This is a continuation of a previous posting, which I wrote a couple of years back. And it will cover the histories behind more popular foods which we take for granted today.

Jelly!

Mmm, jelly. Cold, jiggly, wobbly, sweet, wiggly, wriggly jelly! Or, as the Americans call it…Jello, which is actually a brand-name, not an actual foodstuff. But jelly it certainly is.

These days, we associate jelly with dessert, with children, with ice-cream, and with catchy little TV jingles (“I like Aeroplane Jelly, Aeroplane Jelly for me…“). But for centuries, jelly was a luxury food. Incredibly laborious and time-consuming to produce, it could only be eaten by the richest of people, during only the most special of special feasts, dinners, parties, holidays or other significant occasions in a history that dates back to medieval times.

We’re familiar with jelly as that stuff that you buy in a packet. You pour the powder into a bowl, you mix it with water, you pour the sloshy, syrupy mixture into a mold, and then chuck it in the fridge or freezer to cool and set, into pretty, jiggly shapes which are red, and green, and yellow and purple, and which look like everything from flowers to pyramids.

That’s what jelly is today. But in older times, jelly was obtained only after hours and hours and hours of extremely labour-intensive work. Jelly wasn’t simply mixed with water and chucked in a cold spot. It was boiled, and strained, and purified, in a process that would eat up almost all the hours of the day. This is why it was eaten by only the wealthiest people, who could afford the servants and the time to make it.

So how do you make jelly the old fashioned way?

To make jelly as they might’ve done back in the Middle Ages, you first required gelatin. Gelatin comes from collagen, a type of protein. And you get collagen from…

…pigs.

For centuries, well up to the Georgian era, the only way to make jelly was to boil the feet of pigs or cattle. In an incredibly time-consuming process, the salvaged pig’s feet would be placed in a pot of boiling water. The pig’s feet and water would be left to boil for the better part of eight or ten hours. This intense boiling extracted the gelatin from within the pigs’ feet, and mixed it with the water. Once the gelatin had been boiled out, the entire mixture had to be strained. First, it was strained to remove the pigs’ feet. Then it was strained to remove any debris. Then it was strained to remove any fat. Then it was strained to remove any impurities. And then it was strained again. And again. And again.

The repeated straining and purification removed all the impurities from the mixture so that in the end, you were left with nothing but water, and gelatin.

Left on its own in a suitably cool spot, the gelatin would eventually solidify. If you wanted flavoured jelly, then it was simply a matter of mixing in the required fruit-juices, such as lemon, lime, orange, strawberries and so-forth. These extra ingredients being added, the entire mixture was stirred up, poured into a mold, and then dunked in the cellar (or other suitably cold room) to solidify and set.

It seems easy, but when making jelly could take the better part of the entire day, and could require the efforts of at least two people (there’s a lot of water to strain!), you can understand why, for centuries, it remained a food for the wealthy. Poor people simply did not have the time, the money, or the space to dedicate, or waste, on such a frivolous dessert.

It was not until the mid-1800s, when it was discovered that you could dry out the mixture and create gelatin powder, that it was possible to sell gelatin in a convenient packet for the average consumer. All the buyer had to do was mix it with water to help the powder congeal, flavour it to his or her taste, pour the mixture into a mold, and set it. Before that was possible, hardcore boiling and tiresome straining and purifying was the only way to make jelly.

Sausages

Oooh, we all love sausages. Beef, pork, chicken, lamb…delicious!

These days, sausages are made out of synthetic casings, although there is a significant number of sausage-makers and butcheries, which are manufacturing sausages the old-fashioned way.

We love sausages. Convenient, easy to cook, easy to hold, easy to store and easy to hang up on a peg. We even have gourmet sausages stuffed with herbs and spices and cheese. But the origin of the sausage is far from gourmet.

Imagine a cow, or sheep, or chicken, or a pig. You’ve gutted it, you’ve taken off the ham, the bacon, the ribs, the cutlets, the various cuts of steak, the wings, the legs, the breasts, and everything really worth eating. What did you do with the rest? The carcass that’s left over?

Bones might be used to boil up for soup. Feathers, wool or fur might be removed for clothing. But there’s still the leftover carcass and the organs and innards that nobody wants. Now what?

If you lived in older times, you certainly did not throw it out. Catching and killing animals was hard work, and cooks were encouraged to cook and eat every single part of an animal which was worth eating…even the organs. Or the feet (if they weren’t being saved for jelly…). Or the head. The cheeks. Anything that wasn’t already removed. The offal, basically.

But how to dress the dregs of animals so that they looked appealing?

One way to do this was to take the intestines of the animal, pump water through them, wash them clean, and then fill the intestines with ground up animal leftovers, twist them into convenient lengths…and sell that, if you were a butcher, to your unsuspecting customers, or serve it to your diners, if you were a cook. It was still meat. It was still beef. Or pork. Or chicken. Or lamb. It was just…um…’modified’.

And that’s all a sausage is.

…did I put you off of your dinner yet?

In older times, all the leftovers from a dead animal were diced, sliced and minced up. Then, these animal unmentionables were pumped into the cleaned out intestines of the animal in question. The big long sausage was twisted around, every few inches, to make sausages of convenient lengths, and then the whole thing was cooked up.

Some butchers still make sausages like that today, although most cheaper sausages use edible plastic or synthetic sausage-skins instead. But it is, nonetheless, how it was done.

…Hotdog, anyone?

Pies

Pies…Cake is the lie

Mmm. We like pies. Chicken pie, beef pie, steak and kidney, apple, blueberry, custard-cream…sweet, savory, spicy, simple, splendid. We love pies!

One of the reasons we love pies is because they’re fun to make. We love creating pretty, patterned crusts, with cris-crossing strips, vents held open by pie-birds, pastry-leaves, and pretty, rippling, wavering sides.

A pie-bird. These painted clay birdies are stuck into the middle of pies to stop the pie-crusts from sagging during baking, and to provide a vent for steam to escape

But for all the effort, we know that before long, the crust and sides will be broken up, carved up, and devoured. And all our efforts will be dashed in a flurry of gravy, cream, sugar and crumbs.

But our love-affair with pies is only the end of a very long journey.

With pies, cakes and tarts, comes an interesting history.

Takeout Pies

For a long time, pies were not even baked at home. We have a romantic image of pies cooling on the window-sill after they’ve been baked, the wonderful smells wafting around the neighbourhood. Which they may well have done; but it’s a rather modern thing.

For centuries, pies were never baked at home. Until the introduction of the range stove in the 1700s, it was well outside the ability of the ordinary man or woman to do his own baking at home. Most homes did not have ovens. They had fireplaces. Fireplaces are great for roasting meat, for cooking stews, boiling soup and providing heat and warmth, but they’re impossible for baking on. The smoke and flames and soot from the fire would destroy the pie, and the constantly wavering heat from the flames meant that the pie wouldn’t bake properly, anyway.

For a long time, pies were actually sent out to the nearest bakery to be baked. Here, the village baker would bake your pies for you. You dropped them off, and he marked the top of your pie in a manner that made it stand out (so you knew which one was yours, to differentiate it from the dozens of other pies in town!). He baked it, and then you came back later and picked it up.

