It’s not ethnic, but Buffalo wings were invented in a similar fit of improvisation.
Penicillin couldn’t have been discovered centuries earlier. First because the kind of experiments that led to its accidental discovery couldn’t have taken place back then. And second, because the stuff that was discovered wouldn’t help. They first had to identify the most powerful strain existing, and then collect and culture all variants of it they could find, until they produced a complete freak that was so efficient that it could indeed fight an infection in a human body.
Nope. Nacho’s especiales were invented south of the border.
Per Wiki:
Nachos may have originated in the city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas,or in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico, at a restaurant called the Victory Club, owned by Rodolfo De Los Santos. In 1943, the wives of ten to twelve U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Duncan in nearby Eagle Pass were in Piedras Negras on a shopping trip, and arrived at the restaurant after it had already closed for the day. The maître d’hôtel, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, invented a new snack for them with what little he had available in the kitchen: tortillas and cheese. Anaya cut the tortillas into triangles, added shredded cheddar cheese, quickly heated them, added sliced jalapeño peppers and served them.
Invented in Mexico by a Mexican and made from Mexican ingredients. Sounds like that’s about as authentic ethnic as you are going to get.
Its discoverers won a Nobel Prize, not because it enables old geezers to have boners 
but because it led to the discovery and resulting research into the nitric oxide cycle, a cellular process that is believed to play a major role in cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the overall aging process.
It, and Cialis and Levitra to a lesser extent, is being used by people of all ages to treat certain rare circulatory diseases, most commonly primary pulmonary hypertension.
Minoxidil is rarely used for blood pressure, because it has some really nasty side effects. The baldness remedy is used topically, and truthfully is of dubious efficacy.
Birth control pills were discovered as an offshoot of research into fertility drugs.
There’s a certain polymer molecule that can be stretched the right way or the wrong way. Gore-Tex is produced by stretching it the wrong way.
Chop Suet?? Really?
All this time and no one has brought up James Burke? This is the man who’s bread and butter is bringing these types of things up. He’s got a number of books on this topic and a couple of TV shows about it. It’s very interesting to see how some unrelated and minor things in history bring about major changes.
Connections
Fantastic series.
It is also also used off-label to treat ischemic digital ulcers in scleroderma patients.
Terribly high in fat, I’ve heard.
An important discovery in the photographic process was made by accident. Early photographs had unbearably long exposure times, and the images rapidly faded. Louis Daguerre discovered that an exposed plate that he’d placed in a cupboard produced a much more vivid, longer-lasting image. He eliminated chemicals from the cupboard one by one until it was empty, and the plates still developed well. Finally he concluded that the reason was a thermometer in the cabinet that had broken some time before, spilling mercury, resulting in the lingering presence of mercury vapor. That discovery took photographic exposure times from eight hours down to thirty minutes.