Everyone has a favourite candy, dessert or food item. However, they
may not know everything about their favourite dish — like where it got
its name, how it was fi rst made, or how it has evolved ever since! So
today we bring to you the origin and unbelievable background stories
about some of your favourite foods, whether it is a pizza, a chocolate
bar or a salad. You’ll be amazed to read the story behind them all.
Marshmallows
Marshmallows are a favourite
treat for many people. They date back to as early as 2000BC and were
considered a delicacy deemed worthy only for the royalty. During those
times, Egyptians made individual marshmallows by hand, by extracting sap
from a mallow plant and mixing it with nuts and honey.
This
delicious sweet developed a new form when, in the 1800s, candy makers in
France took the sap from marshmallow plants and combined it with egg
whites and sugar. The mixture was whipped by hand and took the form of
the marshmallow we all know today.
Later, candy makers replaced
the sap taken from the marshmallow plant and egg whites with gelatine,
this enabled the marshmallow mixture to maintain its form and reduced
the labour intensive process of extracting the sap from the mallow
plant; thus, marshmallows maintained their beloved elastic and spongy
qualities much longer than they had previously.
But in 1948, Alex
Doumak took a huge step forward in technology by creating an extrusion
process in which marshmallow substance was pressed through tubes, cut
into equal pieces, cooled and then packaged. No longer were they made by
hand.
Lollipops have strange name origins
Since
ancient times, candies and sugary sweets have often been put on the ends
of sticks for easy eating. It became popular in the 17th century to
enjoy boiled sugar treats that were pressed onto sticks to eat. This
treat was soft candy rather than hard, but it was one of the forerunners
of the modern lollipop.
In the 20th century, the owner of
McAviney Candy Company often brought home for his children the leftover
sticks used to stir batches of candy. He began selling these sticks in
1908, which coincided with the invention of the first automated machine
that put sticks in hard candy.
In 1908, George Smith began
marketing the modern version of a lollipop through his confection
company, Bradley Smith Company. He coined the term “lollipop” in 1931,
after a famous racehorse of the time called Lolly Pop.
When
lollipops stopped being produced during the Great Depression, the name
fell into the public domain. The name also meant something like “tongue
slapper” because “lolly” was Old English slang for “tongue” and “pop”
meant “to slap.”
Whether the name originates from a horse or Old
English slang, or it was simply made-up, the world still loves to call
it lollipop!
Nachos
There actually was a person named
Nacho! In 1943, a man named Nacho was working at a club in Piedras
Negras, Mexico. The club was located close to the border of Eagle Pass,
Texas. One night, when it was time to close down the restaurant, a bunch
of soldiers and their wives turned up for dinner. Nacho didn’t want to
turn them away, so he let them sit, however, he couldn’t find the chef
and, as it was the closing time, there wasn’t enough food to serve all.
All
he could manage with whatever he had at his disposal was a dish he made
by cutting tortillas in pieces, sprinkling them with cheese and
jalapenos, and popping them in the oven. The dish earned a lot of fame
and was named ‘Nacho’.
Cotton candy was promoted by dentists
Cotton
candy was originally called fairy floss, and the first version of cotton
candy machine was patented by John C. Wharton and William J. Morrison
in 1899. Then they introduced the machine and their new candy concoction
at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. They sold nearly 70,000 boxes of
candy at that fair.
As cotton candy is made entirely from
caramelised sugar, most people don’t realise that such a sweet overload
will probably send you to a dentist sooner rather than later.
Interestingly,
Morrison was a dentist. To be fair, he was also a lawyer, an author and
a civic leader. But still, a dentist creating cotton candy has to raise
some eyebrows!
In 1900, cotton candy was introduced to the
Ringling Brothers by Thomas Patton, who had invented a more modern
version of the cotton candy machine. Even later, Josef Lascaux, another
dentist, created another version of the machine that he never officially
patented. He did, however, coin the name “cotton candy.”
Margherita Pizza
In 1889, the Queen Margherita
of Savoy and her husband, King Umberto I, were traveling in Naples. A
chef named Raffaele Esposito made three special pizzas for the royal
couple at his restaurant. The Queen loved the pizza made with tomato,
basil and mozzarella over others, which also mimicked the colours of the
Italian flag. The chef then named the pizza after the queen, and the
recipe is still followed.
Chew on!
