Tasting History 家樂氏玉米片的不凡的起源｜The Disturbing Origins of Kellogg's Corn Flakes

But one of the more tame curatives he promoted, and probably his most lasting legacy, was the invention of cornflakes, the breakfast cereal which I'll attempt to make using instructions from the original patent. So thank you to Trade Coffee for sponsoring this video as I attempt to make the true cornflakes, this time on Tasting History. Now in determining how I was going to make these original cornflakes, I looked to the patent from 1895, which is probably the earliest recipe for making these cornflakes. Now it's very, very long so I'm not going to read the whole thing, but here are the bullet points. Patent number 558393 for flaked cereals in process of preparing same. First, soak the grains for some hours, say 8 to 12. Second, cook the grain thoroughly. For this purpose, it should be boiled in water for about an hour. Third, after boiling, the grain is then cooled and partially dried, then passed through cold rollers. The purpose of this process of rolling is to flatten the grain into extremely thin flakes, whereby the bran is broken into small particles. Fourth, after rolling the compressed grain of flakes, it is then baked or roasted in an oven until dry and crisp. And the patent doesn't just apply to corn. He says it could be corn or barley or wheat. In fact I think wheat was the first thing that they used. But this is kind of where my dilemma is because he talks about putting the entire grain or wheat berry or piece of corn through the roller to make it into a flake. And that description agrees with something that William Kellogg later wrote saying that it came out in the form of large thin flakes, each individual wheat berry forming one flake. But in other descriptions he talks about making it into a dough which would require the grain to be broken up before putting it into the roller. So not entirely sure what was going on in that very first process. So I'm going to try both and see which works best. Now what is definite about that original 1895 version is that there was exactly one ingredient, corn or wheat or whatever grain you were using. There was no sugar, no salt, no nothing. It was bland and it was supposed to be bland because Dr. John Harvey Kellogg said that the most bland plain foods were the most healthful. So for this recipe I got two and a half pounds or about one kilogram of corn. And Dr. Kellogg did say that it is the corn that was used in hominy grits so it's a larger kernel rather than the small sweet corn which might taste better. But I tried it and it makes for some teeny tiny flakes. So take the corn and cover it with water and soak it for about 12 hours. Now Dr. Kellogg says that this should either be in cold water or hot water above 110 degrees so that it doesn't start to ferment. And so you can keep it in really hot water. I'm not exactly sure how you would do that. Or you can just do like I did and put it in the fridge overnight. So hot or cold either one works just like it works for coffee. Hot coffee and cold coffee which you can get from today's sponsor Trade. Trade is a coffee subscription service that delivers freshly roasted coffee right to your door. And I'm always looking forward to that little red bag because I always know that it's going to be excellent quality and freshly roasted being delivered within just 48 hours of roasting. And with over 450 different roasts they have something for everyone. They got your light and dark roasts, your decaf, your espresso. And you can have it hot or they have a lineup of cold coffees and cold brew. So they sent not only this cold front coffee from PT's Coffee but also the cold brew system which makes preparing cold brew incredibly easy. You just add the grounds, add some water and set it in the fridge to brew overnight and then it's ready to drink. Nice and mild with a bit of cream. Just how I like it. And right now whether you want your coffee hot or cold you can visit my link in the description, drinktrade.com.maxmiller and you'll get a free bag of coffee or more when you subscribe to one of their plans. That's drinktrade.com.maxmiller to sign up and get a free bag of coffee. And they guarantee that you'll love your first bag or they'll replace it for free. Now back to the corn flakes. So once your corn is nice and soaked the patent says that it should be boiled. So drain the corn and add it to a pot then fill it with water and bring it to a boil. Cover it up and boil for one hour or until it's nice and soft and make sure to give it a stir every few minutes just to make sure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pot. Then once it's cooked drain it again and leave it to cool and dry. And here's where I began testing different ways to recreate this recipe because the patent talks about how each grain or kernel is supposed to turn into one flake, and they had these rollers that they would put them through that would mash them into a flake and then they would scrape them off. I don't have those rollers. They're like industrial rollers. So I tried a few different things. One, I tried to put it through a pasta roller. That did not work and I almost broke my pasta roller. I tried rolling them out with a rolling pin. Eh, not really. So I ended up just kind of mashing them and it did make it into a flake, but then when I baked them it really just turned into kind of like smashed popcorn. I don't think that's right. So with almost an entire day of different versions all not working out, I decided I would have to go with a