there and take their cookers away from and I think it's yours so no count that you couldn't you know forget the chicken but the gravy was the most important thing and it was a really obsession with him the first thing he inspected when he went into a restaurant and he was very critical and you better have the gravy right or you were in for a serious tongue lashing [Music] a Kentucky high chicken party by 1969 there were more Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets than there were McDonald's restaurant eventually KFC would lose that lead but the puddle had 120 degrees he had virtually invented the idea of food franchising selling branches and a successful restaurant concept and he had taken Fried Chicken from the kitchens of the south to tabletops all across America and well beyond we now return to American eats history honored one the sandwich is the most democratic of American dishes because who you are is often reflected in what you put inside your sandwich no other nation took to the sandwich the way America did but the sandwich actually owes its name to an 18th century British blue blood Sir John Montagu the 4th Earl of Sandwich was a passionate Ambler one day as the story goes he got hungry in the middle of a card game he didn't want to get his cards greasy so he asked for a piece of meat between slabs of bread the system worked and the story got out and even crossed the Atlantic here in America we experimented with the sandwich and by the end of the 19th century we could offer the world a truly original sandwich it's peanut butter of course and it started out as healthy nutrition for adults in fact it said that a doctor invented his stuff not as everyone thinks George Washington Carver George Carver did many good things it's particularly with the peanut but he didn't create peanut butter we have good evidence that a person a doctor in st. Louis and 1890 certainly was eating peanut butter ground up actually this good doctor created peanut butter as a way into his elderly patients who had no teeth eventually in the 1890s John Kellogg father of the cornflake patented a way of making peanut butter and advertised it as a pasty adhesive substance certainly not an approach you'd think would ring up sales but it did as soon as you have peanut butter created you have peanut butter sandwiches and then the type of foods that are applied to peanut butter sandwiches multiply dramatically so you have tomatoes and peanut butter you have anchovies at peanut butter you have liver and peanut butter you have all these types of sandwiches that would sound god-awful today sandwich eaters peanut butter and bacon became so popular that Oscar Meyer created a special spread with the two flavors mixed what a tantalizing flavor Oscar Meyer bacon gives to peanut butter but one peanut butter combo created by some caring mother sometime before World War two took the prize good old peanut butter and jelly then the government fed PB&J sandwiches to our soldier loaded with protein easy to store ship and serve peanut butter helped the US Army refute the old cliche that wars are won on meat it's stuck and why it's stuck I can't tell you other than the fact that as a child I loved it and I'm sure most of the rest of us that had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and kids loved it too and it seems we still do Americans eat an average of nearly three and a half pounds of peanut butter per person per year that's 800 million pounds total enough to smoothly coat the entire floor the Grand Canyon but whether it's with peanut butter anything else it takes a lot of work to fee sandwiches to a large family what was all like honey that changed in the 1920s and if you don't think it was a big deal think of how often we rate something wonderful as the best thing since sliced bread revolutionized the sandwich world and we owe it to an Iowa salesman named Oh F row winner whose simple 1928 invention could slice a whole loaf and a few seconds sharp blades moving at great speed cut this bread into smooth slices the time was right for another sandwich landmark Wonder Bread wonderful sandwiches today the Taggart company which offered Wonder for the first time in the 1920s said the name referred to the wondrous size of the bread but this new loaf also boasted another wondrous attribute thanks to preservatives and a plastic wrapper the bread would outlast your average fresh baked loaf by several days authorities agree that the enrichment of bread has been a major factor in the greater vigor of our young people and once the bread slices began humming Wonder Bread was pre-sliced the familiar polka-dotted package came to symbolize the American good life my grandmother for instance when she was growing up her idea of food heaven was white soft bread because back to her represented eternity occasionally white bread has been vilified for making the American sandwich a monotonous affair in fact the opposite may be true the slicing of bread and the marketing of sliced bread probably does encourage sandwich like quick foods and any dish that comes out of an ethnic cuisine or a foreign cuisine that can be turned into something sandwich like it becomes quite popular immigrants in cities that were only a few hours apart developed and claimed distinct specialty sandwiches