Sharpe: The magic of beautiful mistakes

For my birthday, a friend sent me a cake.

And not just any cake. A famous St. Louis gooey butter cake.

While the exact origin of the GBC is uncertain, the most common tale is that it was created in the 1930s by a German-American baker who had an ingredient accident while trying to bake a traditional cake.

Yes, the delicious GBC was, in fact, the product of a historic mistake, and it is not the only scrumptious screw-up from St. Louis.

The toasted ravioli was a St. Louis accident of errant pasta landing in a deep fryer. The ice-cream cone was a 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair improvisation, a waffle-like pastry that, when rolled, saved the day for an ice cream vendor who ran out of dishes.

My favorite cooking mistake is the chocolate chip cookie, invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts, where she and her husband owned and operated the Toll House Inn. Legend has it Wakefield was preparing a colonial cookie recipe but ran out of baker’s chocolate, so she chopped up semi-sweet chocolate that had been given to her by Andrew Nestlé instead.

Epicurean innovation is nothing new: One of the oldest and most epic consumable missteps dates to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, somewhere around 3,500 B.C.E. when stored grain fermented and became the first beer.

These boozy Babylonians also gave us cuneiform, the earliest written language, which allowed for the creation of literature. Look at how far their invention has brought us.

While we can label these and other great edible discoveries mishaps, we also need to acknowledge the innovation, creativity and ingenuity at work as our historic culinary inventors adapted to their environments and made the best of their situations.

This spirit allows humanity to thrive. And it applies to something much bigger than food and drink.

This is also what separates the human mind from artificial intelligence.

I’m not an AI hater, but I am a skeptic. I am willing to accept that AI has its merits in society and will make our lives better in many ways.

I’m also scared to death that we will go too far and allow machines to replace our ability to think freely and creatively in the way that only the human mind can.

We need to preserve and treasure the traits of the human mind – including our ability to invent, take chances and turn accidents into miracles.

To do this, we need to allow for unrestricted thought. We need education that encourages opening the mind instead of closing it toward one narrow, censored perspective.

We need access to history and to literary works, and to teach these in a way that is thoughtful and reflective.

We need to be exposed to ideas that are different from what we know. We need to be taught to consider ideas critically and intelligently. Only then can we form conclusions based on rational thought rather than personal bias or group thinking.

We need the freedom to turn our mistakes into triumphs and fully understand the differences.

Almost 100 years ago, a cakemaker made a mistake in a St. Louis kitchen, adapted his recipe and developed something new and delicious that I was able to celebrate my birthday with this year.

If you can’t get to St. Louis for GBC or toasted ravioli, maybe you can grab a chocolate chip cookie or a beer and be thankful for meaningful mistakes, along with the human minds that made the best of the moment.

Jennifer Sharpe is deputy editor of The Journal Record.

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