dough. So I put the corn into a food processor and ground it up. Not nearly as fine as cornmeal, but fine enough that when I added a little water I got something resembling a dough that I could at least roll out fairly thin. So I put that into the oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit, 220 Celsius, and toasted it for 15 minutes or until it was nice and crispy. Again, I know this is not going to look like the original version, but since the only ingredient is corn, it should at least taste like the original version. Now before we finish up the recipe, we need to talk about something, and that is a story that has been going around on the internet for many years, saying that Kellogg's cornflakes were invented to stop people from pleasuring themselves, and while it is true that John Harvey Kellogg was obsessed with what he called the secret sin, claiming that the solitary vice made boys pale, scrawny, hollow-eyed, dull, and listless, and could lead to bad eyesight and even psychotic behavior, and while it is true that he had a lot of ways of dealing with this secret sin, including extreme pain to the region, or just locking it up in a cage, seems that making cornflakes was not one of these treatments. Rather cornflakes was a way to get people to chew their food more, and to just help with indigestion. Now is that as exciting of a headline? No, it's not, but I promise you the story of cornflakes is still really, really cool. While today we associate the name Kellogg with breakfast cereal, in the last decades of the 19th century, Kellogg's was synonymous with good health. As director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was a health guru of the age. He published numerous books and pamphlets, all filled with ways to keep both your mind and body healthy. And so you had people like President William Howard Taft, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, and Thomas Edison all converging on Battle Creek to be healed via the treatments of Dr. Kellogg. Now some of the treatments were pretty tame, things that you wouldn't bat an eye at today. Things like daily exercise, getting a good night's sleep, and a low-fat vegetarian diet of whole grains and other fiber-rich foods. And this was his cure for one of the most common maladies of the day, and that was bad indigestion. And when you look at the cookbooks of the late 19th century, you see that a lot of the food was like meat, and gravy, and cream sauce, so it's no wonder that people had a lot of indigestion. For things like seasonal depression, he prescribed light therapy, or phototherapy. He also did things like thermotherapy, where he would subject you to rather extreme bouts of cold, and electroshock therapy, which, well, it's exactly what it sounds like. But these were all some of the more tame treatments that he had, and definitely not what he would become infamous for. As I mentioned at the beginning of the video, one of his more infamous treatments was thrice-daily enemas. And you could either have a yogurt enema, where you would eat a half pint of yogurt, and then have the other half pint entered through a different hole, or a traditional water enema, but the water was pumped into you via a machine that he invented that pumped 15 liters of water per minute. That's a lot of water. He also used a number of machines that were meant to massage the bowels to get things moving, but they were vigorous massages, rather painful. He even had a slapping machine, which would literally slap the **** out of you. And it, again, was very painful, and was meant to be, because pain was one of the ways that you could treat a lot of the mental issues that you might be having. That was especially true if he thought that the root of your issue was sex. And frankly, he believed that the root of pretty much all people's issues was sex. Now best in his mind was to abstain from it altogether, which is what he and his wife of four decades did, having never ever consummated their marriage. And many of these beliefs stemmed from his version of the Seventh-day Adventist religion, which also informed many of his beliefs on diet. He often cites his personal religious views, which sometimes conflicted with the official views of the Church, when discussing his views on diet, including complete abstention from meat, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, chocolate, or caffeine of any kind. Instead, he believed that a diet of grains and vegetables was the best way to keep a person healthy, both in mind and body. It was also important that this food that you were eating was very well chewed, and he got these ideas from someone who was dubbed the Great Masticator. Horace Fletcher, who along with trying out a diet of nothing but potatoes for 58 days, also popularized Fletcherism, and this was a system that dictated what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat it, meaning how many times you needed to chew something before swallowing it. Usually this was 32 to 50 times, but there were foods that required more, and he said you should just stay away from them, things like the shallot. When you eat a shallot, you're supposed to chew 720 times before swallowing. That's about 10 minutes of chewing before swallowing. Now Dr. Kellogg took Fletcher's advice to heart and required all of his patients at the sanitarium to chew their food at least 40 times, and whilst they chewed, he sang a song, which started, Chew, chew, chew, that is the thing to do. You may smile when you chew, but don't try to talk too. For perhaps