Great food tastes even better if it was invented right here in the Metro, and Omaha/Council Bluffs can claim many classics. Accidentally Historic host Richard Warner provides a brief history of many of them in this podcast.
Questions and comments are always welcome. Here’s link: https://www.thehistoricalsociety.org/contact-us.html
Butterbrickle was a signature flavor of the Woodward Candy Company of Council Bluffs. John G. Woodward started in the candy business at a small firm run by Menard Duquette in 1885, and bought full interest in the company and changed the name to Woodward Candy in 1895. The place grew, taking up almost the entire block where Ogden Place is today.
The local lore is the flavor and candy were invented by Woodward and the Blackstone Hotel shortly after added the candy to ice cream inventing Butter Brickle ice cream.
Is that true?
Some claim Fenn Brothers in Souix Falls, not Woodward, invented the butter brickle flavor.
I think the confusion comes from the fact Fenn Brothers bought the Woodward brand when Woodward closed in 1939.
First, what is butter brickle? I’m not a cook so I had to dumb this down enough I could understand it; apologies to foodies listening in… but here’s my take on it: butter brickle is similar to toffee except more butter. What’s toffee? Toffee is butterscotch that is cooked longer. What’s butterscotch? Brown sugar, butter, and cream… as opposed to carmel which is granulated sugar, butter, cream, and a bit of vanilla. (I Googled it).
SO bottom line— butter brickle starts from butterscotch.
Butterscotch was invented in Yorkshire, England in 1848; it first popped up in the United States in Chicago in 1881. And who do we know that was living in Chicago in 1881? None other than Mr. John G. Woodward.
Woodward was one of the first to use butterscotch in candy, so his experimentation with it and transition to butter brickle makes great sense. Butterscotch was promoted heavily as something of a company specialty.
Conventional local wisdom is that sumptuous delight, butter brickle ice cream, was invented at the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha when a chef there mixed Woodwards’ butter brickle with ice cream. The theory makes sense; Woodward serviced the metro area well. The Blackstone certainly would have had ready access to the Butter Brickle candy to stick into their ice cream, but there is some suggestion that Butter Brickle ice cream was actually invented by Harding Ice Cream company of Omaha. It is fact that the Harding and Woodward families were friends and spent summers together in the same “colony” at Lake Okoboji. Harding family lore has it that one summer afternoon at the lake Mr. Woodward was lamenting that it was hard to preserve and ship Butter Brickle candy in the warm months and it effected sales. Mrs. Harding suggested why not put the candy into ice cream and market it that way during the summer? And Butter Brickle ice cream came about. So exactly who invented the ice cream remains a mystery, but either story you chose to believe, it doesn’t change the fact butter brickle ice cream was an invention of Omaha/Council Bluffs.
Speaking of ice cream… a young entrepreneur by the name of Russell Stover… fresh off a candy manufacturing failure in Des Moines… moved to Omaha in the 1920s. His fortunes changed when a young soda jerk showed him a new treat he had invented called the I-scream bar… that’s capital I and scream… s c r e a m. He liked the idea, but hated the name… Stover re-christened the treat the Eskimo Pie and the rest is history. I learned more about how the soda jerk came up with the idea from one of our guest speakers at a Historical Society program… here’s how Darcy Malsby explained it…
"The story behind the Eskimo pie is that this guy named Christian Nelson had a confectioner shop in Onawa in Western Iowa and a little kid allegedly came into the store one day and he had a nickel and the kid says, I want a candy bar. No, no, no, I think I'd like ice cream, He can't decide candy bar ice cream, candy bar ice cream and mr nelson sees this and thinks, well, gosh, if we could just in road ice cream with chocolate, that'd be good, wouldn't it? So he figured out a way to actually make the candy coating stick to the ice cream because if you just mixed chocolate and ice cream, they tend to melt together and make a milkshake right now, he figured out how to do this. But then the problem was he didn't patent his invention, so he never made any money per se off of learning how to enroll ice cream and chocolate."
I love some of the early Eskimo pie advertising… particularly the one that says to eat ice cream for good health. Got to love that!
