Legend has it that the panettone came into being from a forbidden romance in the 15th century. During a Christmas Eve feast hosted by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, his head pastry chef burnt the dessert while stealing a kiss from a nobleman’s beautiful wife in the medieval passageway. A young scullery boy named Toni then saved the night by scraping together the leftover bread dough which had been resting for three days, orange peels, some raisins, and baking it into the “pane di Toni,” thus was born the panettone.
The story of culinary innovation has long been seen through accidents, mistakes, and myths. But the better sounding hypothesis proposes that recipes be passed through generations by following their owner’s footsteps, and then be changed anew in order to adapt to their new home. It was not until the late 1800s that food was considered a serious field to be studied scientifically. Not accidentally, it coincided with the rise of the industrial revolution. The need to produce food commercially in large quantities, yet possessing the same characteristics in every batch requires every ingredient and every part of the process to be controlled.
Beer was among the first to be studied in such manners. In 1914, the Guinness brewery had reached an output of almost a billion pints a year, and the desire to have one pint tasting the same as the next was ever apparent. Getting Guinness beer in tip-top quality became the well-respected work of the statistician William Gosset. Constrained by the limited number of samples available for testing, he developed the Student’s T-Test to assess quality for small datasets. Gosset would later collaborate with Karl Pearson in the field of mathematical statistics, and his work helped pioneer the fundamental sciences of industrial quality control.
R&D investment flurry into bottling draft beers in the 1960s arrived amidst the “draft wars” between Japanese beer brewers. Before the bubble, Japan’s beer market was populated by the pale lager, which was introduced to the country when the Dutch opened beer halls in the 17th century to accommodate sailors running trade routes. Until 1964, Japanese bottled beer went through a heat pasteurization process. To bottle draft beer, which is non-pasteurized, Suntory developed a microfilter, utilizing technology developed by NASA, to remove yeast and bacteria without heat, launching the first pure draft beer in 1967. Then came the “container wars” in the 1970s, when Asahi launched the first aluminum canned beer in 1971. This era solidified beer as Japan’s leading alcoholic beverage, in which their taste preference no longer had the hoppy bitterness of pale lager, but became sharp and super dry.
Another major investment went into the banana. That the banana, a tropical fruit, can be purchased in the coldest parts of the world for half as much as an apple is the result of the wonders of industrial engineering. In 1876, it was a luxury item, being featured next to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in the horticultural hall of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. To create a mass market for this fruit, the United Fruit Company focused research on standardizing banana size, color, and taste in their Lancetilla Experiment Station in Honduras throughout the early 20th century. The commercial advantage of the banana lies in its uniform ripening rate. Unlike peaches or plums, bananas all arrive at the store green and cycling from yellow to flecked with brown in almost exactly seven days. There is no other fruit more consistent or reliable. With large scale plantation, controlled transportation and distribution, and aggressively dominating land and labor, a banana’s cost, taste, and visual appearance today are as predictable as a Big Mac’s.
While food quality control became an industrial engineering pillar throughout the 1900s, cooking at home, save for becoming more convenient, remained more or less the same. Grandma’s recipes reigned supreme even if the grandchild had moved across the country and had little recollection of how it tasted when grandma made it. The breakthrough for home cooks came during the 1980s, when Harold McGee published On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Utilizing scientific knowledge of the natural world, it was a sort of encyclopedia to classify food and its care taking in the home kitchen. Ever since, interests in the science of food and cooking have only become more intense. Whereas baking could only be done in a communal oven in the past, today, with built-in ovens in every home, powerful kitchen gadgets, and affordable food supplies, a modern casual cook can experiment with recipes fit only for royalties in the olden days. Now it is possible to bake a panettone fit for a king, or to brew your own beer to taste just like a pint of Guinness.
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