you will choke, and be sorry that you spoke. And it was this combination of a grain-heavy diet and the need to chew your food that birthed cornflakes. Now cornflakes were not strictly the first breakfast cereal. That had been invented in 1863 by Dr. James Caleb Jackson. At his own sanitarium in New York, he had invented something called granula, and this was basically graham bread that was baked and dried to within an inch of its life, much like hardtack. This was then broken into little pieces and put in milk and left to soak overnight, though even after a night of soaking it was supposed to be as hard as pebbles, and so this was the perfect food for Dr. Kellogg, he thought, so he basically just copied it, but instead of calling it granula, he called it granola, so he didn't get in any legal issues. Now granola was incredibly flavorless and incredibly popular. His patients loved it, and he loved giving it to his patients, but it required a lot of chewing, so much so that it actually broke a woman's tooth at one point, and so he was on the lookout for something that wouldn't require as much chewing. Then he came across a man who had invented another new cereal, which was tasteless, difficult to chew, and like eating a whisk broom. The tasteless and whisk broom were great, difficult to chew, not great, but something about it worked for him, because what it was, was wheat that was made into a sort of slurry and then pushed into little threads, kind of like a pasta extruder, and those threads would then be put together into like a little basket, and this was shredded wheat. Well, Kellogg wanted to buy the rights to shredded wheat, but he couldn't get them, and so he decided, well,I'll just make my own version, but I'll make it even easier to chew by making it into a flake, and this is where John's brother William enters the story, except that actually William's been there the whole time, you just haven't noticed him, because he has been in Dr. Kellogg's shadow the entire time. Basically, he has been his assistant and lackey for decades, and has been made to do all sorts of things, not just taking notes and writing letters, but polishing his brother's white shoes, and trimming his beard. It wasn't uncommon for William to work 120 hours a week, and originally got $9 a week, which is like $275 in modern money. So now we have the two Kellogg brothers and John's wife Ella testing ways to make this grain into flaked cereal, and they test it for months, and finally they figure out that if they soak the grain, and boil it, and then push it through these rollers, and scrape it off, it comes out as flakes, and that is the version that is then patented. They call these flakes granos, and in 1895, they start serving them at the sanitarium, either plain, or sometimes in milk or yogurt, which I guess is a better way of getting your yogurt than via enema. The brothers also began selling granos to former patients, shipping it out via mail order, and eventually they just had too much granos to make, and so Will asked his brother if they could build a small factory, and in 1897, they opened up the Sanitas Food Company, which began selling toasted cornflakes soon after. A much better name than granos, if you ask me, though it did not change the formula, because Dr. Kellogg said that they should remain bland and tasteless because they were a health food. The problem was, while some people enjoyed cereal because of its health benefits, a lot of people in the country were wanting to have cold cereal because it was just easier than making breakfast. Hot porridges could take hours and hours to make, whereas breakfast cereal, put it in a bowl, you're ready to go. Well,William saw this potential and was like, we got to change up the formula so we can get this into more households, but John said, absolutely not, we are not changing it, it's going to remain bland, and this left a big void in the cold cereal market for others to come in and fill, and one of those people was a former patient of Dr. Kellogg, a man named Charles Post. Post opened a factory, also in Battle Creek, where he produced a cereal based on Kellogg's granola, but he made the pieces much smaller, and he added sugar, and he called it Grape Nuts. Over the next few years, Post and numerous others turned Battle Creek into a cereal Silicon Valley with dozens of cereal factories opening all over. Everyone was making money, everyone except William Kellogg, because by now, he was pretty much running the cereal factory, except that his brother John was still calling all the shots. Time and again, he asked his brother if they could change up the formula, or at least start a national advertising campaign, and time and again, his brother said no. He didn't want to change anything, he saw it as a health food, and he didn't want his reputation tarnished, but one day, while John was on a trip to Europe, William decided to go rogue. He added salt, malt, and sugar, and people loved it, but not John. John hated it, and when he came back, he said, how dare you mess with my food, change it back. Well,William saw that he had made the right decision in changing the recipe, but John was never going to change his mind, and so he decided, you know what, I'm done, and he quit, and he decided he was going to take cornflakes, and make them work on his own, but John owned most of the rights still, and he thwarted his brother at every turn, so after six months, William came back, and the reason that he came back was because the sanitarium burned down to the ground, and he saw