People have been chewing gum in various forms since
ancient times. There’s evidence that some northern Europeans were
chewing birch bark tar 9,000 years ago, possibly for enjoyment as well
as such medicinal purposes as relieving toothaches. The ancient Maya
chewed a substance called chicle, derived from the sapodilla tree, as a
way to quench thirst or fight hunger.
In North America, the
Indians chewed spruce tree resin, a practice that continued with the
European settlers who followed. In the late 1840s, John Curtis developed
the first commercial spruce tree gum by boiling resin then cutting it
into strips that were coated in cornstarch to prevent them from sticking
together. By the early 1850s, Curtis had constructed the world’s first
chewing gum factory, in Portland, Maine. However, it didn’t taste great
and became brittle when chewed. Curtis and others who’d jumped into the
gum business after him subsequently switched to ingredients such as
paraffin wax.
Later, in the 20th century, chewing gum made William
Wrigley Jr. one of the wealthiest men in America. Wrigley started out
as a soap salesman and after moving to Chicago in 1891, he began
offering store owners incentives to stock his products, such as free
cans of baking powder with every order. When the baking powder proved a
bigger hit than the soap, Wrigley sold that instead, and added in free
packs of chewing gum as a promotion. In 1893, he launched two new gum
brands, Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint which are still famous
around the world.
Fettucini Alfredo
The Italian favourite has
been around for centuries, but it supposedly took on its current form
around 1914 when Alfredo di Lelio upped the amount of butter in the
recipe in an attempt to find something his wife would enjoy eating.
Di
Lelio realised that his buttery cheese sauce was extraordinarily tasty,
so he started serving it to tourists at his Rome restaurant and named
the dish after himself.
Caesar salad
Most people confuse this dish to have been named after the famous king Julius Caesar, however, that does not stand true.
The
most reliable origin of the dish can be traced to an Italian, Caesar
Cardini Caesa, who lived in San Diego but operated a restaurant in
Tijuana, Mexico. He is said to have created the dish during a Fourth of
July rush in 1924 that led to low stock in the Tijuana restaurant. He
found some basic ingredients in his kitchen, like olive oil, parmesan
cheese, lettuce, egg, etc. He assembled all in a bowl and tossed them to
make a delicious salad. The dish has earned fame since then.
Snickers
The ‘Snickers’ bar has an
interesting story behind its name; although the Snickers bar was not the
first peanut, caramel and nougat candy bar, it was one of the most
popular and most enduring of its time.
Frank and Ethel Mars,
founders of Mars, Inc., had great success with the ‘Milky Way’ bar
before it and were open to developing new candies. Thus after three
years of development, the ‘Snickers’ bar was released in 1930.
Just
months before the release of their new candy bar, Ethel’s favourite
horse, Snickers, died. This was a hard loss for her as she adored her
horse. So she and her husband named the new candy bar “Snickers” in
their horse’s honour.
Interestingly, the farm where Snickers had lived was called the Milky Way Farm, another chocolate bar by the same makers.
Food facts
• In the 1800s, the sap of mallow
plants were not only used to make marshmallows, but doctors also used
this sap to soothe colds and sore throats.
• The world’s largest lollipop maker, Tootsie Roll, turns out 16 million lollipops per day.
•
Lollipops can be used to carry medicines. Flavoured lollipops
containing medicine are marketed for children, and are also used in the
military due to the fast-acting ingredients.
• In 1998, in one of
the wildest marketing stunts, Pizza Hut had the idea to burn their logo
into the surface of the moon with high-powered lasers. Luckily, common
sense prevailed. Upon consulting experts, they learned that the
necessary technology was still some years off. Moreover, for earthlings
to be able to see the logo with the naked eye, it would have had to be
the size of Texas. In the ensuing years, Pizza Hut has made several
deals with the cash-strapped Russian space programme, including
emblazoning their logo on a rocket and delivering a pizza to the
International Space Station.
• In 1958, the song “Lollipop” by female vocal quartet
The Chordettes reached #2 and #3 on the Billboard pop and R&B charts, respectively.
The song was a worldwide hit and has been prominently used in several movies and TV shows.
•
The world’s largest lollipop was made by See’s Candies in 2012. It was
7003 pounds, over four feet in length and five feet in height, and had a
12 foot stick.
• The name Kit Kat originated from London in the
late 17th century, when a literary club met at a pie shop owned by
pastry chef Christoppher Catling. The group was called the Kit Kat club
and took its name from an abbreviated version of the owner’s name.
Published in Dawn, Young World, March 12th, 2015