in Buffalo home to many German immigrants the official city sandwich is beef on weck a slab of roast beef on a heavily salted roll with enough force radish to make your eyes in Pittsburgh the renowned local sandwich is served at prom auntie buggers but don't bother ordering fries and a side of slaw in Pittsburgh they're served right on the hand sliced Italian bread back in the early 30s remaining whose restaurant was open from say midnight to six o'clock in the morning and all the trucker's would come in and drop off the produce and he needed something to eat real quick to take on the road so legend has it that the Prem Primanti Brothers put everything together on one sandwich wrapped it up and just gave it to the truckers that way so they can eat it on the road whether traveling around and in Chicago they're known to pile spiced beef on to an Italian roll then dip the whole thing into the beef juices and eat it dripping wet now elbows in rooster sang and you grabbed your sandwich and you start eating well this trips off [Music] [Laughter] American eaters are serious about variety so if the sandwiches themselves aren't much different no problem will give them different names take the universally loved combination of salami and other cold cuts on a long Italian roll I was originally called a grinder in UAE because of the chewing it took to get through the crusty bread but during the Second World War deli owner Benedetto Caputo and Groton Connecticut started shipping huge quantities of his grinder to the workers at the town's famous submarine factories along the river the shipbuilders ordered more than 500 of them a day so Caputo started calling them submarine sandwiches in honor of his new clientele in Pennsylvania the sandwiches were named hoagies a name believed to have been borrowed from POG Island another shipyard where workers ate the big Italian sandwiches and in Louisiana they were called poor boys after a restaurant gave out free sandwiches to striking workers in 1929 and that's only the beginning what about Zeppelin's torpedoes Rockets heroes I'm panicking but no matter where in America you are no eatery is more closely linked to the sandwich than the deli delicatessens got their start on the East Coast in the waves of German and Jewish immigrants who came through Ellis Island the delicatessen became a neighborhood fixture where these immigrants could find the delicacies of home hence the name delicate the German word for delicacy combined with Essen the word for eat during the Great Depression delicatessen owners literally banded together and started a campaign to convince Americans of other backgrounds to learn to eat delicatessen foods [Music] the centerpiece of the delicatessen menu came to be sandwiches made from the cured meats corned beef and pastrami both common among the poor cultures of Europe corned beef is cured by soaking or injecting it with salt water then it's rubbed with garlic and cloves it's boiled or steamed for the familiar gentle flavor it's cousin pastrami the name is Yiddish not Italian is smoked before it's steamed and encrusted with ground pepper and other spices but one of the most famous deli sandwiches was invented in the 1950s when deli man Arnold Rubin hit on a really distinctive combination Arnold originally when he made the sandwich made it on toasted rye and the way it was made as he would toast the Rye bread then a layer of corned beef the sauerkraut and then the Swiss cheese was melted it became unique okay and all the flavors just meld it together the original Reuben sandwich featured more than half a pound of meat dripping with sauerkraut and melted cheese it was served on giant slices of rye bread sliced extra thin and people were willing to pay for the gastronomic event of whopping $5 and before long the sandwich was a national phenomenon the Reuben sandwich has become a celebrity in its own right and it's like taking a picture of a celebrity on the street you don't need their permission okay you don't need for them to sign a waiver okay that's what the sandwich has become it is its own institution it has become its own celebrity [Music] no question about it most of America's favorite foods can be linked in one way or another to the sandwich what makes a hot dog a hot dog or a hamburger a hamburger it's the sandwich treatment and at a time when fewer and fewer Americans take time out for lunch the sandwich just as portable as it was in the days of the Earl of Sandwich is still Lord of the lunch hour we now return to American eats history on a bun [Music] welcome to such one palace or Hunan taste or golden dragon or Jade King whatever the name it's a taste of the Far East in your hometown and as you're drawn in closer seduced by exotic aromas you slide into your booth and behold sweet-and-sour pork fried rice and for that authentic finish a fortune cookie enjoy but don't think you've just consumed a Chinese meal the foods you just feasted on are as American as the hotdogs in fact a whole lot of Chinese food our favorite ethnic food is just that ours it's America the first large group of Chinese immigrants was lured to America in the 1850s by stories of the golden mountains of California it was gold rush fever and thousands of Chinese mostly from the southern Chinese City of Canton answered the call