I just saw this on the Instagram feed of the New York Times…
Legend has it that the tuna melt was accidentally invented in the 1960s at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Charleston, South Carolina, when the cook didn't notice that a bowl of tuna salad had tipped over onto a grilled cheese. We may never know if this story is true, but there's no doubt that the tuna melt has become a classic American diner food.
I'm always intrigued by stories like this — and there seem to be hundreds of 'em — which pinpoint how and where a certain food item was invented…and how it was invented by accident. They always seem to involve accidents. The hot fudge sundae was invented by someone accidentally spilling some hot fudge on a dish of ice cream. Don't you think it's more likely that someone at some soda fountain or ice cream shop who had vanilla ice cream and hot fudge at hand thought, "Hey, you know…these things might go well together."?
And that maybe more than one person had that thought? We're not talking The Invention of Penicillin here, people.
So consider the tuna melt. Someone accidentally got melted cheese on a tuna sandwich and someone liked it? Couldn't someone have thought of that? I suspect that there is no food in the history of mankind that someone hasn't thought could be improved by melting cheese all over it. In fact, I'll even wager that somewhere, someone has tried putting the melted cheese on the vanilla ice cream and the hot fudge on the tuna sandwich.
And how do we know where and when this happened? Did the guy working the Woolworth's lunch counter in Charleston, South Carolina spill the cheese on the tuna and then alert the media? Did he quickly call up the biggest newspaper in Charleston and say, "Get a reporter down here on the double. I've got your headline story right here!"?
I think it's more likely that one day, the manager of that lunch counter had a reporter eating there and the reporter said, "Gee, you seem to serve a lot of tuna melts." The manager, aware of what a little publicity might do for business said, "We should! We invented them, you know." And then, to get this claim into print, he had to come up with a story and "Our chef just thought it might be good" seemed too boring…so it became an accident and other papers picked up on it.
You may find this cynical on my part and you're right. It is. That doesn't mean I'm not right about it. Not all food combinations are accidents except maybe the one below. No living, breathing human could have done this on purpose…