The nursery-rhyme ‘Pat-a-Cake‘ recalls this era of history:

“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,
Baker’s man, 
Bake me a cake as fast as you can,
Prick it, and poke it, and mark it with a B,
And put it in the oven, for baby and me!”

In the rhyme, just like in real life, a cake or pie was marked (‘with a B’, in this case), to differentiate Baby’s cake, or pie, from all the others in town, which were being baked at the same time, in the communal oven.

But before you even baked the pie, you had to put something into it. Filling! Back in medieval times, pie-fillings were a little more creative than what they are today. Two of the most common filling-choices gave us two of the most lasting, pie-related nuggets from history.

Before people got the idea of grinding up animal-guts and turning them into sausages, animal entrails were chopped up, boiled, and stuffed into a pie-casing. This pie was baked in an oven, and then served to the peasantry, low-ranking servants, and paupers. Entrails and guts and organs were called “umbles”. Serving “umble pie” to the poor gave the peasantry a constant reminder (as if they ever needed one!) that they were on the lowest rung of the social ladder, because all they could eat was…’Umble Pie”, or “humble pie”, as it eventually became to be called.

These days, we’re used to separating sweet from savoury. You’d hardly have a beef and custard pie, would you?

…would you?

Sweet’n’Savory

Believe it or not, but in medieval times, pies that mixed sweet with meat, were pretty common! Beef would be mixed with raisins and dates and prunes, and baked together in a pie. This wasn’t necessarily because people liked it…but rather because it was one of the few ways that people had, to stop food going stale!

The natural sugars found in fruit were used as a preservative to prevent the meat from going rotten. And often, fruit and meat were baked together, for this purpose.

These days, we don’t bake our meat and fruit together in a pie anymore. But we do have a leftover from that period – the Christmas “mince pie”. There isn’t any beef mince in these pies, but they’re called mince pies because they were originally made with meat, with the fruit acting as a preservative. Over time, the beef was removed, giving us a simple fruit ‘mince’ pie, the kind we know today.

Empty Shells

No, not shotgun-shells or bullet-casings…pie-casings!

The tradition of eating a pie, sweet, savoury, or a mix of the two, together with the crunchy pastry crust and casing, is actually a pretty modern development.

For much of history, when a pie was eaten, the pastry lid was removed, the contents (today, the fillings) eaten, and then the pie-casing (and the lid) was put back in the kitchen to be reused!…Again…and again…and again! For as long as the crust and casing remained fresh.

Why bother using the crust and casing when you have a pie-dish, though?

You have to understand a couple of things here…

This is a time before widespread refrigeration. Meat had to be cooked and eaten within 48 hours of being purchased fresh from the local market. There was nowhere to store it for longer than overnight without it going stale (unless you froze it, smoked it, or salted it).

To prevent meat going bad, cooks would bake it in a pie. And cooking the meat meant that it lasted longer and you could eat it, of course!

But why save the pie-crusts?

Until relatively recently, flour, the main ingredient in pie-casings, was an expensive commodity. Very expensive. In medieval times, the only way most people could get flour was to grow their own wheat, thresh their own grain, winnow their own wheatgrain, and then grind it by hand, or grind it at the mill owned by the local landlord (for which the peasantry had to pay taxes to use!). Even in later times, flour was expensive, and only the wealthy could afford to eat the fine, sifted, refined white flour which we love so much today. This was because the extra effort required to refine it made it more expensive.

The result? Most people couldn’t afford enough flour to bake a pie for every day of the week. You’d use up your flour to bake your pie and the meat inside. Then you’d use the same pie-crust over and over and over again until it started going bad, before eating it on the last night of the week. This was to make your flour last for as long as possible.

And the pie-crusts of older times are a lot different to the ones made today. Most people would complain…loudly…if you served them a pie with a crust that was too thick, since it would be impossible to crunch into, or get a fork or knife through. In the days of serfdom and lords, pie-crusts could be upwards of an inch or two in thickness! This was so that they would last through the repeated bakings without burning and charring in the oven.

Bread

Not for nothing is bread nicknamed “the staff of life”. For centuries, millenia even, all over the world, mankind has survived on bread of some variety. Whitebread, wholemeal, mixed-grain, sourdough, rice-bread, cornbread, pita-bread…the list is almost endless. But what is the history of bread?

The origins of bread go back to the dawn of civilization. And its importance is just as up-there as its history. Hell, the Romans even created a whole ROOM just for bread. Ever wondered why your kitchen has a ‘pantry’? It comes from the Latin word ‘Panna’ or…bread. A ‘pantry’ was the room in which bread, a staple of life, was stored. But here’s a few things you may not know about bread…

The Upper Crust

The “upper crust” is a common expression meaning those of a higher social status, up there in the upper-class economic group. But have you ever wondered where the term ‘upper crust’ came from?

Yep. Bread.

Before the first modern stoves were invented in the Western world (Ca. 1700), baking bread was a hot, dangerous and ashy affair. Here’s how it was done…

The dome-shaped bread oven was filled with wood, which was then set on fire. The oven door was left open and the huge fire inside the oven was allowed to burn for hours, until it finally burnt out. Once the fire was out, the baker had the unenviable task of raking out the hot ash, charcoal and cinders, and shoving in dozens of loaves of bread at a time, using those big, wooden baking-paddles (so he didn’t burn his hands).

Burning a fire in the oven, and letting it burn down to ash made the brick (or stone) inside the oven extremely hot. And it’s this heat, and not the heat from the fire, which actually bakes the bread. Once the bread was shoved in as quickly as possible, the oven door was shoved on, and extra bread-dough was stuffed around the edges of the door. This had the double-job of sealing in the heat, but also acting as an oven-timer. You could tell when the bread inside was baked by checking whether or not the dough on the door was also baked.

When the bread was baked, the door was ripped off, and the bread hauled out on paddles again.

Everything about baking bread relied on speed. It took so long to build, light and burn down the fire that bakers wanted to get the ash out of there, and the bread in there, as fast as possible. The result is that there was always a thin layer of ash on the oven-base. And during baking, this ash and soot would stick to the bottom of the loaves of bread. Eugh!

Picky rich people who wanted the best bread, would slice the loaves horizontally instead of vertically, so that the burnt, sooty bottom crust of the bread was given to the poor – the paupers, beggars and lepers, while they…the rich…kept the crunchy, soft, soot-free…upper-crust…for themselves!

Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree…

Anyone who’s ever baked bread at home will know that one of the most frustrating things is the wait while the dough rises. After the bread-dough has been mixed and kneaded, it’s necessary to leave it alone so that the yeast inside the dough can expand and let off gas, which allows the dough to rise, before it can be put into the oven.

But what if you didn’t have yeast, one of the key ingredients in breadmaking?

If you don’t have yeast, you could do what medieval bakers used to do. Take the bread out into the back yard, or nearest available orchard, find a suitable apple tree, and stick the yet-to-rise bread-dough underneath it! And let nature take its course, as they say.

Yes. This actually works. And it works because apples, which grow on apple trees (see, you learn something reading this blog…), are full of yeast. And apples on the ground, rotting off, let off yeast fumes, which will help your flaccid loaf to fluff into life before its date with destiny. The yeast in the apples is the same reason why it’s possible to make alcoholic apple cider; yeast is also a key ingredient in beer!