in San Francisco where most of the immigrants landed the Chinese clustered in one section of town soon known as Chinatown an oasis of traditional Chinese culture swirling with the inescapable smells of traditional Chinese foods you didn't need to have a map to get to where you want it just a good nose without sinus problems if you want to hum your salty fish or sound yer fish fresh fish you knew that this was the street this is called homme new guy salty fish alley if you want to herb so it's an area for that desert you can smell the sweetness most of the Chinese immigrants to America were farmers and served the peasant food of Canton a simple menu featuring stir-fried meals with rice while tea and platefuls of dim sum traditional finger food that included everything from shrimp dumplings to tripe to birds food the first Chinese restaurant served these foods from home to Chinese customers who couldn't or didn't want to cook this is a heavily nail migration and whenever you have a heavily male migration you get a proliferation of restaurants to serve those men without women you see the same case in the Greek and the Italian migrations that you see in the Chinese migration lots of restaurants Chow Chows that were called and they offered all you could eat for a book to hungry Chinese laborers but pretty soon the non Chinese were coming in and the Chinese realized that this is a business this is a business in itself so before long the restaurant started popping up of course the owners knew they'd have to westernize their food a bit to keep the non Chinese coming what the Chinese adapted which is not to say always harmony the Americans will often refer to as low farm or the barbarians and what the barbarians wanted was chop suey Chop Suey has its roots in Canton were the words sab Suey mean miscellaneous grabs and that just about sums it up Chop Suey is Chinese leftovers it's exact origins are clouded in mystery but it was created here in America one story has to do with a Chinese cook faced with a bunch of hungry miners again in the off hours when he doesn't have a whole lot left in the kitchen but they're hungry they've got money in their pockets he chops up whatever he's got puts it on a sauce throws it on some rice and hands it to them it's not really a an idea and a very flexible idea at that chop suey was usually made from whatever vegetables Chinese cooks could get their hands on carrots potatoes and tomatoes were just as likely to turn up in chop suey as water chestnuts or Chinese cabbage the meat could be whatever the customer wanted the most essential ingredients were bean sprouts soy sauce and more soy sauce but then we're going to eat Chinese Americans wanted as much of that Chinese flavor as they could get but only from the food by the late 1800s many Americans were worried that the Chinese who worked long hours for little pay would take their jobs the Chinese became targets of prejudice by many their clothing hairstyles and their practice of eating food with little wooden sticks were ridiculed and reviled bending to these fears in 1882 Congress severely limited for their immigration from China as for Chinese food the customers still came even though there were rumors that all sorts of creatures were secretly being chopped into Chop Suey mice rats or your neighbors missing plant there's a lot of concern about how clean it is and there's but there's also the sense you can safely otherwise seen as I'm willing to go to Chinatown in years around 1900 tourists and guidebooks really sell it that way and I mean our Chinese restaurateur is gonna turn down these these these paying customers of course they're not the war was won and the stock market looked at climb forever the exotic was what the country craved the new music was jazz and a fashionable food was Chinese in cities across the country China towns lit up with neon sleek Art Deco lunch rooms began offering dinner for one and dinner for two for many many years that's all we saw because there there was nothing else that was really not the Chinese chef didn't speak English the Caucasian customers did not speak Chinese but they had a common ground at dinner one for one dinner for two pick one item from column a and one from column D and the top sellers egg rolls and wonton soup and sweet and sour pork another crude American revision of an old Cantonese recipe and the meal was always finished off with a fortune cookie it's only natural that the message in the cookie knows our future this is from China with its 3000 years of wisdom except that the cookie didn't originate in China it's most likely from California there was a tradition in China of hiding messages in case it said that rebels in the 12th century got messages past the Emperor's guards in what were called moon cakes but the first of the sweet folded envelopes the way we eat them now are often credited to the owner of a Chinese eatery in LA the story goes he came up with the idea in 1916 as a waiter will lose his customers awaiting their orders they're entertaining they contain an element of surprise and the mixture of entertainment with food has been a very important theme and sort of the introduction of foreigners to American culinary life [Music] we like entertainment along with our food I think the fortune cookie gives us