As for Russell Stover… when I hear that name I think candy not ice cream. That’s because Mr. Stover sold hid stake in the ice cream venture, moved to Colorado, and used the money to go into the candy business.
My favorite breakfast cereal was invented in Omaha. I wasn’t being particularly loyal, I just liked Raisin Bran and was pleased to discover it was first made by brothers Lloyd and Paul Skinner in 1926. Their
I do love coffee, and Butternut is certainly a familiar brand… and very much a product of the Metro. The story starts with the Paxton & Gallagher Wholesale Grocery company, which was founded in 1879 by two Omaha businessmen: Ben Gallagher and William A. Paxton. The company became one of the largest grocery companies in the West but really hit it bit when they launched ButterNut coffee in 1913. They said what made their coffee taste “as sweet as a nut” was using gas instead of coal to roast the green beans. Those of us who are old enough and grew up in the area fondly remember the smell of roasting coffee over western Council Bluffs and the old market area in Omaha. The old Butternut building at 9th and Jones was in the process of being transformed into apartments when it was destroyed by fire in 2004. The building’s infrastructure was largely wood making the fire hard to control. The iconic water tower on the roof, painted to resemble a coffee can, crumbled into the flames… a very sad ending.
It’s 1927 and the poker players at the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha were hungry. Reuben Kulakofsky ordered a corned beef and sauerkraut sandwich. Chef Bernard Schimmel strained the sauerkraut, mixed it with Thousand Island Dressing, added corned beef, Swiss cheese, sandwiched it in crisped rye bread and Reuben loved it. Known as “Reuben’s sandwich” the creation made it to the hotel coffee shop’s menu. It was just a local thing until 1956 when a waitress entered the recipe into a contest and won… after that the Reuben Sandwich gained fame across the entire country.
It wasn’t until recently I learned that the fellow that figured out how to put the ridges in the ruffles was from the Metro. Both sides of the river can claim Bernhardt Stahmer; he was an Omahan but also had some nice lake front property on the south side of Lake Manawa. He came up with his idea in 1948 and felt the process of cutting the potatoes into ridges actually changed the taste slightly… he felt Ruffles had a bit of a cheese taste even though there was no cheese added. Besides a ridged chip is just more fun. He sold the rights to the Ruffles brand to the Frito company in 1958.
When I think of the Skinner company I think macaroni and that’s correct… been around since 1911. But Lloyd and Paul Skinner were also the first to mix a fruit into a cereal… and Raisin Bran came into being in 1926. Raisin Bran is my favorite cereal, and there have been times all I could find around the house were corn flakes… so I tossed in my own raisins. But’s just not the same. The company lost their patent exclusivity in the 1940s, as it was deemed too vague, so all sorts of companies began producing Raisin Bran. The company sold to Hershey Foods in 1979, but the Skinner Macaroni name is still visible in the Old Market building that is home to lofts today AND they’re still Skinners in Omaha making food. The James Skinner Baking company produces pasties and is operated by the descendents of Skinner Macaroni co-founder Lloyd Skinner.
Strictly speaking it’s not Metro… but Lincoln is kind of in the Metro… so I’m going to throw in the Cheese Frenchee. My mother loved them, and when we talk about local restaurants today it’s likely the Kings Cheese Frenchee will come up. The sandwich was invented by Larry Price one of the founders of Kings; King’s was named for original co-owner Larry King who left the business in 1960. But the Cheese Frenchee predates that… it goes back to Larry Price’s long-time stand at the Nebraska State Fair called the Topper. After a few years on the fair circuit and seeing the demand for his food, he opened Kings Food Host in Lincoln in 1954. He grew the chain to 172 restaurants across the United States before selling the franchise in 1972. Kings opened in the old Broadway Theater in Council Bluffs in 1963 and moved to a new free standing building on North Broadway in 1970; after King’s closed that building became Village Inn and is home to Lansky’s today. In Omaha there were two King’s fast food booths in Westroads when it opened in 1967 as well as restaurants at 72 and Cass, 72 and and L, 30th and Farman, and 16th and Howard.
