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John Arbuckle (1839–1912)
John Arbuckle, the son of a well-to-do cotton-mill proprietor of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, combined a penchant for invention with promotional genius to revolutionize the United States coffee industry in the late 19th century.
Arbuckle was born on July 11, 1839 in Allegheny City. He spent his boyhood there and in 1856 enrolled in Washington and Jefferson College at Washington, Pennsylvania. But business beckoned and he left college to join his brother and uncle in a wholesale grocery business in Pittsburgh. He received his first patent in 1868—the same year he married Mary Alice Kerr—for a process of coating green coffee beans with a gelatinous mixture of Irish moss, isinglass, gelatin, white sugar and eggs to preserve their taste and aroma. According to Arbuckle, the gelatinous matter would also act as a “clarifying-agent when the ground coffee has been boiled in water.” Subsequent improvements in designs of roasters allowed him to use only sugar and eggs.
The use of a machine which filled, weighed, sealed and labeled coffee in paper packages similar to small bags of peanuts enabled Arbuckle to establish a market for convenient, reliable coffee. “Ariosa” coffee, a blend of hearty Rios and milder Santos beans, became the first successful national brand of packaged coffee in the United States. Other brands might be cheaper, but Arbuckle’s was always considered superior, particularly among westerners.
The successful sales of pre-packaged coffee allowed Arbuckle to open a second office in Brooklyn, New York. It was the beginning of an entrepreneurial empire, Arbuckle Brothers, that eventually included branches in Kansas City, Chicago, Brazil and Mexico as well as ownership of sugar plantations and a fleet of seagoing vessels to move the coffee beans from field to factory.
By 1891 Arbuckle was a multimillionaire; his company was the leader in the United States coffee market, and needed large quantities of sugar.
To acquire it at competitive prices, Arbuckle’s had to break up the sugar trust dominated by the Havermeyer families’ American Sugar Refining Company, which was not hesitant about determining market prices and destroying those who did not adhere to their policies. During the trade war between the two industry giants, Arbuckle’s opened a sugar refinery in Brooklyn and Havermeyer acquired major interest in a rival coffee company. By the time Havermeyer admitted defeat, losses by the two firms were estimated at $25 million.
Arbuckle’s advertised with trading cards and folksy colored handbills. A coupon bearing Arbuckle Brothers’ signature and redeemable for household goods was placed on every package. A peppermint stick tucked inside the paper bag sweetened the deal. American homes, especially in the west, took on an Arbuckle’s décor as consumers traded coupons for silverware, china, towels and curtains.
Arbuckle Brothers introduced Yuban coffee in 1913, a year after John Arbuckle’s death. The special blend had been his favorite, served only at his annual Christmas dinner or given to friends as gifts. Today, Arbuckle’s “Ariosa” coffee, complete with the original Flying Angel trademark and a piece of peppermint candy in the bag, is again available on the Internet.
JACQUELINE B. WILLIAMS
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Mithaecus (c. 400 BC)
Mithaecus was a cook and author of recipes. He lived about 400 BC, which makes him the first named culinary author anywhere in the world. Only one of his recipes is now on record.
Mithaecus was a Sicilian. At this period the coastal regions of Sicily were largely occupied by Greek colonies. It was a rich and fertile island, and these colonies, notably Syracuse, enjoyed a luxury lifestyle envied by the people of Greece itself. Among the features of Sicilian luxury were the emergence of gastronomy and the development of the arts of entertainment. Some Sicilian cooks, it appears, having learned their trade, migrated back to Greece and earned a living there while spreading the knowledge of good food and luxury eating.
The only known contemporary reference to Mithaecus comes from the philosopher Plato, a highly respectable source, though Plato’s remark is not intended favorably. In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato depicts Socrates poking fun at anyone who would take seriously the contribution to civilization made by three then-famous people: “Thearion the baker, Mithaecus who wrote the book on Sicilian cookery, and Sarambus the wine-dealer.” Socrates goes on to say that by seducing us with fine flavors people like these encourage our physical decline. Incidentally, Mithaecus is in interesting company here. Thearion was credited with inventing an oven for the mass production of bread, and with introducing this idea to Athens. He became widely famous, and so did the aroma and flavor of the fine fresh bread that anyone could buy in the Athenian marketplace as a result of his innovation.
Plato’s words are the only evidence we have concerning the date at which Mithaecus worked, and they are difficult to interpret: The dramatic setting of Gorgias could be as early as 427 BC, but it contains various anachronisms, so it is safer to say merely that Mithaecus must have become famous at some time before Plato wrote the dialogue, in the 390’s BC.
According to an anecdote told by a much later source, Mithaecus had at first attempted to introduce his skills to the city of Sparta, in southern Greece. He spoke the language—Sparta, like much of western Sicily, used the Doric dialect of Greek—but the culture defeated him. The ephors, the all-powerful governors of Sparta, expelled him from the city. Luxury was not wanted there: Sparta was famous throughout the Greek world for its strict and militaristic lifestyle.
Thanks to Plato, Mithaecus finally achieved fame not as a cook but as a cookbook author. Sadly, no copy of his book survives from the ancient world. Its last known reader was that tireless compiler of gastronomic information, Athenaeus. In his Deipnosophists, Athenaeus cites Mithaecus a total of three times, and quotes one recipe in full from the historic text. Mitaecus’s recipe, as follows, is not the oldest recorded recipe in the world—that honor goes to the Babylonian cuneiform recipe collection—but it is the oldest authored recipe in the world:
Tainia: gut, discard the head, rinse and fillet; add cheese and olive oil.
In this brief, practical sentence, Mithaecus gives instructions for dealing with the ribbon-like fish that the Greeks called tainia: It is Cepola rubescens; in French, cépole. His laconic recipe required just 13 words of Doric Greek. The addition of cheese and oil is exactly what Mithaecus’s countryman, Archestratus, disliked about Sicilian fish cookery. Fifty years later, having given a recipe for sea bass, Archestratus added: “Allow no Syracusan…to come near you when you are preparing this dish: They do not know how to prepare good fish, but wickedly spoil it by adding cheese to everything.”
ANDREW DALBY
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