Because the processed pork and shoe-soles that make up the McRib are only with us for a brief time, Burger King has gone and filled the void left in its wake with a new breed of chicken nuggets. So if you are a fan of tempura-style batter, well, you are in luck. But while we are on the topic of nuggets—did you know they were probably invented at Cornell? Yes, America's favorite lowbrow dish was likely first developed by Ivy Leaguers.
Slate's Maryn McKenna recently went in depth into the two histories of the processed food stuff. On the one hand there is the McDonald's McNugget, which popularized the product and came out in 1983. And on the other hand there is the prototype "frozen, breaded 'chicken stick'" that was developed by a Cornell University professor named Robert C. Baker in 1963. And really, he wasn't trying to make everybody fat—he was just trying to help farmers produce "more food, more cheaply," according to his son. Here's the gist of how the nugget came to be:
Baker’s prototype nugget, developed with student Joseph Marshall, mastered two food-engineering challenges: keeping ground meat together without putting a skin around it, and keeping batter attached to the meat despite the shrinkage caused by freezing and the explosive heat of frying. They solved the first problem by grinding raw chicken with salt and vinegar to draw out moisture, and then adding a binder of powdered milk and pulverized grains. They solved the second by shaping the sticks, freezing them, coating them in an eggy batter and cornflake crumbs, and then freezing them a second time to -10 degrees. With trial and error, the sticks stayed intact. Baker, Marshall, and three other colleagues came up with an attractive box, designed a dummy label, and made enough of the sticks to sell them for 26 weeks in five local supermarkets. In the first 6 weeks, they sold 200 boxes per week.
The whole process—recipe, box design, sales records, even predictions of how much it would cost to add a chicken-stick manufacturing line to a poultry processing plant—was described in the Cornell publication Agricultural Economics Research in April 1963. The publication was one of several food-science bulletins that the university distributed free of charge for decades. No one can say now to whom they went. “They were mailed to about 500 companies,” said Robert Gravani, a Cornell professor of food science, who studied for his doctorate under Baker and then joined the department that his mentor led. “He literally gave ideas away, and other people patented them.”
Baker, who died in 2006, never profited from his part in the products creation—and McDonald's says there is no record of contact between the company and him—but now you have an interesting anecdote the next time you find yourself drunkenly buying a $1 box of fried chicken bits and shouting, "McNuggets away!"
