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Food & Drink

299 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 3 of 5.

121. Bulgaria and Serbia both claim rakia, and each points to medieval evidenceRakia is the Balkans' fruit brandy, usually bottled at 40 per cent alcohol, though homemade batches can reach 80. Who invented it is a matter of national pride. Bulgaria cites an …
122. Canola is a Canadian invention whose name simply means Canada oilRapeseed oil once lit European homes, railway carriages and lighthouses. As food it had problems: a green tinge, a strong taste and plenty of erucic acid. Plant breeders in Manito…
123. Medieval monks gave up meat for centuries but almost never gave up fishThe word pescetarian was only coined in late-1980s Britain, blending Italian pesce with vegetarian. The habit is far older. Benedictine monks banned four-legged meat yet ate fish …
124. Pierogi takes its name from an ancient Slavic word meaning feastA pierogi is simply unleavened dough folded round a filling and boiled, but the name carries a long history. It descends from Proto-Slavic pir, feast, shares roots with the Russia…
125. Russian refugees carried pirozhki as far as Japan, Argentina and IranPirozhki are small boat-shaped buns of yeast dough, baked or fried around a filling. The name means little pies. Revolution and emigration scattered them across the world, so toda…
126. Molasses is what is left once sugar refiners have taken the sugarBoil sugarcane juice once and you get sweet cane syrup; boil it twice and a slightly bitter second molasses; a third time yields thick, dark blackstrap, stripped of most of its su…
127. Legend says mooncakes once smuggled the signal for a revoltA folk tale credits Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming dynasty, with hiding the date of an uprising against the Mongol-led Yuan inside mooncakes. In one version the message was sp…
128. Nigel Slater reverse-engineered his stepmother's lemon meringue pie from her binAs a boy, Slater fought his stepmother for his father's affection using food. She would not share her recipe for his father's favourite pie, so he counted the eggshells she threw …
129. A dinner host crying over crème caramel inspired Nigella Lawson's first cookbookLawson got the idea for How to Eat after watching a dinner-party host weep because a crème caramel refused to set. The 1998 book, full of shortcuts rather than stern instructions,…
130. One diner vomited, and norovirus spread table by table across the restaurantIn December 1998 a single guest was sick on a restaurant floor; staff cleaned up and dinner went on. Days later 52 of the 126 diners fell ill. Researchers mapped the seating and f…
131. Scottish universities once gave students a holiday to fetch more oatsOats cope with cold, damp weather far better than wheat, so they became Scotland's staple grain. The country's ancient universities even kept Meal Monday, a break for students to …
132. In pancreatitis, the body's own digestive enzymes turn against the pancreasThe pancreas makes enzymes strong enough to break down a meal. When it becomes inflamed, those same chemicals can damage the organ and even the lungs. Roughly 80 percent of cases …
133. The miner's thick pasty crust as a handle for dirty hands is doubtfulA popular story says Cornish tin miners held their pasties by the thick crimped edge and threw it away, keeping arsenic-stained fingers off their food. Old photographs tell a diff…
134. The man who invented the digestive biscuit also bankrolled Scotland's national libraryMcVitie's grew from a Dumfries baker's Edinburgh provision shop into Britain's top-selling biscuit maker. Its first big hit, the digestive, came from a young employee named Alexan…
135. Three in four Japanese people drink miso soup at least dailyMost of the miso Japan makes each year, more than 80 percent, ends up dissolved in soup, and about three quarters of the population has a bowl at least once a day. The recipe is s…
136. Korean food was shaped by invaders, rice taxes and cheap army SpamRice is not native to Korea, and for centuries it was so costly that cooks stretched it with barley or beans. Yet in the kingdom of Silla it paid taxes, and the Sino-Korean charac…
137. Mac and cheese began as a posh English dish, not American diner foodLong before the blue box, macaroni baked with cheese was refined fare in English cookbooks, traceable to medieval pasta and cheese casseroles. It crossed to North America with Bri…
138. The same browning chemistry flavours your toast and reddens ancient bog bodiesBrowned crusts, seared steak, roasted coffee and golden fries all owe their colour and much of their flavour to a single reaction between amino acids and certain sugars. French ch…
139. Marmite began as brewery leftovers and ended up curing anaemia in BombayThe dark, salty spread Britons either adore or loathe is made from spent yeast skimmed off beer brewing. In the 1930s a haematologist used it to treat anaemia among Bombay mill wo…
140. Nobody agrees where marzipan came from, or even what its name meansOne theory traces the word marzipan to a Venetian coin showing an enthroned Christ. The coins were kept in ornate boxes, and once they stopped circulating the boxes held luxury sw…