Hungry for More?

The “If Walls Could Talk” documentary episode “The Kitchen”, and the documentary “Tudor Feast” will supply you with some tasty information.

As I write this, the second-southernmost state of the Commonwealth of Australia is steadily being slow-roasted into hellish oblivion. For the third week in a row, we’re having temperatures over 30’c. And that is what has inspired this posting about the history of ice-cream.

Heaven, I’m in Heaven, and my heart beats so, that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek… 

Where Does Ice-Cream Come From?

Variations of ice-cream have existed for centuries. Cold, sweet foods which contained ice as a main ingredient date back to ancient times, in cultures as far apart as China and Ancient Persia (Iran, today), all the way to the Roman Empire. But how did ancient man produce these sweet, cooling treats, without freezers or refrigerators?

The First ‘Ice-Cream’

The first versions of ice-cream, which emerged in these ancient cultures, used crushed snow as the main ingredient. To the snow (stored in caves during hot weather, or harvested from mountains which remained cold all-year-round), various ingredients were added, depending on the tastes of the consumers, and the country of manufacture.

The first ice-creams of a sort, were fruit-based, and one of the main ingredients were fruit-juices, or purees. Of course, you could add anything you wanted to the ice; other ingredients included rosewater, saffron, or the crushed pulp of berries.

Living in the boiling climates that they do, it was the Arabians who developed ice-cream as we might know it today. Originally, the fruit that they added to crushed ice was not only to give it flavour, but also to sweeten it.

Eventually, Arabian innovators changed the recipe to improve taste and texture. To do this, sweetened milk was added to the ice instead of fruit, to create bulk and substance. And they used pure sugar, rather than the sugars found in fruit, to provide the sweetness. For the first time in history (about 900A.D.), we had our first ‘iced cream’, which literally combined ice, and cream (okay, milk…), to form a dessert that would remain popular for millenia.

The Spread of Ice-Cream

It took a while, but by the early 1700s, ice-cream was becoming popular all over the world. Recipes varied from country to country, but it was catching on fast. There were a few false starts and mistakes during the early years, but even these apparent failures gave us desserts which have survived the test of time, and became regional varieties of ice-cream; Italian gelato is one example of this.

Ice-cream became very popular in Europe. In France and Italy, and then eventually in England, too. By the late 1600s and early 1700s, ice-cream recipes had appeared, printed in a number of languages, including French and English. One of the earliest recipes for ice-cream in English dates to 1718! “Ice Cream” first appears as a dictionary-entry in 1744!

During the 1790s and the early 1800s, French aggression (remember a little chap named Bonaparte?) on the European mainland was driving Italians away from their homes. Italian refugees fled across the Channel to England, bringing their ice-creaming technology and skills with them.

Even before then, however, the popularity of ice-cream was spreading even further, and this sweet, cool dessert reached the Americas in the mid-and-late 1700s. The first ice-cream parlour in the ‘States opened in New York City in 1776. Ice-cream had been introduced to the colonials by Quaker migrants from Europe. Thomas Jefferson’s favourite flavour was supposedly vanilla.

How Do you Make Ice-Cream?

I hear you. How do you make ice-cream? They didn’t have freezers back then. They didn’t have fridges. And surely you can’t get ice and snow all year ’round? How did they make it in the summer, for example, when ice-cream would’ve been most popular? What, and more importantly, how, to do, when all the ice and snow is gone!?

Come to our aid, O great science of chemistry.

As far back as the early 1700s, housewives and professional ice-cream sellers had cracked the code of making ice-cream without all the fancy freezing and chilling apparatus which we take for granted today. Here’s how it’s done.

First, you need a pot or a can made of metal. Into this can, you put the ingredients of your ice-cream. The cream or milk, the flavorings and so-forth.

Find a larger pot. Line the bottom of the pot with ice. Lots of it. Put the smaller pot inside the larger pot, and pack in the space on the sides with even more ice. Now, just add salt.

A LOT of salt.

One particular recipe calls for a whole pound of salt.

what happens here, you ask?

The salt mixes with the ice, and the ice begins to melt.

The salty water is kept cold by the ice that hasn’t melted yet. And since salty water has a lower freezing temperature than pure water, the remaining ice can act on the salty water for a lot longer than it might otherwise do. And this drives the temperature of the salt-water-ice mix down even further.

This whole process is aided by putting the entire concoction of ice, salt, water and ice-cream, into the basement or cellar. The cold air slows down the melting of the ice that hasn’t already melted, and so the whole process is prolonged and lengthened out. The result is that the ice and saltwater slurry chills the sides of the interior pot or canister inside the main ice-pot. This, in turn, freezes the ice-cream mix inside the inner pot. Once the process is complete…you have ice-cream!

Simple.

Okay, not so simple.

The problem with this method is that, while it worked, it took a very long time. Up to four hours. When’s the last time you waited four hours to eat ice-cream?

A faster method of making ice-cream was needed. And in the early 1800s, that method arrived, in the United States…

Machine-Made Ice-Cream!

Since the early 1700s, ice-cream had been made the slow way. You filled a can with ice-cream, you sat it in a basin of ice and salt, and let basic laws of science do the rest. It produced a great result, at the expense of a lot of time. Something better had to be found to produce ice-cream in greater quantities, or at least, smaller quantities at a faster pace!

Enter…this:

Believe it or not, but this is the world’s first-ever purpose-built ice-cream maker.

Yes. That.

It was invented in 1843 by Nancy Johnson, a lady from New Jersey, in the United States.

How does it work, you ask? It works more or less the same as the previous method mentioned above, except this one takes more muscle. It produces ice-cream in the following way:

1. Put your ice-cream mixture into the interior canister.

2. Fill the bucket with ice, and salt.

3. Turn the crank.

And how exactly does this produce ice-cream?

Constantly turning the crank moved the interior can around in the slurry of saltwater and ice. This nonstop agitation mixed up the ice and water, but also mixed up the ice-cream. The result is that more of the ice-cream mixture gets to contact the freezing cold sides of its metal container, which means that the temperature of the ice-cream batch on a whole, decreases much faster. The faster you crank, the faster this happens, and the sooner you get ice-cream!

A bonus of the Johnson method of ice-cream making was that you also got ice-cream of a much better texture. The previous method, of simply freezing the cream in a bucket of icy saltwater produced a sort of ice-cream lump, similar to an ice-cube. The constant agitation produced by the hand-cranked freezer was that mixing the ice-cream around inside its receptacle prevented it from clumping together into chunks and blocks, and aerated it at the same time. The result was smoother, creamier ice-cream!

The result of this was that in 1843, you had the Johnson Patent Ice Cream Freezer. There are conflicting reports about whether or not Ms. Johnson ever patented her machine. Some say she did, in September of 1843, while others say say it was never patented at all. A Mr. William Young patented a similar machine and named it after her, in May, 1848. Whichever version of events is true, we have Nancy Johnson to thank for the first machine-made ice-cream in the world!

Ice-Cream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice-Cream!

From its crude beginnings in the Middle East, up until the mid-1800s, ice-cream was a delicacy and a treat. Phenomenally expensive and extremely fiddly, labour-intensive and tricky to make in any decent quantity, ice-cream was originally available only to the super-rich.

