Snacks with Rides - History of Carnival Foods

My look at the foods that are supposed to be bad for you continues with food bought at a carnival. Food made for carnivals is not designed to nourish but to be fun, the majority of it being fried, coated with sugar or both. There are a few foods found at the carnivals and amusement parks that have some nutritional value. Popcorn and hot dogs (already covered in the other articles), salted peanuts and barbecued corn to name a few. The rest seems designed to rot your teeth and upset your stomach.

It's not Dentyne
Cotton candy is pure sugar and almost nothing else, the only other ingredient's being food coloring and the cardboard stick it comes on. Most of the cotton candy is pure air, which is why the vendor can afford to give you so much of it. He is not being generous, he is giving you edible fluff which is mostly air. Pop some in your mouth and it melts into almost nothing right away. The cotton candy machine works like this; it is a circular drum with a smaller drum in the center. The smaller drum does two things. It gets really hot and it spins really fast. the smaller drum has several small holes like a colander. Sugar is put into the center drum along with food coloring. The drum heats up and the sugar begins to melt. The drum is then spun and centrifugal force causes the melted sugar through the small holes where as it quickly cools off it turns into thin hairs. The hairs collect on the edge of the larger drum as one mass of fluff which is then collected by the cardboard stick. It does not take that much sugar to produce a giant ball of cotton candy. Probably the most amazing thing about this snack is that it was invented by dentists William Morrison and John C Wharton. They came up with the pure sugar snack in 1897 and officially introduced it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair calling it Fairy Floss. William Morrison would go on to become the president of the Tennessee State Dental Association. So why would Dentists invent a pure sugar snack guaranteed to help rot your teeth? Could it be that their true agenda was to generate business for themselves and other dentists? Think of all the millions of dollars worth of cavity drillings that cotton candy generated. I smell a conspiracy.

...And There's a Prize
There is no record as to who invented caramel popcorn. It began showing up in the late 1800's originally with molasses as the coating. It was possibly the invention of Frederick and Louis Rueckheim who created a concoction called Candied Popcorn and Peanuts that they introduced at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Even if the Rueckheim brothers were not the ones who thought of coating popcorn with molasses, they developed the technology to take it further. Coating popcorn with caramel was a lot tastier, but the problem was the corn in the vat would clump into large chunks that were almost impossible to break apart into smaller units for selling. This made manufacturing caramel covered corn impossible. That is until they came up with the idea of adding oil to the mix. This allowed the popcorn and peanuts to be coated with caramel yet prevent the clumping. The question was did the oil ruin the taste. A worker was asked to taste the caramel covered popcorn in the vat and after eating some he was reported to have smiled and said "That's crackerjack!" ( Crackerjack being a slang term in the late 1800's meaning excellent ). The brothers then had the words Cracker Jack trademarked and began selling the snack in boxes, eventually including a small prize.

Was Meant For Christmas
William W.Kolb was a candy maker and the owner of a candy store in Newark, New Jersey. In 1908 he was trying to come up with a new candy for Christmas by adding cinnamon flavor and red food coloring to melted sugar. Having poured the liquid sugar into a bunch of candy molds he had a lot left over and decided to dip some apples in it so he could use them as window decorations. It was not long before customers began buying the candy covered apples. Candy Apples became such a popular treat that Kolb continued selling them beyond Christmas. Soon other candy shops were also dipping apples in sugar syrup.

Made From Kitchen Scraps
During the Second World War many soldiers waiting to be deployed to the Pacific were stationed at Fort Duncan in Texas. In 1943 a group of soldiers wives were visiting their husbands, and during the day crossed over the border into Mexico to do some shopping. When night came the wives became hungry and stopped over at the Victory Club for some dinner before they returned to Texas. The problem was that the restaurant had already closed for the night and the chef had left, locking most of the food in the pantry before he left. The restaurant's maitre'd, Ignacio Anaya who went by the nickname Nacho, was getting ready to leave when the wives walked through the door. And not wanting to send the wives away hungry he offered to go into the kitchen himself and whip them up a snack. But with the pantry locked Nacho was forced to use what little food scraps the chef had left behind; a few unused tortillas, left over cheddar cheese and some jalapeño peppers. Cutting the tortillas into smaller triangles Nacho melted the cheese over it and added the peppers, calling the dish Nachos Especiales. The wives loved the snack, and soon it became a regular offering on the Victory Club's menu. Inevitably Nacho's started being served in restaurants North of the border in Texas and spread out into California becoming a popular Tex-Mex snack. Today's version usually skips the peppers and is made from melted cheese over tortilla chips.

I Guess You Can Fry Anything
Much like caramel covered popcorn there is no record as to who invented the Corn Dog, although in recent years there has been many unsubstantiated claims by some corn dog stands as the original. Corn dogs, those hot dogs dipped in corn meal batter and deep fried began to appear in the 1940's. Eventually sticks were added to them so the could be carried around and eaten without customers having to touch the greasy coating. Deep frying food became a specialty at carnivals, originally as different fried meats. But eventually frying drifted away from meat. One of the more popular fried snacks actually began in Brooklyn at the ChipShop in 1992 when Shea Apple invented the fried Twinkie. He did this by freezing a Twinkie, dipping it in batter, and deep frying it. Carnivals fell in love with the deep fried Twinkie and soon added any other fried snacks including the fried Oreo, the fried Ring Ding, the fried Tootsie Roll and even amazingly fried Coke made by mixing Coke syrup into the batter. One of the more irresponsible carnival snacks is funnel cake which is nothing but fried batter topped with powdered sugar.