141. A tornado and a handshake deal with nuns built the Mayo ClinicIn August 1883 a tornado flattened a third of Rochester, Minnesota. The local doctor who organised care for the injured, William Worrall Mayo, borrowed nurses from a teaching orde…
142. The Jack Russell began with a milkman's terrier bought by an Oxford studentIn 1819, in his final year at Oxford, a hunting-mad student named John Russell bought a small white-and-tan terrier called Trump from a local milkman. She became the model for a f…
143. Japan's navy spent decades calling its aircraft carriers destroyersJapan's post-war constitution renounces war, yet the country runs a navy of 160 ships and 50,800 personnel. It has managed the tension partly through careful labels: flat-decked s…
144. Japan's grandest dinner is named after a warm stone against the stomachThe characters for kaiseki, Japan's elaborate multi-course meal, literally mean breast-pocket stone. The name recalls Zen monks who tucked warm stones into their robes to quiet hu…
145. Gold in the Indus Valley city of Harappa came from Karnataka's minesLong before Bengaluru became India's Silicon Valley, the land now called Karnataka was exporting gold: metal found at Harappa has been traced to its mines, hinting at contact with…
146. Roman ships once sailed to Kerala loaded with gold to buy pepperSumerian records suggest Kerala was shipping spices around 3000 BCE, and by the last centuries BCE Roman vessels were arriving at the port of Muziris laden with gold to swap for b…
147. For most of its history, kimchi contained no chilli at allKimchi's fiery red colour is a relatively recent addition. Chillies are a New World crop that Portuguese traders brought to East Asia, and Korea's first written mention of them da…
148. Cheese-filled knafeh is much younger than its thousand-year legend suggestsA popular tale says knafeh was invented to fill the stomachs of fasting caliphs during Ramadan, a story written down as early as the 10th century. Yet the melting-cheese version n…
149. Hugh Grant meant to act for a year, then study art historyHugh Grant only agreed to act so he could save money for postgraduate study in art history. At 32 he was ready to walk away, until the script of Four Weddings and a Funeral made h…
150. The Indian subcontinent was once a separate landmass that crashed into AsiaThe land south of the Himalayas began as a fragment of Gondwana that drifted north and slammed into Eurasia, closing an entire ocean and pushing up the world's greatest mountains.…
151. One marriage in 1272 founded a dynasty that still reigns in SpainWhen Robert, youngest son of Saint Louis IX, married the heiress of Bourbon in 1272, his line spent three centuries as minor royals. Then the Valois kings died out, a Protestant f…
152. French fries may be French after all, whatever Belgium insistsBelgium and France still argue over who invented fries, and the oldest written fried potato is neither: a Spanish soldier held captive by Mapuche warriors in Chile ate them in 162…
153. Southern fried chicken has Scottish and West African grandparentsBefore chickens were bred for fast growth, only young spring birds could take the heat of a frying pan, so fried chicken was a seasonal luxury. Its American form blends a Scottish…
154. Scorsese wanted Goodfellas to feel like a two-and-a-half-hour trailerWhen Martin Scorsese cold-called Nicholas Pileggi to say he had waited his whole life for the reporter's mob book, Pileggi answered that he had waited his whole life for that call…
155. Bourbon carries 37 times the congeners of vodka, and hangovers noticeNobody fully understands why a night of drinking produces the next morning's misery. Symptoms peak as blood alcohol falls back to almost zero, and suspects range from a toxic brea…
156. People were baking flatbread thousands of years before anyone farmed wheatIn Jordan's Black Desert, archaeologists found charred crumbs of flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers between 14,600 and 11,600 years ago, from wild grains and tubers. Bread went o…
157. The pizza Margherita probably wasn't invented for a queen at allThe famous tale says a Naples baker created the Margherita in 1889 to honour Queen Margherita with tomato, mozzarella and basil in the colours of the flag. Yet a writer described …
158. Hors d'oeuvre literally means a dish that sits outside the workIn seventeenth-century France, dinner arrived all at once in rigid symmetry, and the little extra plates set beyond that formal arrangement earned the name hors d'oeuvre. Romans n…
159. A Maine teenager's visions helped found a church and a vegetarian traditionEllen G. White said she experienced her first vision at a small prayer meeting in Portland, Maine, in December 1844. She went on to co-found the Seventh-day Adventist Church, wrot…
160. A common stomach bug may lower the risk of one oesophageal cancerOesophageal cancer comes in two main forms with almost opposite profiles. One tracks tobacco, alcohol and scalding drinks and dominates in poorer countries; the other follows acid…