But it’s so easy. You get the cream, the sugar, the flavourings, you put it in a pot, you put the pot in the ice-water and the salt and…

It’s not so easy.

First, you need the ice. To get that, you had to carve it out of frozen lakes. Or haul it down from the mountains and store it in ice-houses during winter. And you needed to have an ice-house to begin with! And the labourers or slaves to cut, dig and haul the ice.

Then, you needed the salt. Salt was so tricky for most people to get that for centuries, it was traded as currency. It’s where we get the word ‘salary’ from, because people used to paid in salt, or paid money so that they could then go and buy salt for themselves. Salt was only obtained at great expense in time, from evaporating great quantities of seawater to obtain the salt-crystals, which would then have to be washed and dried and purified. Or else it had to be dug out of salt-flats, crushed, and purified again. This made salt extremely expensive, and out of the reach of mere mortals like you and me.

The relative scarcity of the ice required to cool down the cream, and the salt needed to provide the reaction, meant that large quantities of ice-cream were very difficult to make, and thus, were only available to the richest of people, who could afford the expense of the ice and salt. Most ordinary people wouldn’t have bothered to waste precious salt (used to preserving fish and meat) on something as wasteful and as extravagant as ice-cream! The damn thing melted if you left it on the kitchen table. What use was that all that fuss over something that didn’t last?

It wasn’t until large quantities of ice and salt were able to be produced, harvested or sold cheaply enough for anyone to buy it, that making ice-cream for everyone really became a going concern. Before then, it was simply too expensive.

Nancy Johnson’s ice-cream machine from the 1840s made efficient manufacture of ice-cream possible for the first time. Granted, these early hand-cranked machines could only freeze a small amount of ice-cream at a time, but they were a big improvement on waiting for hours and hours and hours for the same thing from a can sitting in a pot of salty slush!

Building on inventions such as the Johnson ice-cream freezer, by the mid-1800s, it was possible to produce ice-cream in commercial quantities, and the first company to do so was based in Maryland, in the United States.

The man responsible for the birth of commercial ice-cream manufacture was named Jacob Fussell. Fussell was a dairy-produce seller. He made pretty good money out of it, but he struggled constantly to sell his containers of cream. Frustrated about the fact that this cream would otherwise constantly go to waste, Fussell opened his first ice-cream factory in 1851.

Fussell spread the gospel of ice-cream, and as more ice-cream manufacturers sprang up around the ‘States, you had ice-cream for the common man.

Ice-Cream in Modern Times

By the 1900s, ice-cream was becoming popular everywhere. In the 1920s, the first electric refrigerators, and by extension, the first electric freezers, made ice-cream production, selling, buying, storing and of course, eating, much easier. It was during this time that companies and distributors like Good Humor (1920), Streets (1930s) and Baskin-Robin (1945) began making names for themselves…and which they still do today.

Since the invention of the Johnson ice-cream freezer in the 1840s, ice-cream could now be made faster and cheaper. Refrigeration technology, and the technology to manufacture enormous, commercial quantities of ice also aided in the ability to make ice-cream available for everyone. This also led to ice-cream being served in different ways for the first time in history.

Ice-Cream on a Stick!

If as a child, or even as an adult, you ever went to the corner milk-bar, drugstore or convenience-shop, and opened the ice-cream bin, and pulled out an ice-cream bar on a little wooden paddle or stick, then you have two little boys to thank:

Frank Epperson, and Harry Burt Jnr.

Ice-cream-bars, or frozen, citrus-based popsicles, or icy-poles, were invented in the early 20th century by two boys living in the United States.

The first popsicle was invented in 1904, by little Frank Epperson. Epperson was eleven years old when he tried to make his own, homemade soft-drink. He poured the necessary ingredients into a cup, and stuck a wooden paddle-stick into it to stir the contents around. Epperson left the mix outside in the garden overnight, and went to sleep.

During the night, the temperature plunged to frigid, subzero temperatures. When little Frankie woke up the next day, he found that his mixture had frozen solid inside the cup! Undaunted, as all little boys are, he simply turned the cup upside down, knocked out the frozen soda-pop, grabbed his new invention by the stirrer-cum-handle, and just started sucking on it. The world’s first-ever popsicle!

The invention of the world’s first ice-cream bar can be attributed to young Harry Burt.

Okay, so Burt wasn’t so young. But he did invent the ice-cream bar on a stick.

Burt’s father, Harry Burt senior, was experimenting with a way to serve ice-cream on the go. To make the ice-cream easier to sell, he set the cream into blocks. To keep the customer’s hands clean, he dipped the blocks in chocolate and froze them so that clean hands need not be soiled by contact with melting ice-cream.

The problem was that…what happens when the chocolate melts?

This was the point brought up by Harry’s daughter, Ruth Burt. Harry wasn’t sure what to do about it. That was when Ruth’s younger brother, 20-year-old Harry Junior, came up with the idea of freezing the ice-cream with little wooden sticks already inside them, to give the customer something to hold onto, and minimise the chances of ice-cream going all over the customer’s hands.

Daddy liked the idea so much that he gave it a shot, and success ensued! Between them, the three Burts had invented the ice-cream bar on a stick!

Sundaes on Sundays?

Ah. The joys of having a dish made almost entirely out of ice-cream. Sinful, isn’t it?

Apparently, someone thought so, because in the United States, it was illegal to eat ice-cream on Sunday!

Is that true?

Honestly, nobody knows. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The legend goes that since selling  ice-cream was illegal on Sundays, ice-cream vendors would sell ‘sundaes’ instead, deliberately mis-spelling the name to circumvent the religious morality laws (‘blue laws’) which were killing their businesses.

Something else that nobody knows is where the sundae as an entity, was invented. The United States. But which city? And state? Nobody knows for sure.

Whoever invented sundaes, and for whatever variety of reasons, we should thank them for inventing one of the most enjoyable and most variable ways of consuming ice-cream  ever thought of.

…Banana split, anybody?

Sweet, Creamy Goodness

Looking for more information? Here are some links…

http://firesidelibrarian.com/projects/s532/icecream.html

http://inventors.about.com/od/foodrelatedinventions/a/ice_cream.htm

http://www.idfa.org/news–views/media-kits/ice-cream/the-history-of-ice-cream/

Head into your kitchen and take a look around. If it’s anything like mine, or like any other average kitchen, it’s full of stuff like salt, pepper, cinnamon, cumin, powdered gelatin, sugar, mint, basil, onion, garlic, pork, beef, chicken, eggs, bread, butter, coffee, tea…all things we see, use, and eat on a regular, daily basis.

What today are common and popular condiments, foodstuffs and seasonings that we use every day, and which we can purchase at any time, were once expensive, hard-to-find luxury goods, available to only the richest and most prosperous of people. This posting  will outline the histories behind, and the significance of a selection of the flavorings, spices, foodstuffs and condiments found in almost every kitchen in the world today.

The History of Salt and Pepper

Any kitchen, any restaurant, any dining-table in the world, any fast-food eatery, cafe, diner and mobile food-wagon is going to have these two most important of all seasonings. Salt and pepper.

