Food history
History
22 rabbit holes · 9 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Is the croissant Austrian or French?
- Why didn't Coca-Cola raise its price for 70 years?
- Why is corn for tortillas soaked in lime?
- Are all bananas clones?
- Why is real vanilla so expensive?
Rabbit holes
- garum: the fermented fish sauce Romans put on everything
Fish guts and salt fermented in the sun for months. Sounds awful, tastes like umami. Southeast Asian fish sauce is a very close relative.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- Japanese curry probably came via the British navy, and the Japanese navy still eats it every Friday
Curry reached Japan in the Meiji era via the British, as curry powder rather than anything directly from India, which is why it's a thick roux stew. The navy adopted it, and the JMSDF still serves curry on Fridays.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- is the croissant actually Austrian?
Kind of both. The kipferl, a crescent-shaped roll, goes back centuries in Austria. The flaky laminated croissant came much later in France, after a Viennese bakery made the shape fashionable in Paris. The siege-of-Vienna origin story is a legend.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- did lead poisoning bring down Rome?
Matteo Rossi · 4 sources
- pineapples were rented out as status symbols
In 18th century Britain a pineapple could cost a fortune, so people rented them to display at parties. There's a building in Scotland with a giant stone pineapple on top.
moth · 4 sources
- a Coke cost 5 cents for about 70 years
From 1886 to 1959. Part of it was an early bottling contract that locked in the syrup price, and part was vending machines that took a single nickel. Going to 6 cents meant asking for two coins.
Tomás Rinaldi · 6 sources
- Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen in a backyard shed at 48
1958, Osaka. After months of trial and error in a shed behind his house, Ando landed on flash-frying the seasoned noodles, which dries them and leaves tiny holes so they rehydrate fast in hot water. Cup Noodles followed in 1971.
Noor Rahman · 5 sources
- fortune cookies are Japanese
Descended from a Japanese cracker. Chinese restaurants in the US took them over, partly because Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during WWII.
Beatriz Oliveira · 4 sources
- the Dutch traded Manhattan for a nutmeg island
The Dutch wanted a monopoly on nutmeg so badly that in 1667 they let the English keep New Amsterdam in exchange for a tiny island in the Bandas. The history of the Bandas themselves is a lot darker.
Tomás Rinaldi · 5 sources
- some US states required margarine to be dyed pink
Dairy lobbies fought margarine with taxes and bans on coloring it yellow. People would buy it white with a capsule of dye and knead it in at home.
Tomás Rinaldi · 3 sources
- were carrots made orange for the Dutch royal family?
Yuki Tanabe · 3 sources
- Lloyd's of London started as a coffee house
'Penny universities': for the price of a coffee you got the newspapers and the conversation. Lloyd's, the stock exchange, and a bunch of newspapers grew out of coffee houses.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- tea clippers raced each other to London
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- ketchup used to be fish sauce
Probably from a Hokkien word for fermented fish sauce. English versions were made of mushrooms, walnuts, oysters. Tomato came later; Heinz won by dropping the preservatives everyone else used.
An Bui · 5 sources
- cooking corn with lime kept people healthy for thousands of years
Mesoamerican cooks have cooked corn in alkaline lime water for thousands of years. When corn spread to Europe and the American South, the crop traveled but the technique didn't, and people living mostly on corn got pellagra.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- gladiators were mostly vegetarian
Bone analysis from a gladiator cemetery at Ephesus showed a diet heavy on barley and beans. They were called 'hordearii', barley men. And they drank a plant-ash drink, probably for calcium.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- MSG was discovered by a chemist trying to work out why dashi tastes so good
1908, Tokyo. Ikeda isolated glutamate from kombu broth, named the taste 'umami', and a businessman started selling it as Ajinomoto. It took most of the century, and the discovery of actual taste receptors for it, for umami to be widely accepted as a basic taste.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- salt was a big deal
Tomás Rinaldi · 4 sources
- every banana you've eaten is a clone
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- almost all vanilla is hand-pollinated, using a trick a 12-year-old figured out in 1841
Outside Mexico, vanilla orchids barely set fruit because their natural pollinators aren't there. On Réunion in 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy, worked out a fast way to pollinate each flower by hand with a thin stick and his thumb. Commercial vanilla is still done that way, one flower at a time.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- scurvy: they had the cure and lost it again
Clara Novak · 5 sources
- people thought tomatoes were poisonous
Related to deadly nightshade, so suspicious from the start. The pewter story (acidic tomatoes leaching lead off plates) gets repeated a lot but might be overstated.
Tomás Rinaldi · 4 sources