During the 19th century, Reverend Sylvester Graham invented the Graham Cracker to suppress sexual urges. He believed giving in to “carnal desire” could cause epilepsy, headaches and even insanity. Apparently, eating meat, fat, spices and coffee also stimulated those urges. To combat this, in 1829, he invented a bland biscuit-like cracker, the Graham Cracker, and preached its sexual urge-crushing powers, especially in adolescent boys. He believed wholesome food would make wholesome people. It may seem ridiculous today, but he had a bit of a following at the time.
Lemon has been paired with fish for centuries, but not for the reason you may think. During the Middle Ages, many people thought the acidity of lemon juice could help dissolve accidentally swallowed bones. Fish was often served with lemon and this trend has continued through to today, but it’s now more about flavour and garnish than those pesky bones.
Although the origin of chocolate is hard to pin down, the cocoa bean can be traced back at least a few thousand years. Both the Mayans and Aztecs in pre-modern Latin America believed cacao beans were extremely valuable, and used them as currency. According to a 16th-century document, one bean could be traded for a tamale, while 100 beans could buy you a turkey hen. The cacao bean was thought to have magical, even divine properties and was used in the most sacred rituals including births, marriages and funerals.
Bananas were not always as easy to get hold of as they are today. During the Second World War, due to rationing and food shortages, the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, ordered a complete ban on the import of bananas, making them almost impossible to get. The British came up with creative ways to recreate the tasty fruit. Some households used parsnips, mashed and flavoured with banana essence to create mock banana sandwiches.
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Popsicles came from a happy accident. In 1905, Frank Epperson, an 11-year-old boy in California was making himself a soft drink using a cup and stirring stick to mix his soda water. Epperson got distracted and left his drink on the front porch overnight. The next morning he found it had frozen with the stick poking out. It wasn’t until 1923 that Epperson patented “ice on a stick” and started making his "Eppsicles". They were later renamed “Popsicles” after his children’s nickname for the icy treat and have been popular ever since.
Have you ever tried a carrot that isn’t orange? Carrots weren't always their striking shade. For years, they were purple. It wasn’t until the late 16th century that Dutch growers took mutant strains from the purple carrots crossed with other varieties, which gradually developed into the sweet orange mutation that exists today. You can still buy purple carrots, along with red, yellow and white varieties from some supermarkets and farmers’ markets.
Lobster is a prized dish served at many high-end restaurants, but it wasn’t always a luxury item. When the first European settlers reached North America, lobsters were so plentiful that piles up to two feet high (0.61m) would wash ashore in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, earning lobsters the nickname, “cockroaches of the sea”. There were so many lobsters that Native Americans would use them as fertiliser and fish bait. Once people learned how to prepare and cook the meat, lobsters became a much-loved delicacy.
Invented in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg, the popular soda we now know as 7UP was originally called the very catchy, Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, and contained lithium. At the time, lithium, a mood-enhancing salt, had long been used to treat bipolar disorder and depression. The soda was marketed as a mood-booster as well as a delicious fizzy drink. In 1948, the US Food and Drug Administration banned the use of lithium in soft drinks and 7UP was reformulated two years later.
The Victorian era was a time of ground-breaking discoveries and technology, which also meant plenty of questionable and often unsafe innovations too. After basics like bread were able to be mass-produced, manufacturers switched their ingredients for cheaper alternatives that would add weight and bulk. Alum, an aluminium-based compound found in modern-day detergent was used to make bread whiter and heavier. The dangerous compound led to bowel problems, constipation and chronic diarrhoea, which was often deadly for children.
Before the invention of chemical embalming fluids, the Egyptians had to get smart when trying to preserve their dead, opting for sticky, sweet honey. Similar to salt, honey’s extremely high sugar content sucks water from bacteria and kills microbes. Honey also contains small amounts of hydrogen peroxide, an antiseptic. This makes it the perfect embalming solution for corpses. Following the death of the ancient King Alexander the Great, his body was said to have been laid in a golden sarcophagus filled with honey.
In 1935, the Flakall Corporation, an animal food manufacturer in Wisconsin, would clean the grinder used to flake the corn for animal feed using moist corn. The workers were shocked to find these produced blobs of corn, now known as corn puffs. Edward Wilson, an employee, took the little puffs home to season them and the result was Korn Kurls.
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The Romans loved to stuff birds for cooking. It was a case of the bigger, the better. Farmers caught on and started developing methods for fattening their chickens. Some used wheat bread soaked in wine, while others would use a mixture of cumin seeds, barley and lizard fat. At one point these practices were outlawed by authorities, who believed it was promoting excessive luxury in the Roman republic.
Possibly the most recognisable condiment of the western world, the ketchup of today has come a long way from the ketchup of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the UK, the original sauce was made from mushrooms. Fresh or dried mushrooms were boiled, finished with spices and then strained. Mushroom ketchup was a firm favourite in Victorian kitchens and dishes and has made a recent comeback. Geo Watkins is the most famous brand, operating since 1829, and you can still get hold of its mushroom ketchup today.