While we take these two staples for granted today; white, crunchy, tangy, musky, woody and spicy, they were once luxury goods available to only the most privileged of peoples, and available in only very small amounts. This is their history.

Salt

The importance of salt can hardly be exaggerated. It doesn’t just make food taste nice, but throughout history, salt has held a place of great significance. It was used for everything from flavoring meat, preserving food, and even as currency! A lot of expressions in the English language relate to salt and its one-time status as a rare and valuable commodity.

Today, you can buy salt from any supermarket in any number of forms. But in older times, salt was hard to come by, and incredibly expensive. Salt is acquired by one of two means, depending on which is the most effective:

The first is the simple evaporation of seawater. Gathering seawater into large, open troughs or pans and letting the water evaporate, is one of the most common ways of getting salt, even today. Once the seawater was evaporated by the sun, the salt-crystals would remain behind. Then, it was simply a matter of gathering the salt-crystals, washing them, purifying them, and repeatedly evaporating them until they were clean, clear, white and ready to use.

The second method of procuring salt was salt-mining. When vast inland lakes and seas dried up, they left large deposits of salt on the earth’s crust. Today, we know them as salt-flats. Salt in this form is known as ‘rock salt’ because it’s clumped up into large crystals. Accessing this salt is as simple as shoveling it out of the ground, mining for it, and purifying it, much like with the seawater.

But doing all this by hand, without the aid of modern mass-production, meant that for thousands of years, salt was a relative luxury. Industrial quantities of salt were used for preserving meat and fish. Food such as pork, beef, ham, bacon, and any number of sea-creatures were packed in salt to keep it fresh. The large chunks or chips of salt used in this curing and preserving process were called ‘corns’ of salt. Hence the term ‘corned beef’; literally, beef preserved by being packed in with large flakes and chips of salt.

Salt was so valuable and relatively hard to come by that as far back as the Ancient Romans, salt was used a currency. Soldiers were paid in salt, and only a man…”worth his salt“…would be allowed his allotted ration. When soldiers weren’t paid in salt, they were paid in coinage that would allow them to buy the salt which the money represented. This form of payment was known as a salarium. Working people are still paid their regular ‘salaries‘ to this day.

The relative scarcity of salt meant that it was a massive status symbol. These days, salt is sold and presented at-table in any number of ways: In cheap plastic salt-grinders or shakers, in plastic zip-lock bags and in shrink-wrapped packets inside pretty cardboard boxes. But it wasn’t always like this.

Salt was so important that once it was presented at the table, it was housed in a specially-manufactured piece of tableware: The salt-cellar.

You can still buy salt-cellars today, but antique cellars, made of glass and sterling silver were prized pieces of the household’s table-setting. The number of salt-cellars on the table showed off how wealthy the homeowner was, and the position of the cellars on the table determined and indicated a diner’s relationship to the homeowner!

A king, lord, or wealthy merchant would have closest access to the salt-cellar. The people in his immediate vicinity, and who were able to reach the salt-cellar, did so at the king’s invitation, and were said to be ‘above the salt‘. People who were less deserving, and therefore, who couldn’t gain access to the coveted salt-cellar on the table, were seated further down the table, and therefore ‘below the salt‘.

Salt was so important and prized that whole wars were fought over this simple, white crystal. Taxes were levied against salt, and restriction of prohibition of its passage through a country was even hoped to affect the outcomes of wars and battles. During the American Revolution, the British and loyalist colonials hijacked, stole or hid valuable cargoes of salt bound for the Patriots. While this may seem funny today…don’t forget that salt was required to preserve food! Without the salt, meat and fish could not be kept fresh for long journeys and big battles, which, the British hoped, would turn the tide of the war in their favour.

So important was salt that government mishandling of this precious flavouring could cause the population to turn against it in a hurry! In 1648, the Russian Government unwisely put a heavy tax on salt. Taxation in Russia was easily circumvented, and many people of relative means were able to get away with not paying their taxes.

In the early 1600s, Russia was in a transitional stage. The last tsar of the Rurik Dynasty had died and there was a fierce power-struggle, which ended in the 1610s and 1620s, with the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty, which would rule Russia until the Revolution of 1917.

The fighting caused by this power-struggle had left the Russian Treasury empty. To get much needed money for the government, and to stop the widespread tax-evasion of the time, the Russian Government decided that the fastest way to get money was to tax the one thing that everyone relied on…salt.

Salt was essential to the Russian diet. It was required by everyone to salt and preserve the fish and meat which was at the time, a staple to the Russian people. The salt tax infuriated the Russian citizens and in 1648, everything came to a head with the Moscow Salt Riot.

You wouldn’t think that much would happen. A bunch of peasants and serfs, middling sorts and shopkeepers rioting over a lack of salt couldn’t be that big, could it?

By the end of roughly ten days of rioting, half of Moscow lay in ruins, burned to the ground by people who refused to pay taxes on such an essential component of Russian life.

Such is the importance and significance, rarity and necessity of salt.

Pepper

There are several varieties of pepper. It holds the world record as being the most commonly used spice in the world. The most common pepper that people are familiar with is Piper Nigrum…’Black Pepper’.

Pepper was once a prized and rare spice. It’s native to the Asian regions of the world, around India, and the South Pacific countries. Access to this desirable but faraway spice caused the opening of the Spice Trade. The Spice Trade had existed for centuries. It started in the Mediterranean, and spread east from there, to countries such as Persia, Afghanistan, Siam, China, India, Korea, Malaya, and Indochina. The Spice Trade was done by sea, with routes running through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The Trade was also run through overland routes, such as the famous “Silk Road” through China. A lot more than pepper was traded, however. Popular spices included cinnamon, cumin, ginger and turmeric. Along with spices, silks, exotic woods, ivory, cloth and other exotic items were also traded. Pepper remained the backbone of the Spice Trade, however, because it was heavily used, much like salt, to flavour food, and/or to disguise the taste of less-than-fresh meat or fish.

Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice

Aaah, sugar. Sweet, sweet, wonderful sugar. Brown, white, crunchy and sweet. The bane of dentists, dietitians and purveyors of health-food. This legendary substance has been used in everything from candy to chocolate, sauces, cakes, pies, muffins, cookies, and even meat! But, like salt before it, sugar was once a valuable commodity used only by the very rich.

Sugar is native to India. There, it is grown in the sugarcane plant. The juice or water extracted from the cane-reeds is a sweet liquid (…which is incredible to drink, by the way…) which for many years, remained untapped. For most of the world, the main sweetener was still honey, extracted from beehives. But when Indians learnt how to refine the sugar-water, and extract pure sugar-crystals from it, the sugar-trade exploded!…or not.

The issue was that sugar produced from sugar-cane was expensive and had a relatively low yield. As a result, sugar was incredibly expensive, and remained a luxury item and status-symbol throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. If you could afford sugar, you were rich!

Sugar started becoming cheaper when, in the 1700s, it was discovered that another plant, the sugar beet, was also high in natural sugar. Sugar-beets were easier to grow and more plentiful. The discovery of the beet and it’s link to sugar was made in the mid-1700s, but it wasn’t until the 1810s that sugar-beet production and harvesting really took off! By the Victorian-era, sugar was becoming much cheaper, and the candy industry, with boiled sweets, chocolate-bars, cookies, cakes, pies and puddings really began to take off. Sugar-consumption shot up significantly during the 1800s.

