The cream of tartar in your cabinet is winery sediment
Tartaric acid occurs naturally in grapes, and during fermentation it binds with potassium and crystallizes into a hard crust on the inside of the tank. Winemakers call the crystals wine diamonds. The crust is scraped out, washed, purified, and ground into the fine white powder sold on the baking shelf.
Baking powder came out of a laboratory, and it exists because that sediment used to be expensive. American cooks had to import cream of tartar from the wine regions of southern Europe. In 1856 a Harvard chemist named Eben Horsford patented a process for producing a cheaper dry acid, then packed it together with baking soda and cornstarch so an entire chemical reaction could ship in a single can. The American Chemical Society designated the development a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2006.
Baking soda is a rock. Most of the sodium bicarbonate in American kitchens begins as trona, an evaporite mineral mined 800 to 1,600 feet beneath southwestern Wyoming, according to the Wyoming State Geological Survey. The deposit is the floor of Lake Gosiute, which dried up somewhere around 50 million years ago. Miners still descend to the floor, where they cut the ore. The last stop in that process is a cookie.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.