The one I always wonder about is mayonnaise. Who says “Hey, you know what would be great on this sandwich? Some eggs, beaten in oil with lemon juice and herbs until the mixture becomes soemthing totally different in texture!”
My organic prof used to give us smell and taste and health effects (usually, fatal of one variant or another) for every new compound he used as an example.
First job as a shiny new engineer after graduating, I had an unknown, clear, odorless fluid dribble out of what should have been an empty reactor. I was all ready to abort the run, when the PhD whose process we were running simply stuck his finger into the flow, and took a taste.
PhD: “Nope. Not organic. We’re fine.”
me: :eek:
When I actually asked what the Hell made him try that, he basically answered “Eh, we used to rinse glassware in benzene with not gloves.” My conclusion: stupid, is what made him try that.
… come to think, one of my classmates in inorganic chem identified his unknown salt by taste, too. Caused the TA and I ('cause I had the only sodium chloride as an unknown) a few moments of panic trying to figure out what he’d chowed down on. (it wasn’t too toxic; I think they induced vomiting just because he was an idiot who needed to learn a lesson)
Most baked good amaze me. Butter and flour themselves didn’t just materialize one day. Then people had to figure out yeast and granulated sugar. There’s a lot of chemical complexity between different types of bakery. What happens when I add more eggs? Less flour? More baking soda? More air?
Amazing.
Any time one of these threads comes along I have to add surstromming to the list.
Yep. Pickled herring. Banned on most major airlines because of the tendency of the cans to explode. Violently and nausiatingly.
ETA (again): Have some surstromming antinor01
Interesting reaction, it makes you do math? 
I am so stealing that.
To add on Antinor’s piercing, how about those 3rd world tribes that put those big plates in their lips. I mean, geezus! Way to inconvenience yourself and endure what looks to be a highly uncomfortable lifestyle, become a freakshow, and never be able to whistle. Ever.
What were they thinking?
Also, those powdered wigs they use in English courts. I understand tradition, but why such an archaic, almost costumed, accessory for a civil occupation?!
I think once that the basic concept of bread caught on, the rest is a no-brainer. People have an amazing capacity to tinker with and improve things that are already useful. When I’m really hungry and have no food in the house, I’ll sometimes make simple bread (flour and water, pinch of salt, form into a disk, fry in a little oil). I often throw in odd ingredients just to see what happens. (Hint: baking powder, sugar, and Dutch process cocoa = Bad Idea.)
Anchovies. On pizza.
My case has been rested.
More from the egg family: meringue. Particularly since it was invented (discovered?) before there were electrig mixers. “You know what this needs? Beat 6 egg whites until you’re sure your arm will fall off, then keep going for 6 hours…”
While we’re at it, who ever decided that adding a pinch of cream of tartar (why IS it called that?) would improve it? What even is that stuff, and how does a quarter teaspoon make a difference in half a dozen eggs?
This is what I think when I start thinking about knitting too hard. I understand someone seeing animals with big fluffy coats and thinking "hey I bet it’s warm in there, but who was the first to get us from raw wool to yarn…and from there to really intricate patterns such as aran sweaters?
It’s tartaric acid crystals. What is tartaric acid? It’s a weak acid that collects in the top of wine barrels and on the underside of wine corks. For some reason, lowering the Ph ever so slightly makes for a fluffier, more durable foam. [/wannabe Alton Brown]
Hell, eggs in the first place. “You know those hard things with the goo inside the birds shit out? Let’s try eating them. No, the white ones.”
The conventional story for the invention of leavened bread is that someone left a bowl of gruel lying about and it started fermenting. I think it’s more likely that people were already baking flat bread and just noticed that when you make a double batch of dough, intending to use the rest later, it comes out a bit more puffy.
Flour and water mixed together will start to ferment spontaneously due to the natural yeasts and bacteria naturally present in it (I recently put this to the test). The hard thing would be to make dough and not have it rise.
According to our roaster, it started with Kaldi the goatherd, in Ethiopia, noticing that his goats ‘danced’ after eating the berries from a particular shrub. Hence the name of our espresso: Dancing Goats.
Not too much of a stretch for the goatherd, finding the coffee cherries unpalatable, would eventually note that the pits contained the lovely stimulant (caffeine). Efforts to process this stimulant into a more and more palatable form continue to this day.
Puddles of urine from diabetics attracted more flies, ants and other insects gathered around than non-diabetics. THEN someone cautiously tasted it.
You know, most food was initially consumed not on the principle of “I be that’ll taste good”, but on the principle of “perhaps that will keep me from starving to death, for at least a while longer”.
We’re too far removed from a survival-mode society to really appreciate that.
From: THHGTTG
3 stages of society, and the question asked in each stage:
Survival- “How can we find food?”
Inquiry- “Why do we need to eat?”
Sophistication- “Where shall we have lunch?”
One might also wonder about caviar.
Unlike many of the things in this thread Mayonnaise wasn’t an accident.
IIRC it was invented by a French Chef after the king ordered him to “short circuit” the cow from the butter making process. Mayonnaise was the result of many experiments.
I imagine there was a college kid who woke up from a wicked hangover one early sunday and stumbled down to his near empty refridgerator to find only vodka, tomato juice, A1, tabasco sauce, Worcheshire Sauce, Celery salt and half a can of stale beer left and decided ‘what the hell’.
Well, definitely the “half a can of stale beer” part. That’s just disgusting. But the cocktail you are mutilating was invented by George Jessel/Ferdinand Petiot.
A1? 
Flour has always puzzled me. A few weeks ago one of my girlfriends and I were high as kites and got to wondering how people ever invented flour. And WHY.
“Oh look at these little brown things. Let’s dry them out and grind them into powder.”
“All right. But it tastes like ass.”
“Well, we’ll add water to it. And an egg. And heat it up. Oooh, it’s all puffy now.”