Honey

Honey is something that everyone is likely to have in their house. It’s sweet, sticky and delicious. And it’s also healthy and good for you! Among other things…

Honey has been known to mankind for centuries. And before the rise of sugar in the early 19th century, it was the main sweetening agent used in cooking. Honey was used for a lot more than making things sweet, though. Just like salt, honey is a natural preservative. Food could be sealed in honey to keep it fresh for weeks and months at a time. Fruit and nuts were often stored in jars of honey to keep them fresh and sweet, during the summer months, so that they could still be eaten during the winter months, when fruits were less plentiful. Honey is such a good preservative that jars of ancient honey found by archaeologists are still good to eat today, thousands of years later. In some countries, honey was even used to preserve dead bodies.

Honey is also an antiseptic, and was used to treat and clean wounds on the battlefield in ancient times. English monarch, King Henry V, was shot in the face with an arrow during the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, while fighting under his father’s command. The battlefield surgeon cleaned the wound with honey, removed the arrowhead and bandaged the then-prince’s face. Prince Henry survived his injury, and the battle, and succeeded his father, Henry IV, in 1413.

From those reading this who suffer from bowel-issues, you might be relieved to know that honey is also a laxative. Raw honey, in as pure, and as unprocessed a state as it’s possible to buy, has a lubricating effect on the body, which helps relieve digestive issues such as constipation. Feeling a bit blocked up? Make yourself a couple of pots of tea with a good dose of raw honey mixed in. Not only is it delicious, but you’ll feel much better after a couple of hours…

Butter and Margarine

Anyone who’s ever done the schoolboy experiment of dropping two marbles into a jar of cream, sealing the lid and shaking the jar until your arms drop off, will know how butter is created (and yes, that is how butter is created…constant agitation of cream).

Butter is one of the most essential ingredients in the world. For cakes, for pies, for cookies, for sandwiches, for hot toast on cold nights, for greasing up the toastie-maker before making a grilled-cheese sandwich.

Butter has been around for centuries. Commercial exporting of butter is traced back to the 1100s in Northern Europe. For a long time, butter was considered a peasant’s food, fit to be consumed only by farmers and peasants. Eventually, however, butter became accepted as food for all classes, from kings and emperors downwards.

Because it’s a dairy product, storing butter was a problem. It had to be kept in such a way that it didn’t melt or spoil. Where possible, it was kept cold, underground, or in ice-houses or ice-boxes. Where the ground-conditions allowed it, butter was stored in barrels and buried in peat-bogs! This method of preservation was common in Ireland up until the end of the 1700s.

Butter became wildly popular in the 1800s. Sauces and dressings for salads and a variety of savory dishes were made using butter. In France in the 1860s, butter became so widely used that there was a severe butter-shortage! Emperor Napoleon III famously set up a nationwide competition! A prize, to anyone who could mass produce a cheap, effective and worthy substitute for butter, that would feed the poor and provide sustenance to the French Army! The prize was finally claimed in 1869, by French chemist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries. Mege-Mouries built on research done by other chemists, and developed the wonder-spread that would save France from a butter-drought! He named it..Oleomargarine…or just ‘margarine’ for short.

Margarine, made from vegetable fats and oils, instead of milk-fat, as butter is, has  always had a bit of a stigma. It’s seen as the poor-man’s butter. The cheap substitute that it was back in the 1860s is a stigma that is yet to be removed from its character. In fact, margarine was seen as so offensive, that it was actually prohibited in certain countries!

Because manufacturing cheap margarine would harm the local dairy industries, in the United States and Canada, the production and sale of margarine was made illegal! And…just like in the U.S.A. in the 1920s…it led to bootleg margarine. Hard to imagine, but it did! In the end, margarine-bans were ended (Canada, in 1948, America, during the late 1960s), but taxes and ‘margarine licenses’ meant that it wasn’t quite as cheap as probably it should’ve been. In the United States, there was a Margarine Tax (2c/lb). 2 cents a pound doesn’t sound like much, but back then, 2 cents was the price of a newspaper!

Potatoes

…Yes. Potatoes.

The humble spud has some pretty interesting stories to tell. It was once considered inedible and filthy. It came from the ground, covered in crud that you had to scrape off, after all…who wants to eat that!?

The potato comes from South America. It was introduced to Europe by the Spanish in the Early Modern Period. But acceptance was slow and grudging. It was considered cheap, peasanty food, not worth for anything but pig-feed. In fact, in the 1780s and 90s, when France was undergoing a record famine due to crop-failures, the French would rather starve to death than eat potatoes!

The potato-promoter extraordinaire was a Frenchman. His name was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.  It was he who suggested that the potato, a versatile and adaptable food, would be the savior of the French people during their time of need! He was so convinced of this that he hosted dinners at which NOTHING was served…but potatoes…in one way, or another. For every single course. He even did this to the French king, Louis XVI! In the 1770s, the French medical society finally agreed that the potato was not the filthy, poisonous, and dangerous thing that came out of the ground, but, grudgingly, accepted that it could be eaten…this still didn’t stop the French from avoiding it like the plague, though…

The potato was the staple food of the Irish people for much of the 1800s. When the potato crops failed in the 1840s and 50s, thousands of desperate Irish men, women and children immigrated to the United States to save themselves from starvation.

But the most famous story about the potato is not how it became accepted into polite society, or how it affected patterns of immigration, but rather, how it became the popular potato-chip.

If you dug deep enough, you could (and some people have) found proof that this happened before this date, but the generally accepted story is that the crunchy, salted potato chip was invented in the following manner:

Moon’s Lake House, Saratoga Springs, New York, U.S.A. 1853. Moon’s Lake House is a popular eatery and holiday resort in the town of Saratoga Springs. The resident chef is an African-American, a young (by then, in his early 30s) man named George Crum. The fashion of the time was to slice potatoes into thick chunks, sort of like wedges, and fry them, so that they could be eaten with a knife and fork. A customer repeatedly sent back his fried potatoes to the kitchen, insisting that the slices were too thick, and so soggy that they kept breaking apart on his fork!

Insulted by this, Crum shaved the next order of potatoes until they were paper-thin! He flash-fried them in oil until they were crunchy and hard, and then showered them all over with a huge amount of salt! He sent the potatoes back out…

To his surprise, his new invention was a hit! Potato-chips made Crum rich! In a restaurant that he opened himself, after the American Civil War, Crum served potato chips in baskets on all the tables, as a snack-food for his diners before their meals.

Did Crum invent potato chips? There are some who believe so. There are some who believe that they existed before then, but were not named as such. However they arrived on the scene, they have remained popular for over a hundred and fifty years…

Food. Glorious food. In the 21st Century there is an abundance of this stuff. You find it everywhere. And a lot of us just eat it without thinking. But some of us do think. Some of us think about the most random and ridiculous thoughts ever.

Like…who invented crispy potato chips? Where did the Hotdog come from? Why do police-officers eat doughnuts and who invented them? Why is a Baker’s Dozen one more than a real one and why did it take mankind so long to come up with a meal that could be eaten between two slices of bread? This article will look into the whimsical and interesting histories of a selection of famous foodstuffs that are as common to us today in the 21st century as bread, cheese and ale was to Medieval European peasantry in the 1200s.