Today it might be about caviar, truffle and lobster when it comes to talking about luxury foods, but in Ancient Rome, it was all about dormice. The dish was prepared by gutting the mouse, stuffing it with pork mince and baking it. The mouse was fattened up beforehand in a special jar known as a glirarium with ledges for it to run around before it was killed. Dormice were considered a delicacy and were reserved for the upper classes.
A lunchtime classic around the world, the sandwich was thought to have been invented so people could eat meat without cutlery or a plate. John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich is often credited with making the dish famous. Legend has it, in 1762, during a particularly long game of cards, Montagu asked the house cook to bring him meat between two pieces of bread so he wouldn't have to get up from his seat. The “sandwich” quickly caught on and is now one of the most popular dishes on the planet.
After Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin took their history-making first steps on the moon, the pair sat down to eat. The first meal after the ‘Eagle’ landed included bacon squares, sugar cookies, peaches, a pineapple grapefruit drink and coffee. Bacon is thought to have been the very first.
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Who would have thought candyfloss would have been invented by a dentist? In 1897, dentist William Morrison teamed up with candy maker John C. Wharton to design an electric candy machine to cut down on the manual labour required to make spun sugar treats. The machine had a metal bowl containing a central spinning head that was filled with sugar, producing the candy which they fittingly called “fairy floss”. Renamed cotton candy in the 1920s, it is now one of the most popular treats served at carnivals and fairs.
Before naturalist Charles Darwin rose to fame for his theory on evolution, he had quite an adventurous taste in food. During his time at the University of Cambridge, Darwin was a member of the Glutton Club, a group of students who met weekly to eat unusual meat, such as hawk and bittern. Darwin’s palette for interesting foods evolved as he travelled around the world for his research, eating pumas, iguanas, armadillos and even giant tortoises.
Many of us have a waffle iron in our homes, but they’ve been around a lot longer than you’d expect. The Ancient Greeks were thought to have their own version they used to make wafers, similar to today’s waffles. Medieval Europeans also used a similar device to cook early waffles, consisting of two iron plans with wooden handles which would be held over an open fire or on the hearth.
Before the invention of modern refrigerators, for centuries Russians used to put frogs in their milk to help preserve it and prevent it from going sour. Recent research has found frogs have peptides on their skin that help kill bacteria.
As gross as it sounds, whale faecal matter (or ambergris) was once a prized ingredient in food, cocktails and even perfumes. Ambergris is a substance that comes from a whale’s digestive system. It's thought to be produced by whales to help them pass hard, sharp objects like indigestible squid beaks. It's eventually excreted and left to float in the ocean. During the 17th century, ambergris was thought to be an aphrodisiac and was highly sought after. Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova was said to have added the strange substance to his chocolate cream, while King Charles I apparently grated it into his morning eggs.
It turns out the old nursery rhyme Sing a Song a Sixpence with the line “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”, was based on fact. During the 16th century, the French had a dish called entremet, used to entertain nobility and the upper classes. For royal banquets, a big pie would be baked and live songbirds would be placed under a dome of pastry. The creation would be carried to the table where the crust would be opened and the birds would fly out. It was apparently a real crowd-pleaser.
Giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘death by chocolate’, during the Second World War, Nazis attempted to create explosives disguised as chocolate bars to kill British prime minister Winston Churchill. Adolf Hitler’s bomb-makers coated the devices in a thin layer of dark chocolate then packaged them like chocolate bars. The plan was to place them in the War cabinet dining room. Fortunately, the plot was foiled by British spies who discovered the plan before Churchill’s life was in danger.
One of America’s most popular foods today, but chicken wings only rose to fame over the last 60 years. Chicken wings were traditionally used as stock for soup, or simply thrown away. It wasn’t until 1964, at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo that all this changed. Teresa Bellissimo is credited as the inventor of Buffalo wings. After she received an accidental shipment of wings, she covered them in her own special sauce, served them with blue cheese and celery, and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.
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During the Middle Ages, this odd snake-like creature, known as lamprey, was a popular delicacy among British aristocrats. King Henry I of England was known to love the taste of the strange fish, and it’s widely believed his death was caused by eating too many lampreys, although it’s more likely to have been blood poisoning
Tomatoes were not always the firm favourite they are today. Quite the opposite. In late 18th century Europe, the red fruit was nicknamed “the poison apple” as it was thought aristocrats would get sick and die after eating them. In reality, the wealthy would eat from pewter plates which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are high in acidity, they would leach lead from the plates. This reaction caused people to die from lead poisoning, but tomatoes were blamed and branded evil.
With its colourful collectable designs, most people would be surprised to find out Pez was originally created to stop people smoking. In 1927, Eduard Haas III invented the peppermint candy in Austria, which was originally sold in wrapped rolls. It wasn’t until 1949 that the first Pez dispenser was created, designed to look like a cigarette lighter as an alternative to tobacco. The colourful characters found on the dispensers today began in the late 50s and marked a turning point for the candy, from adult mints to a children’s treat.
During their famous expedition in 1804 to explore the Louisiana Purchase and America’s Pacific Northwest, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their men brought an astonishing amount of food on the trip. The extensive provision list featured deer, elk, buffalo and nearly seven tonnes of dry food including flour, coffee, pork and lard. If there was plenty of wild game, each man would eat up to four kilograms (9lb) of meat a day.
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