that his brother needed help, and so he returned to his shadows to help him rebuild, and William was the financial brains in the family, so he was able to get the funds, and rebuild the sanitarium bigger and better than it had been before, and you'd think that John would be grateful, but he wasn't, and what really must have stung was in the three years that they were rebuilding, William had to look just down the street to see Charles Post making money hand over fist making cereal, but after the sanitarium was rebuilt, William had a bit of a nest egg, but John did not, he had gone way into debt to rebuild the sanitarium, and William knew this, and so he used that against John saying hey I know you need money, I will buy the rights to cornflakes from you, well John did not like this, but he needed the money, and so eventually he gave up the rights, and William made a clean break, and in 1906 opened a new factory for the new Battle Creek toasted cornflake company, now William had several setbacks fairly early on, first Charles Post started selling a new cereal that was basically cornflakes, but he called it Post Toasties, and the new cornflakes factory burned down, but despite these setbacks the business actually flourished, namely due to the fact that William was excellent at marketing, he knew right away that people just needed to taste cornflakes to become customers, and so he started a national campaign that was a little risqué for the time that encouraged women to give the grocer a wink, and see what you'll get, and what you would get of course would be a sample of cornflakes for free, it actually went so well though that just 6 months later he had to change the campaigns to stop winking, so Will's cereal company was flourishing, and John's sanitarium was also flourishing, and surely they could be happy for each other, and let bygones be bygones, right? No, instead they sued each other over the rights to the name Kellogg when it came to cereal, and for 10 years they battled in the courts. John claimed that he was the first to use Kellogg for a cereal, which he was, and he was the famous Kellogg, he was the doctor that everyone knew, but William said that he had basically turned Kellogg's into the country's biggest cereal producer, and made the name a household name synonymous with cereal, and after 10 years the court sided with him, and so he changed the company's name in 1922 to the Kellogg Cereal Company, and from that point on the brothers' fortunes really began to diverge. Will's company flourished, as we all know, we all know Kellogg's, but John's sanitarium began to lose popularity, partly it was because his methods of healing kind of went by the wayside, and he really started focusing on like eugenics and forced sterilization, things got dark, but also the Great Depression hit, and people just couldn't afford the luxury of the sanitarium, and so eventually it did go into bankruptcy, and this is when John wrote a note to William. It was going to ask for money, but it was also a letter of reconciliation, a letter of apology for not just how they ended things, but all the decades of abuse that he had put upon his little brother, but there was no reconciliation, because the letter never got to William, or at least didn't get there right then, because while John dictated the letter, it was his assistant who wrote it down, and she felt that it was beneath her employer's dignity to apologize in such a manner, and so instead of sending the letter, she put it into a filing cabinet, and there it sat for eight years, long after John had died, and they never really reconciled. They had met once, and it did not go well. Anyway, it wasn't for eight years until somebody finally found this letter and gave it to William, but by then it was too late. A sad end to the relationship of these two brothers who in 1895 kicked off the cold cereal craze with cornflakes, the cornflakes that should be ready. So after 15 minutes the dough should be well toasted, and you can break them up into little flakes, and they're ready to eat, and here we are, the original cornflakes from 1895, sort of. They should taste like them even though the process didn't quite nail it. One of these days I'll get those rollers. Anyway, like he said, I could eat them plain, and you know what? I will try one plain. Crispy. Bland, as they're supposed to be. But it tastes like a cornflake. The flavor is the same. It's just missing that little extra something, that extra something being sugar. But I wanted to put some milk on them just to see how it goes. Um, and see if they maybe soften up a little bit. I'm sure eventually they will, but we don't have time to wait for my cereal to get soggy, so here we go. That's actually pretty good. Again, it tastes like cornflakes, just not quite as sweet. Add a little sugar in there, and you've got yourself some nice cereal. So would I recommend making these? No, I would not. It is way too much work the way that I did it. Just not worth it. If you do want to make them, if you want to make your own though, just buy some, some like cornmeal, some stone ground cornmeal, and use that. Add a little sugar, add a little salt, and then, and then bake them that way. Um, and if you add a little bit more water, I think you can make an even finer flake. Um, and if you have industrial rollers at home, then let me know how the, the original process goes. Maybe get some industrial rollers. Anyway, don't forget to try some cold brew or other coffee at Trade, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.