Crispy Potato Chips

Beloved by all, adored by some, coveted by others, served in glittering, foil-like bags and notoriously difficult to pick out of your teeth afterwards, potato chips, the deep-fried, paper-thin crunchy variety, have been with us for over a hundred years. But who invented them? Which famous person or company came up with the idea of manufacturing and selling wafer-thin slices of potatoes seasoned with salt and packaged into cute little bags? Smiths? Lays? The guy with the moustache on the ‘Pringles’ can?

No! Crispy potato chips were actually invented by a pissed-off chef at an American resort in the mid-1800s. Yes, it’s true!

The unlikely inventor was a man named George Crum (that’s ‘Crum’ without a ‘b’). He was the cook at Moon’s Lake House, a holiday-resort in Saratoga Springs in the State of New York, U.S.A.

The story goes that on the 24th of August, 1853, a patron at the Lake House’s restaurant kept sending his French Fries back to the kitchen, over and over again, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy and too floppy and too much everything-else. The finicky restaurant-patron did this so many times that Crum reportedly lost his temper. Frustrated at having his cooking refused so many times, Crum sliced some potatoes until they were nothing but thin, almost transparent sheets. He dumped them in a sieve and deepfried them until they were so crispy and crunchy that the expectant and probably equally-frustrated customer would be wholly unable to spear them with his fork. Crum sprinkled an abundance of salt on the chips, dumped them in a bowl and sent them back out of his kitchen, probably feeling jolly pleased with himself for showing this picky patron what-for.

To Crum’s surprise, his attempt at revenge was actually met with delight on the part of his target. The salty, crispy chips were a smash-hit and unwittingly, Crum had invented a new snackfood! The new invention were eventually named “Saratoga Chips” in honour of the town where they had been invented. They proved so popular that Crum was able to set up his own restaurant in 1860. For the next eighty years, ‘Saratoga Chips’ remained a regional speciality until a businessman named Herman Lay latched onto the idea of selling these ‘crispy chips’ nationwide. And for the first time, people all over America (and eventually, the world) could eat Crum’s famous mishap invention.

Popular legend has it that the customer that sparked Crum’s invention was Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Bill Gates, Donald Trump and *insert name of another, fabulously rich guy here* of his day. However, this claim or rumor is all that it is. A rumor. Vanderbilt was not the person who so incensed the chef as to make him create something totally new.

Ice Cream Cones

Ah. Ice-cream cones. Like the hotdog-bun, the pie-crust and the crunchy chocolate biscuits that sandwich every single Oreo cookie in existence, the ice-cream cone is one of our most beloved of all the edible food-packaging materials ever invented. But where did they come from?

Believe it or not but the ice-cream cone (the crunchy wafer thing) has only been around for a little bit more than a hundred years. Previous to that, ice-cream was served in waxed paper bowls or cups or in fine glass and ceramic dishes at cafes and restaurants or on street-corners. So, where were ice-cream cones invented and how did they come into existence?

The story of the ice-cream cone is a short one, but is a prime example of the saying that ‘Necessity is the Mother of Invention’.

The year is 1904. The Wright Brothers have perfected the new heavier-than-air flying machine called the ‘aeroplane’, ‘CQD’ becomes the world’s first international radio distress-signal and Trans-Siberian Railroad is completed in Russia.

In the city of St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition is underway. Also called the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Although the story has been disputed by others and may not be entirely true, the popular one is that an ice-cream seller at the fairgrounds ran out of waxed paper cups and wooden spoons with which he served ice-cream. Hearing of his plight, a nearby wafflemaker supposedly rolled a thin waffle into a conical shape and presented it to the ice-cream vendor as a suitable vessel for his frozen treats.

Is this true? Not really.

It is, however, the popular story told by everyone to everyone else.

Although people have been storing ice-cream in weirdly-shaped containers for centuries (yes, ice-cream has been around since the 1700s), research seems to suggest that the ice-cream CONE, that is, the crispy, crunchy ones we eat today, was invented in 1902 by an Italian man living in England. This man was Antonio Valvona, an manufacturer and seller of ice-cream. Valvona, then living in Manchester, England, received a patent on the third of June, 1902 for his “Apparatus for Baking Biscuit Cups for Ice-Cream”. Although no specific mention of ‘cones’ are included, the patent-details state that…

“By the use of the apparatus of this invention I make cups or dishes of any preferred design from dough or paste in a fluid state this is preferably composed of the same materials as are employed in the manufacture of biscuits, and when baked the said cups or dishes may be filled with ice-cream, which can then be sold by the venders of ice-cream in public thoroughfares or other places.”

This then, appears to be when and by whom, the edible, crunchy ice-cream cone was invented. Nice work, Signor Valvona.

Apple Crumble

Sweet, delicious, hot, crunchy and wonderful with cream, Apple Crumble is one of the most beloved desserts in the world, and easy as pie to make.

Or actually, it’s easier than pie to make.

Which was the very reason it was invented.

Apple Crumble was born in the minds of English housewives during the 1940s. During the Second World War, everything was rationed. Coal, tea, tobacco, milk, eggs, butter, water…even the sugar in your coffee was rationed. Due to the significant shortage of food, women were unable to bake the desserts that their families were used to, such as classic apple pie. There simply wasn’t enough butter, milk, eggs, flour and sugar to make the pastry-crust that would both line the tin as well as cover the apple-filling. So, in the spirit of ‘Make Do and Mend’, housewives went thrifty.

Fruits and vegetables were unrationed during the War, and most people grew their own. So filling up the pie was not a problem. It was covering the pie that caused housewives and bakers headaches. Making the best of a bad situation, they simply took sugar, flour and ground cinnamon and mixed it up. This crude, powdery mixture, devoid of both eggs and butter (both of which were nigh unobtainable during the War) was then sprinkled over the top of chopped up apples and the whole thing was shoved in the oven.

Probably because it tasted so good and was so easy to make, the Apple Crumble remains one of the most popular desserts in the world to this day.

Carrot Cake

Like the Apple Crumble, the Carrot Cake was invented during the Second World War. Shortages of almost every kind of food imaginable meant that baking a conventional cake was almost impossible. Because England imported most of its raw foodstuffs, sugar became incredibly scarce and was rationed just as much as everything else. To compensate for the lack of sugar in their cakes, housewives used the natural sugar in carrots (which they probably grew in their own ‘Victory gardens’) to sweeten up their cakes, and the Carrot Cake was born.

ANZAC Biscuits

ANZAC Biscuits are a staple of Australian cuisine. Like the barbeque, the Four’n’Twenty Pie and Streets Ice Cream, no comprehensive look at Australian food would be without a mention of this sweet, crunchy, jaw-breaking confection. But how did it come into existence?

Common folklore will tell you that in 1915, bored Australian soldiers on the frontline in Galipoli mixed up the hodgepodge of rations that they were given, baked the resultant glumpy mess over a fire, and ended up with a sweet, crunchy treat which they called the ANZAC biscuit, naming this new invention after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC).