entertainment along with something sweet [Music] the combination of the flavors and the exotic found in Chinese restaurants proved irresistible oh the real Chinese dishes are over here Chinese food became an official American diversion you know there's there's no telling what we don't get it I'm wanting to take a chance if you are used to weight how to use the chopsticks eating the sticks once sneered at is a sure sign of Chinese inferiority was now the signature skill of the sophisticated diet nothing was more fun than going to a Chinese restaurant to share a table full of steaming platters Chinese love to eat we never asked you how are you we asked you have you eaten Sigma have you eaten because we want to door to be open for us to feed you some more food is a way of communicating love friendship and for the Chinese people the only way to eat is to put all the food in the middle and share in the 1950s the bloomin food for the road made no dent in the Chinese business they'd been offering food to go for a hundred years Chinese respiratory even take the credit for inventing American takeout 19th century waiters from Chinese eateries regularly took whole meals complete with plates bowls and silverware to private homes when President Nixon opened relations with the People's Republic of China in 1972 interest in a wider range of Chinese foods rose sharply the Cantonese grip on the American market came to an end the craze for authentic Chinese food for kinda spread restaurant serving food from Hunan Shanghai or Nanking appeared next to the Chop Suey houses today few people ordered chop suey American leaders of forsaken the simple improvised meals that taught them to love Chinese food but chop suey secured a permanent place for Chinese food in America's palate in a land of immigrants Chinese may be only one of many wildly different flavors but is one of the first exotic ethnic foods and one enough affection and acceptance that in the end it is as American as apple pie especially when you remember that apple pie is imported too we got that from England and speaking of imports when the fortune cookie finally crossed the Pacific and showed up on Asian restaurant tables in 1989 it was touted as the genuine American fortune cookie we now return to American eats history [Music] ice cream smooth cold and sweet never mind asking who loves ice cream the real question is who doesn't love ice cream there are ice cream parlors on the sun-scorched equator and in frozen Arctic fishing villages there's an ice cream shop on the Caribbean island of Barbados that offers ice cream flavor with flying fish what no one loves ice cream the way Americans do it was in America where ice cream joined the cold and where it first cloaked itself in chocolate to become every child's idea of him every food comes with a set of Legends if the stories are true ice cream has gotten itself mixed up with some of the most famous folks in history there's the Roman Emperor Nero who sent slaves to the mountains to retrieve freshly fallen snow which he mixed with fruit juice and honey the great adventurer Marco Polo who brought Europe its first recipe for ice cream from China because ice cream was popular in Europe it was popular with American colonists too ice cream was consumed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all the nobility would consume ice cream it really had to take off after the French Revolution of which you had again French chefs coming to America and one of the things that many French chefs did was open up ice cream parlors in those days the creation of ice cream required lots of ice and lots of elbow grease vigorous beating in a pewter pot which in turn was immersed in a tub of ice and salt hard work for not much really and what you got was something that was kind of slushy and had little pieces of ice in it it was not the kind of creamy ice cream that were used to as a matter of fact a lot of people drank it out of cups kind of sipped it like they would sip tea ice cream was expensive to make up to the late 1700s it was generally reserved for the rich but the times they were a-changin first by the 1800s commercial ice houses were opened here on second in 1846 a burst of inspiration a philadelphia woman named Nancy Johnson invented the hand powered ice cream machine a whole troublesome process was reduced to turning a crank thanks to these two developments ice cream could now be made in the humblest of households but the boost that made ice cream the mega-superstar it is today was its introduction onto a magic elixir so the water that happened in 1874 and it happened in a soda fountain because soda water was originally taken as medicine soda fountains were first located in pharmacies and there everybody could partake of the pleasure so fulsome and so helpful later soda fountains opened on their own in towns all over America [Music] in the days before teenagers and young people had cars and mobility and the kind of permissive atmosphere that they have today the soda fountain was the respectful place to go of coordinates so they played a very important role in letting young men and young women meet in a socially acceptable atmosphere at the center of the soda fountain was the soda jerk part circus barker part waiter this man with the magic fingers often put on a