The Metro can claim instant cake mix… In July, 1951 Duncan Hines Cake Mix, produced by Nebraska Consolidated Mills, debuted in Omaha in two flavors… one was called three star… it was a vanilla mix that could be baked into yellow, white or spice cake… and Devil’s food. And it went gangbusters. Housewives love it; the product sold out in three weeks and it took six months for the company to gear up to the point it could keep up with demand.
So this Duncan Hines fellow must have been a top notch chef or baker? Heck no… from what I’ve been reading he couldn’t cook any better than I can. And that’s pretty sad. But he did know how to eat.
Mr. Duncan Hines was born in Kentucky in 1880 and was a traveling salesman. All he really wanted on the road was a decent meal and he developed a hobby… he became an amateur restaurant critic... keeping notes on cleanliness and food quality. No online reviews in those days, so fellow travelers started asking his advice. In 1938 he decided to self-publish a book with his findings called “Adventures in Good Eating.” It really took off, and he updated it every year.
So how did his name get on a cake mix? He didn’t endorse things very often, saying is name was his livelihood. But a marketer for the Grange League Federation approached him with a novel sell… he told Hines that by making his name more meaningful in home products, he could upgrade American eating habits. Also, Hines would have full control in any product that used his name.
Mr. Hines only approved about one fifth of the products he tested, and that cake mix produced by Nebraska Consolidated Mills was one of them.
Finally… an invention I remember well when I was in college and wasn’t eating Mom’s cooking everyday… the TV dinner. I had no idea it was invented in Omaha, but I’ve certainly downed very many in my time.
As the story goes, the Swanson Brothers way overestimated the number of turkey’s they would sell for Thanksgiving, 1952… and hit the new year with 520,000 pounds of unsold turkeys. The interesting part of the story is the company had been selling frozen turkeys for years… they knew quite well how many they normally sold each year during the holiday season. But this year the company’s young leader, Gilbert Swanson, a son of the founder, decided a way to eliminate the competition was to buy up all the turkeys the could find… leaving none for their competitors to market. Not sure what went wrong, but they ended up with a whole lot of frozen birds on their hands… more then they could even store. They had so many they rented refrigerator railroad cars to store the excess.
Keep in mind this was back when railroad refrigerator cars used ice… so they couldn’t just load up the turkeys, park the cars on the siding, and plug them in… They had to keep moving them to the ice docks in Council Bluffs where and army of man would shovel in ice every day.
It’s common to find turkey meat in the store today, but that was rare in the early 1950s… turkey pretty much was a meal for the holiday season only. My friends whose cooking skills far exceed mine say a full turkey takes a lot of time and work to prepare… and one turkey serves a lot of people. Those are two facts that have “special occasion only” written all over them.
Over a half million pounds of turkey birds is a lot of meat to sell once the holidays had passed. The excess product allowed for some experimentation.
At the same time the baby boom was hitting its peak… The GIs back from World War II had started families, and mothers were busy with the little ones… And cooking takes time.
Pre-prepared food already existed in a way. The military had been experimenting in with prepared heatable rations but it didn’t taste very good.
Swanson staff member Gerry Thomas made a drawing of a three-compartment tray that would keep foods for running together based on an idea Gilbert Swanson had when eating a meal on an airplane and staff bacteriologist Betty Cronin, a recent graduate of Duchesne College, assigned to come up with a trio of foods that tasted good when all cooked at the same time at the same temperature.
The impact was huge.
Here one has a complete dinner, with nothing extra to add or dishes to wash. Swanson obtained a patent for the frozen “TV dinner” and they rolled off the assembly line in downtown Omaha. Housewives loved them… what a time saving. Ten million were sold the first year of distribution.
So why was it called a TV dinner? I always figured it was because one could carry it into the living room and watch TV as they ate… that’s what I did. Or, it could mean Mom didn’t have to wash dishes and could join the rest of the family for TV time together in the living room after dinner.
Actually Swanson came up with that name because the concept was futuristic and modern… like television, an invention that was sweeping the nation by storm. Also the tin tray kind of looked like a TV. In those early days the size of the TV dinner tray and television screen would have been pretty close to the same size.
By the way, the Swanson factory that changed the future of home dining sat where the Holland Performing arts center is today.