Iconic Texas: DR PEPPER

My favorite teenage snack was Dr Pepper with salted peanuts added to it. It worked with Coca-Cola too, but for me, Dr Pepper was clearly better.

Remember: You pour peanuts into Dr Pepper, let them float and flavor the drink, then sip the soda and eat the peanuts.

Dr Pepper has a fairly strong claim—although Vernors disputes it—to being the oldest major soft drink still produced in America. It is one year older than Coca-Cola.

It was created in 1885 by pharmacist Charles Alderton in Waco, Texas. He began serving it there at the soda fountain in Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store, and customers originally called the pharmacist's blend of fruit syrups “Waco,” according to the Dr Pepper Museum. Customers would sit down on one of those old swivel stools and say, “Give me a Waco.”

This unusual drink was an instant hit. As its popularity exploded, other local soda fountains began buying the syrup blend from Morrison's drugstore. Alderton and store owner Wade Morrison could not keep up with demand, so Morrison and a partner founded a company to develop it as a soft drink. And they came up with a new name.

The name “Dr. Pepper” (the period was dropped in the 1950s) is credited to Morrison. The most frequently repeated story is that he named it after a doctor he had once worked for in Virginia and whose beautiful daughter had captivated him. However, the Dr Pepper Museum does not believe this story—or more than a dozen others it says it has collected over the years.

By the time of the 1904 World's Fair, Dr Pepper was already a regional success; like so many other American pop-culture food and drink classics, the fair catapulted it onto the national stage.

Perhaps the biggest loser in this whole affair was Charles Alderton, the pharmacist who invented Dr Pepper. He simply gave the recipe away, apparently because he was more interested in medicine than marketing.

Today, the Dr Pepper formula is kept under tight security in a vault at the company's headquarters in Plano, according to Texas Monthly, with backups in two separate bank vaults in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

Contrary to soft-drink myths, Dr Pepper does not contain prune juice, as both the Dr Pepper website and a brochure published by the company to debunk this persistent rumor state. “There are 23 flavors and other ingredients (none of which is prune) that create that unforgettable Dr Pepper taste,” the brochure says.

But that unique blend of flavors, together with its bubbly carbonation, has won over many devoted fans. Many people swear that Diet Dr Pepper is the least “diet”-tasting diet soft drink there is. And let us not forget Dublin Dr Pepper, which is unfortunately no longer available but was once considered the very best, thanks to its use of Imperial Pure Cane Sugar.

A small side note: The numbers 10, 2, and 4 once appeared on every Dr Pepper bottle cap in the style of a clock face, a reference to a 1950s marketing slogan urging people to take a Dr Pepper break at “10, 2, and 4 o'clock”—times when energy often wanes. That is the origin of a modified poker game called Dr Pepper, in which tens, twos, and fours are wild cards. A poker purist will not play Dr Pepper, but I like it. It is the only game in which I have ever had four of a kind.