show as he presented you with the delectable drink of your choice [Music] the different recipes for these sodas included ingredients from caramel to eggs to sweet cream then in 1874 an ice cream icon was invented when Philadelphia soda jerk Robert Greene ran out of sweet cream he took a dollop of ice cream and basically just plopped it in there and lo and behold he created the soda and people really liked it and it really went over big time and within a number of years it seemed to go national it tasted good too good for some at the time soda was considered almost as intoxicating as alcohol so the sale of soda was banned in many towns on Sunday according to legend the rich ice-cream soda in particular became the target of pious clergyman who railed against drinking it on Sunday enterprising operators came up with the idea hey well we'll just come up with a soda without the soda so they put ice cream in a bowl and they put chocolate syrup on the top and there they had a new concoction they called it the sundae add one spoon and voila no soda in sight so many people were ordering that it was really a successful you know item so instead of just selling it on Sunday they sold it all during the week but they changed the name from Sunday to Sunday the s UND AE well what about to go hamburgers and hot dogs were climbing on the buns why shouldn't America's favorite dessert be part of a move fils the moment came in 1904 at the st. Louis World's Fair where another of America's great food accidents is said to have taken place according to legend the main player in this drama was a Syrian immigrant Ernest Hamwi he was basically making these Persian type pastries you know flat waffles at his food stand and next door was an ice cream seller who ran out of dishes to sell his ice cream so Hamwi rushed to his aid said here he rolled up a spire you know to make a cone and they put the ice cream in it and it was a real big hit the new cone this edible ball - the spool was such a big hit that in just five years Americans bought 30 million as the comb joined the ice-cream establishment novelties began to spring up the first breakthrough came in the spring of 1920 in Iowa with the auspicious marriage of chocolate candy and vanilla ice cream Kristen Nelson was a high school Latin teacher and after school he operated a small candy and ice cream shop to supplement his income and he noticed that the children would come in after school and would have a difficult time deciding whether they wanted to spend their nickel on ice cream or on candy and it dawned on mr. Nelson that maybe this is an opportunity where we should combine them into one Nelson initially called his invention the ice cream but changed it to Eskimo Pie hoping the new name would make his product more appealing it did the first 250,000 5 sold out in 24 hours [Music] Nelson's Eskimo Pie was only the tip of the ice cream novelty iceberg 1920 prohibition handed ice cream a tremendous surge in business beer factories were refitted to make ice cream soda fountains absorbed thousands of former bar flies who needed somewhere legal to turn ice-cream novelties like the Klondike bar an imitator in the Eskimo Pie where a good fat Moe's non-alcoholic beige and Harry Berg senior a candy store owner came up with one novelty that would become a classic he tried to replicate the Eskimo Pie but his family thought that it was too messy to hold a chocolate-covered ice cream bar well he had already had for years a candy bar with a stick in it called the Good Humor sucker so he adapted that stick to his ice cream concoction and just like the Eskimo Pie it was a runaway success [Music] Birk called his sweet treats good humor bars Bert took his idea to the streets with a single truck he operated with his son then he trained a small squad of drivers to bring his products to neighborhoods and business districts the salesmen drivers impeccably dressed in white uniforms saluted male customers and tipped their caps to women Bert took his team from Youngstown Ohio to Chicago where the story goes the mob tried to strong-arm in for protection money Burke said no and may have been one of the few Chicagoans to benefit from actually refusing an offer he couldn't refuse well they say that when the blew up the Good Humor trucks when they tried franchising their product in Chicago that apparently made the front page news and the fact that they didn't give in to the mob put them in good standing with the public good humor men took on mythic proportions stories abound it of the white-clad heroes reporting fires rushing newborns to the hospital supplying ice-cream to flood victims even stopping a counterfeit money rate by the 1950s the average American was gobbling up 20 quarts of ice cream a year soon soda fountains gave way to the ice cream franchises chains that offered both consistency of quality and variety the American sweet tooth is apparently insatiable in the 1980's the ice cream business seemed to fall into the hands of the so called super premium brands haagen-dazs and ben & jerry's fought for the bragging rights as the smoothest or creamiest or freshest but ice cream fans showed that their hearts were still in the glory days of novelties since 1995 the most popular ice cream novelty in America has been the good old Klondike [Music]