Kathmandu:

I suppose at some time all food was a delicious accident just as early man’s fire was a catalyst. But I have a few really favourite magical moments when something happened and a great dish was created. For example, King Louis XV of France late one night discovered he had only onion, butter and champagne at his hunting lodge so he mixed them together and the first French onion soup was created.

Another favourite of mine is the industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt who came to the Moon Lake House Hotel in Saratoga and ordered “thinner than normal French fried potatoes”. The cook was a Native American George Crum who was at the receiving end of Vanderbilt’s demands for even thinner slices. So to spite the industrialist Crum made them so thin they couldn’t be eaten with a fork and splashed salt on them. Vanderbilt loved them and today they are a major industry in the world- potato crisps.

Doughnuts didn’t have holes on them but Hanson Gregory a sea captain loved them none-the-less and used to keep them on hand during long voyages. Once in a brutal storm

he needed both hands to hold the wheel of the ship so he pushed a doughnut onto one of the spokes of the wheel creating the doughnut with a hole in the middle.

In the late 19th century a very hot spell in San Francisco withered the grapes on the wine leading a San Francisco grocer to advertise these shrivelled grapes as “Peruvian Delicacies” and made raisins popular so that they are now a part of everyday fare.

In the last years of the 18th century a Dundee trader Robert Keeler was wrongly sent an assignment of bitter oranges from Spain. But his wife an expert jam-maker saved the day by turning them into marmalade and it was the first time they were made commercially in Britain.

In the middle of the 16th century Dutch settlers in America were delighted as a cow’s kick created a new dish. There was strudel ready to serve, when a cow kicked over a giant pot with hot hog’s fat turning the strudels into fried cakes which became more and more popular and were known as doughnuts and eventually, as we have seen got the hole on them.

Sometimes food can invent a festival. In the 16th century Charles IX of France said the New Year was to begin on January 1 instead of April. The people both as a protest and a joke sent sweets in the shape of fish as New Year gifts calling them April fool’s fish.

All the delicacies that Columbus brought back from the new world might not have happened if it hadn’t been for his thorough knowledge of an almanac. It was Columbus fourth voyage to the West and he anchored off Jamaica for rations but the Jamaicans wouldn’t give any. The explorers learned from his almanac that there was to be an eclipse of the moon in next few days. The Jamaicans laughed at him but when the eclipse began they were terrified, begged him to bring the moon back and gave him everything he wanted.

Rather like our own Gundruk but in meat, the Magyar shepherds of Hungary who were nomads discovered that if they slowly cooked chunks of meat and onion until all the liquid is boiled away and then dry the meat in the sun, packed it into sheep skins, and then when needed, added boiling water for a delicious dish called Goulash named after Magyar shepherds or Gulyas.

More delicacies and how they happened next time.