Randmness

I love Dr Pepper. I don’t know why - I just do.  I think it’s a combination of the way it’s bubbles tickle my nose when I have that first sip out of a can and the fact that it tastes good with just about anything.

Dr Pepper was created by a man named Charles Alderton at Morrison’s pharmacy in Waco Texas around 1885. Charles was a pharmacist at Morrison’s but in his spare time he would come up with different flavors for sodas for the pharmacy to serve.  After doing some taste tests with the pharmacy’s owner, Wade Morrison, they decided to start offering it to customers.  The soda got so popular that people from around town started to come to the pharmacy just to order the drink. Since Charles and Wade hadn’t thought up a name for the soda yet the customers started calling it a ‘Waco.’

This past weekend I had lunch at Philippe’s in Los Angeles. You may not have heard of the place before but you may have heard of the sandwich they invented - the French Dip.

Philippe’s opened in 1908 on Aliso Street. In 1918 the owner, Philippe Mathieu, accidentally dropped a roast beef sandwich he was making in a pan of meat juice. The person Philippe was making the sandwich for, a police officer, was in a rush and took the sandwich despite being soaked in juice. The next day he returned with a couple of friends asking for another sandwich soaked in meat juice. Philippe decided to put the sandwich on the menu calling it the ‘French Dip.’ No one is quite sure how Philippe got the name for the sandwich but the two most popular theories are that Philippe was French and named it after his heritage and that the police officer’s name was French.

This morning my mom and I were talking about the Random things that I could write about on this blog. Together we came up with a pretty good starter list of things to write about but one item on the list caught my attention. It occurred to both of us that we didn’t know anything about potato chips, well other than the fact that we love to eat them and that they come from potatoes. So I did some research an interesting story and some useless facts about them.