Edible Inventions

Milk Chocolate

Sir Hans Sloane was introduced to chocolate while working in the Caribbean as surgeon to the West Indies fleet in the 1680s. He added milk to make it a more palatable drink, and his tasty concoction was sold by London apothecaries as a remedy and popularised by Cadbury's in the 1800s.

Image: Sir Hans Sloane and a drinking-chocolate wrapper.

Milk Chocolate
Image: Sir Hans Sloane and a drinking-chocolate wrapper.

Milk Chocolate

Sir Hans Sloane was introduced to chocolate while working in the Caribbean as surgeon to the West Indies fleet in the 1680s. He added milk to make it a more palatable drink, and his tasty concoction was sold by London apothecaries as a remedy and popularised by Cadbury's in the 1800s.

Image: Sir Hans Sloane and a drinking-chocolate wrapper.

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Other edible Irish inventions include Bailey's Irish Cream, the bacon rasher, flavoured potato crisps, and milk chocolate. The Irish probably also invented whiskey, having learned of distilling from Arabic scientists who used the technique to produce essential oils and essences.

The bacon rasher was reputedly invented in 1820 by a butcher in Waterford city, Henry Denny. Before then, bacon was cured in chunks, but often the salt solution could not penetrate to the core of the chunk and the meat would rot. Denny's successful innovation was to cut the meat in thin slices, which could be cooked quickly or 'rashed'.

Flavoured potato crisps were invented in the 1950s by Dublin businessman Joseph Murphy, founder of the Tayto company, who introduced cheese 'n' onion crisps to the world. Milk chocolate was created by a renowned 18th-century physician, Sir Hans Sloane, who was from Co Down. Sloane, who was physician to the king and queen in London, was an enthusiastic and wealthy collector of books, specimens and antiquities. He left his entire collection to the British nation, and so began the British Museum and Library.