Free How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun by Josh Chetwynd

apocryphal) tale that the happening Paris hot spot sent a spy posing as a gardener to the Tatins’ restaurant to snatch the recipe.
    Neither Stephanie, who passed away in 1917, nor Caroline, who died in 1911, was alive to see their confectionary namesake make it to the big time. The sisters never even called the dish the tarte Tatin and reportedly never wrote down the recipe. Accident or not, the caramelized, buttery treat was proudly prepared for all the patrons who came to their hotel. The restaurant, which still exists today, continues to have one rule about the dessert: It has to be served hot out of the oven.

Candies and Snacks
    Cheese Puffs: Rabbit food
    Junk food haters who say cheese puffs—aka cheese curls—aren’t fit for human consumption may be unconsciously referring to the product’s origin. Best known by such brand names as Cheetos and Cheez Doodles, this powdered mess of a snack got its start from a machine that manufactured food for animals.
    In the 1930s the Flakall Company based in Beloit, Wisconsin, ran a successful business creating corn-based livestock feed. The company’s machine was particularly useful because it broke down dangerously sharp corn hulls by flaking the grain into easily digestible small pieces. The feed became popular, particularly for rabbits, who were the first to indulge in the mashed-up food. With demand high, the equipment, known as an extruder, would often run continuously. This was an intense process and parts could get extremely hot during the flaking procedure. To solve the problem, workers would pour moistened corn kernels into the extruder to cool things down and ease clogging.
    One day a Flakall employee (most say his name was Edward Wilson) noticed an interesting by-product from the cooling efforts. The moistened kernels were turning into long white ribbons of cornmeal as they moved through the machine. Once these strips exited, they would harden and become puffy. Wilson was intrigued by this unintended creation and took home a bag of the fluff. There, his wife fried up the puffs, added a dash of salt, and shared them with neighbors. This being Wisconsin, the locals asked that a little cheese be added to the mix. The snack was dubbed the Korn Kurl.
    In 1942 Flakall secured a patent for a machine dedicated to churning out these corn puffs. Undoubtedly recognizing the contraption’s animal-food roots, the instrument’s inventors made sure to point out in their patent application that “[w]hen streamlets are discharged from the processing apparatus they are prepared for human consumption.” The machine was good to go, but hungry mobs outside of Beloit would have to wait to get their cheese puff fix. During World War II, the government put a halt to the production of any nonessential food. Somehow, the Korn Kurl fell into that category (partying teenagers, if they’d known about the product, would have let out a collective groan at that decision).
      
    Following the war, a company called the Adams Corporation became the first to use the machine for commercial use. Not long after, in 1948, the San Antonio–based Frito Company introduced Cheetos nationally. And in the 1950s, a New York–based company, called Old London Foods, began marketing Cheez Doodles, reaching stores across the country by the mid-1960s.
    The snack has flown off convenience store shelves ever since. Cheetos alone produce four billion dollars in annual sales worldwide and, if you were to put the yearly output of Cheez Doodles end-to-end on the ground, it would span approximately seventy-two miles. Moreover, even with its beastly beginnings, the cheese puff has appealed to the more refined palate. Proving that point, Cheez Doodle inventor Morrie Yohai took great pride in one particular possession: a photo of gourmet TV personality Julia Child with her hand deep in a bag of Cheez Doodles.
     
     
    Chewing Gum: Deposed dictator and a nosy accountant
    If you think gnawing on a hard piece of gum must