161. The first espresso machines made coffee that tasted burnt and had no cremaMilan's first commercial espresso machines, sold from 1905, could turn out 1,000 cups an hour, but their steam pushed at only about 1.5 bars and scorched the coffee. Crema, the ta…
162. Falafel's name probably means peppercorns, and its chickpeas go in rawFalafel most likely began in Egypt, where it is still usually made from fava beans and called taamiya, a small tasty morsel. The Arabic word itself traces back to pepper. The chic…
163. Fenugreek's maple syrup smell comes from one molecule, and the Romans called it Greek hayA single compound, sotolon, gives fenugreek its odd dual scent: curry when concentrated, maple syrup or caramel when faint, which is why it flavours imitation maple syrup. People …
164. Britain's national dish owes its fried fish to Sephardic Jewish refugeesThe fried fish in Britain's favourite takeaway came with Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had lived in the Netherlands, frying in oil so Friday's fish could be eaten cold on the Sa…
165. The digestive biscuit was invented by doctors who thought it settled stomachsTwo Scottish doctors created the digestive in 1839 on the theory that its baking soda worked as an antacid, and chemists once sold it beside indigestion powder. Today McVitie's sh…
166. The dosa is at least a thousand years old and still argued overThe dosa, a fermented pancake of rice and black gram, turns up in Tamil writing of the eighth century and in a 12th-century Sanskrit encyclopedia from a Karnataka king. Tamil Nadu…
167. Cheesecake is reputed to have fed athletes at the first OlympicsCakes made with cheese were reportedly served at the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, and ancient Greek writers produced whole treatises, now lost, on the art of making them. The de…
168. The Marquis de Sade offers an early hint that people ate chocolate in barsFor centuries Europeans mostly drank chocolate. The bar crept in slowly, and one of its earliest clues comes from a 1779 prison letter in which the Marquis de Sade demanded biscui…
169. Why coriander tastes like lime to some people and soap to othersMost people find coriander leaves fresh and citrusy, but a sizeable minority taste soap. Twin studies and a genetic survey of nearly 30,000 people point to variants including OR6A…
170. Dark chocolate's gourmet status was built by French tastemakers, not ancient traditionDark chocolate's image as the connoisseur's choice is surprisingly recent. In the late 1970s French chocolatiers led by Robert Linxe turned their country's palate against milk cho…
171. Brunch was invented in 1895 as a mercy for Saturday-night revellersA British writer named Guy Beringer coined brunch in an 1895 magazine essay, pitching a relaxed noon meal to replace the heavy post-church Sunday dinner and spare anyone who had b…
172. Oscans, Etruscans, Greeks and Romans all fought over Campania's fertile plainNaples began as a small Greek trading port named after a Siren, Parthenope. The region around it, Campania, drew Etruscan colonists, Samnite raiders and Roman legions because its …
173. America's biggest private company started as an Iowa grain shed in 1865Cargill trades grain, raises livestock, makes starch and syrups, and supplies about 22 percent of the US domestic meat market, yet it keeps a low profile. Founded in Iowa in 1865 …
174. Our early ancestors may have scavenged before they huntedDead animals feed a vast crew of vultures, hyenas, beetles, octopuses and even tadpoles, recycling nitrogen and carbon back into ecosystems. Early humans probably joined in: stone…
175. The voice of Shaggy also counted down America's hits for decadesCasey Kasem, a Detroit grocer's son named after Atatürk, launched American Top 40 on July 4, 1970, when Top 40 radio looked finished. A year earlier he had started voicing Shaggy …
176. Before boxed gelatin, a proper aspic began with boiling calf's feet for hoursMeat jelly sounds like a relic of 1950s dinner parties, but a 9th-century poet compared a jellied carp to rubies on a silver plate. From Song dynasty Kaifeng to Russian New Year t…
177. Austin was briefly called Waterloo, and Sam Houston tried to steal its archivesTexas's capital was chosen partly because a vice president liked the scenery on a buffalo hunt. Within two years its arch-rival Sam Houston was trying to move the government out, …
178. The world's bestselling spirit outsells whisky, vodka, gin, rum and tequila togetherMost Western drinkers have never tasted it, yet baijiu sold 10.8 billion litres in 2018, beating the combined totals of the big Western spirits. This clear Chinese grain spirit us…
179. Greek baklava traditionally has 33 layers of filo, one for each year of Jesus's lifeNobody can say for certain who invented baklava. Candidates range from an Ancient Greek honey cake to Byzantine koptoplakous, a medieval Arabic almond confection and Central Asian…
180. A Korean king ate from 12 side dishes, and kimchi didn't count toward the totalThe little bowls crowding a Korean table are a map of history. Banchan grew out of a Buddhist-era ban on meat that lasted roughly six centuries, and the number of dishes once sign…

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