1875 - Food And Drink

Food And Drink

British sugar consumption rises to 60 pounds per capita, up from 47 in 1872 (see 1889).

Berlin chemist Ferdinand Tiemann, 27, patents a process for making synthetic vanillin, the key flavor ingredient in natural vanilla beans.

B&M Baked Beans are the world's first canned baked beans. Burnham & Morill Company of Portland, Maine, has produced them for use by men in its fishing fleet.

A machine is invented to strip the kernels from corn cobs. It will lead to wide-scale canning of sweet corn (see Minnesota Valley Canning, 1903).

Ferdinand Schumacher introduces Steel Cut Oats, a new product whose flaky composition gives it a uniformly acceptable taste and consistency (see 1856). Schumacher uses a new machine invented largely by his employee Asmus J. Ehrrichsen, whose process is the first real innovation in milling oats, employing a series of horizontal knife blades to cut the hulled oats (groats) into a meal that has little or none of the floury residues that have made oatmeal pasty, lumpy, and glutenous. Another Schumacher employee, William Heston, improves on the Ehrrichsen-Schumacher process and obtains patents which he licenses Schumacher to use while reserving the right to use the new process himself (see Quaker, 1877).

English flour miller Joseph Rank begins a business at Hull that will grow to become the nation's largest milling enterprise. By 1914 it will own large mills in the docks of Hull, London, Barry, and Birkenhead.

Société Anonymé Lactée Henri Nestlé is founded at Vevey, Switzerland, in January by businessmen Jules Monnerat, 55; Samuel Roussy (Monnerat's nephew), Emil Louis Roussy, 33, and Gustave Marquis, who pay 1 million Swiss francs, outbidding Geneva bankers to acquire the operation which is selling hundreds of thousands of tins of baby food each year and is the town's foremost enterprise (see 1866). The bankers have offered nearly as much, but the Vevey businessmen offer more, providing Nestlé and his wife with a splendid coach and a team of horses to sweeten their proposition, and they change the name March 8 to Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé (see 1890).

The first milk chocolate for eating is invented at Vevey by the Nestlé shopman in collaboration with the foreman of Daniel Peter's chocolate factory (see Cadbury, 1847). They hit upon the idea of mixing sweetened condensed milk with chocolate and create a product that meets with immediate commercial success (see Hershey, 1893).

Cadbury's opens a large factory outside Birmingham at a place it calls Bournville (to give it a French sound; the best chocolates still come from France) (see 1866).

The average British working-class family spends £15 to £20 per year on alcohol; some families spend a third or more of their income on drink.

A British Trade Marks Act goes into effect; the first trademark registered is for Bass & Company Pale Ale made at Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire since 1777.

French wine producers have their best vintage in history, despite encroachments in some areas by grape phylloxerae (see 1872; 1876).

U.S. tea imports reach 59 million pounds, up from 20 million in 1862, as import duties are removed.

Hires Rootbeer has its beginnings in a recipe for an herb tea discovered by Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires, 24, who takes his bride on a wedding trip to a New Jersey farm. The tea is made from 16 different wild roots and berries that include juniper, pipsissewa, spikenard, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, and hops. Hires takes the recipe back to Philadelphia and begins experimenting with improved formulas (see 1876).

New York Condensed Milk Company begins selling fluid milk in addition to its condensed milk (see 1858; 1885).

New York's first Chinese general store opens at 8 Mott Street. Named for butcher-innkeeper James Mott, it sells groceries, herbs, and medicines to serve a Chinatown population that has grown as more and more Chinese have arrived in the city to escape mistreatment in the western states (see 1847). The area bounded by Baxter Street, the Bowery, Canal Street, and Chatham Square will become a Chinese enclave whose restaurants will include some of the best in the city (see Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882).