As fascinating as it may be, this account isn’t true. ANZAC biscuits were made from the rations afforded to housewives, mothers and sisters living back in Australia during the First World War and were designed to be a treat for their brave fighting-boys over in Europe. They were originally called “Soldier’s Biscuits” for this reason.

One defining characteristic of the ANZAC biscuit is that you could probably hammer a nail in with one of them and then eat your hammer for lunch. They were notoriously hard and crunchy (although recipes do exist that produce softer, more jaw-friendly biscuits) and it’s generally accepted that the biscuits were baked so hard and dry so that they wouldn’t crumble during the long voyage from Australia to Turkey.

SPAM

“Don’t make a fuss dear, I’ll have your SPAM. I love it! I’m having SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, baked beans, SPAM, SPAM and SPAM!”

And in one stroke of genius, this mysterious and odius meat-product was launched to stardom and immortality. Or…something like that.

Spam, or properly capitalised “SPAM” (which I won’t do, since it would probably wear out my ‘Shift’ key in no time at all) is the most famous ‘mystery meat’ in the world. Curiously pink and saltier than concentrated seawater, Spam is famous for being the staple food of the British people during the Second World War. But where did it come from?

Spam was invented in 1937 by the Hormel Foods Company and was one of a growing number of convenience foods that started coming onto the grocery market in the early 20th century. Originally called “Hormel Spiced Ham”, the name was changed to “SPAM” soon after. Due to its strange appearance, Spam has been given all kinds of names over the years, a few of the more interesting ones I shall list here.

Spiced Pork and Ham.
Shoulder of Pork and Ham.
Something Posing as Meat.
SPecial American Meat.
Stuff, Pork and Ham.
Surplus Parts Animal Meat.

Spam is synonymous with the Second World War, although it lasted for a long time before and after that event. Due to its long shelf-life and sturdy, metal containers, Spam could be sent almost anywhere in the world. Millions upon millions of cans of the stuff was sent to England starting in the early 1940s, to deal with the shortage of meat due to rationing. Soldiers in the South Pacific survived on Spam for weeks or months on end, unable to get any other food that wouldn’t go bad in the humid, tropical heat.

The Sandwich

It’s impossible to think of life without the sandwich, isn’t it? Where on earth would we be if we didn’t have some nondescript foodstuff crammed between two slices of bread, eh?

And yet, as fantastically convenient, as idiotproof as it is to make, as simple as it is…the biggest history fact about the sandwich isn’t a fact at all.

Popular history will tell you that the Sandwich was invented by a lazy English nobleman who was a gambling addict and who couldn’t be bothered leaving the card-tables under any circumstances…not even for meals. The story goes that the man ordered his valet to bring him meat stuck between two slices of bread so that he might have a meal but at the same time, not get grease on his playing-cards. Other people (probably other card-players) began asking for the same, ingenius and convenient dish to be served to them as well, and a new type of food was invented. The Sandwich!

Is it true?

Not really, no.

The sandwich has existed for centuries. It just wasn’t called a sandwich. Ever since the Middle Ages people had been eating food stuck between two slices of bread. But since back then this type of dish wasn’t called a sandwich…how come it enjoys that name today?

Although he was not the inventor of this dish, this curious and probably hereforto, unnamed delicacy, was finally named after John Montagu…the Fourth Earl of…Sandwich…a village in the English county of Kent, in the late 1700s. The story of the cardplaying artistocrat John Montagu who ordered his manservant to bring him meat between two slices of bread is probably true. It’s also true that this snack was finally named after Montagu’s title as the Earl of Sandwich, but what’s certainly not true is that Montagu was the undisputed creator of the dish…because he wasn’t.

The Hamburger

Related to the Sandwich is the Hamburger, the Sandwich’s American cousin. Or is it?

The Hamburger is a strange thing. Called a hamburger but containing no ham. Where did it come from?

The Hamburger gets its name because it was actually invented in Germany…not America. For centuries, people in the German city of…you guessed it…Hamburg…enjoyed a grilled steak sandwich which had no particular name. It was during the 18th and 19th centuries, when people from Europe started migrating to America, that this simple regional dish was referred to as a Hamburg-style sandwich and eventually…a hamburger.

Fish and Chips

Americans have hotdogs, the Irish have potatoes. Australians have meat pies, the Japanese have sushi. The Chinese have deep-fried cockroaches.

In England, the most famous dish is undeniably…fish and chips.

But when was it invented?

Fish and chips were created in the 19th century. They were a cheap, filling and delicious meal that was often served to lower-class working men, wrapped up in newspapers (printing ink has more protein per drop than concentrated bug-guts). Potatoes were plentiful and were a popular snackfood during the Victorian era. They were filling and cheap. To make them easier to cook, they were chopped up into rough ‘chips’ and deep-fried.

It’s said that the ‘fish’ part of this dish came thanks to Jewish immigrants. In the mid and late 19th century, the Russian Empire was engaged in serious ethnic and religious cleansing. Polish, Russian and other Eastern European Jews escaping pogroms in their homelands fled across Europe to Britain, taking their Jewish culture with them. Because it is against Jewish law to cook or to kindle a flame on the Sabbath, Jews would do all their cooking the day before. They would batter and fry their fish (a method of preserving it) on the day before the Sabbath so that they could eat it cold the next day without cooking. This method of battering, crumbing and frying fish supposedly caught on with the non-Jewish community and the ‘Fish’ was added to chips.

Although once considered a working-class staple, today Fish and Chips are enjoyed by millions of people all around the world. The food-shortages of the Second World War helped spread the dish and increase its popularity. In fact, Fish and Chips was one of very few things that wasn’t rationed by the British Government during the War.

The Baker’s Dozen

A regular dozen is twelve. A Baker’s Dozen is thirteen. Why?

It comes from Medieval law. In the Middle Ages, when bread was a staple of every single person from the king down to the lowest of his serfs, a baker screwing up his bread-count (either deliberately or by accident) was susceptable to harsh punishment. The baker’s dozen was instituted so that bakers couldn’t be accused of shortchanging their customers and holding back on how much food they had produced. Also, thirteen round buns were supposedly easier to pack into a rectangular storage box without the buns bouncing and rolling around.

The Doughnut

Researching the history of the doughnut is like trying to find out who shot President Kennedy. You’re sure there’s only one answer, but everyone has their own opinions.

The same goes for doughnuts.

The most accepted version, however, seems to be that the doughnut was an invention of the Dutch, who brought it with them when they came to the New World and founded a city called New Amsterdam (that’s ‘Manhattan’ to you and me). The doughnut was originally a ball of sweet dough that was deep-fried and were originally called “oilycakes”. They supposedly got the name “doughnut” when it was discovered that by removing a lump (“nut”) of dough from the middle of the oilycake, the confection would cook faster and more thoroughly. This was how the doughnut got its name (and yes, dougnuts still have holes in them for the same reason).

But why are dougnuts associated with police-officers? In the United States, a cop eating a doughnut is as American as the Statue of Liberty or baseball or Apple Pie (which is actually English). The fact is that when they’re out late at night on the beat or stuck in their police-cars, officers had very little to eat and drink. The only places that were open at such ungodly hours were little diners and roadside cafes and sleepy restaurants where doughnuts and coffee were cheap and plentiful. They tased delicious and were easy to handle and so officers took to eating them, and a national stereotype was created.