Every food and drink on Caltype with where and when it started, who made it first if anyone knows, and which famous stories are only legends.
Acai palms grow in the Amazon, and in the Brazilian state of Pará people have long eaten the purple pulp as an everyday food, often with fish. The sweet frozen bowl with banana took off on Brazil's beaches and in its gyms, and the story goes that Rio's Gracie jiu jitsu family helped make it popular. Around 2000 companies such as Sambazon started shipping the pulp to Hawaii and California.
Weak beer is centuries old, but alcohol free beer as we know it took off in the United States. Under Prohibition drinks had to stay below 0.5% alcohol, so brewers made near beer to survive. Anheuser Busch had already launched Bevo in 1916 and sold over 2.2 million cases in six months. Once real beer was easy to find again, near beer collapsed.
Almond milk is centuries old. An 8th century Islamic medical text lists it as a cough remedy, and it reached medieval Europe with almonds from the Muslim world. Christians took to it because it got around the ban on animal products on fast days like Lent. In the first known German cookbook, from around 1350, almost a quarter of the recipes call for it.
Source: Discover Magazine, People Went Crazy for Almond Milk in the Middle Ages
Wild almonds are bitter and contain a compound that turns into cyanide, so a handful can be dangerous. Almonds could only be farmed after a single genetic mutation switched that bitterness off, as a 2019 study in the journal Science showed. Cultivated almonds turn up in archaeology from about 3000 BC, and they are thought to be among the first trees people ever domesticated.
Source: NPR via KPBS, How Almonds Went From Deadly To Delicious
The story goes that American soldiers in Italy during the Second World War watered down espresso to taste like the drip coffee from home. It is a nice tale, but the Oxford English Dictionary traces café americano to Central American Spanish of the 1950s, a teasing name for weak coffee, first printed in English in a Jamaican paper in 1964. Italians took up the word later.
Source: Wikipedia, Caffè americano (citing the Oxford English Dictionary)
Aperol was created in 1919 by the Barbieri family in Padua, Italy, and its name comes from apero, French slang for an aperitif. Spritz comes from the German word for a splash. Late in the 20th century, beach bars on the Venetian coast started putting Aperol in their spritzes, served over ice in a big wine glass, and the drink spread across the region and then all of Italy.
Source: The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, Aperol
The apple comes from the wild fruit forests of the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan, where its ancestor Malus sieversii still grows. Traders on the Silk Road carried the fruit east and west, and along the way it crossed with wild crab apples. That mix is why a modern apple is mostly Kazakh with a good dose of European crab apple in it.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, How the Silk Road Created the Modern Apple
Apple juice starts with the apple, and the apple comes from the Tian Shan mountains in what is now southeastern Kazakhstan, where its wild ancestor Malus sieversii still grows. Traders along the Silk Roads carried it west. Almaty, the city at the foot of those mountains, used to be called Alma-Ata, often translated as father of the apples.
Apple pie was English long before it was American. The oldest known recipe is in The Forme of Cury, written around 1390 by the cooks of King Richard II. It mixes apples with figs, raisins, pears and saffron and bakes them in a pastry case called a coffin. Settlers later took apple pie to North America, where it became a national symbol.
Source: Tasting History with Max Miller, Medieval Apple Pie (The Forme of Cury, c. 1390)
Strudel's thin pastry probably reached Vienna by way of Hungary during the Turkish wars. The oldest known strudel recipe is from 1696, in a handwritten cookbook kept at the Vienna City Library, and the surprise is that it is not apple at all but milk cream and turnip strudel. Apple strudel became the famous one later.
The avocado comes from Mexico and Central America, where people were eating it around 10,000 years ago and began growing it about 5,000 years ago, possibly first in the Tehuacán Valley in Puebla. The name comes from the Aztec word āhuacatl, which Spanish turned into aguacate. Guacamole comes from ahuacamolli, avocado sauce.
Source: University of Southern California, Plants and People: Avocado
Avocado on bread is older than cafe culture. A report from Brisbane in 1891 says the governor of Queensland ate avocado spread on bread with pepper and salt, and a California newspaper printed a recipe for mashed avocado on hot toast in 1920. The modern cafe dish is usually credited to cook Bill Granger, who put it on the menu at his Sydney cafe in 1993.
Babi guling grew out of Balinese Hindu ritual. A whole spit roasted pig is part of the offerings at temple ceremonies and festivals such as Galungan, and once it has been offered it is shared and eaten as a blessing. Guling means turning, after the way the pig is rotated over the fire. The dish stayed in Bali because, unlike most of Indonesia, the island is mainly Hindu.
Salting and smoking pork is an old way to make meat last, so bacon has no single inventor. The word came into English in the early 14th century from Old French bacon, which goes back to an old Germanic word for back meat, because it was cut from the pig's back and sides. The phrase bring home the bacon is recorded from 1906, probably first in boxing slang.
The first written mention of the bagel is from Kraków, Poland, in 1610, in rules from the Jewish community limiting how lavish a celebration for a newborn boy could be. Boiling the dough before baking set it apart from other bread. The name probably comes from the Yiddish beigen, to bend. A popular story about a Vienna baker in 1683 came later than that first record.
Read the full story · Source: Aish, Bagels: A Surprising Jewish History
Nobody knows who invented the baguette. Long loaves were sold in France well before it, and in 1839 the Austrian baker August Zang brought steam ovens to Paris, which help give the crisp crust. The word baguette, little stick, was only used for this bread from 1920. The tale that Napoleon wanted loaves that fit in soldiers' pockets is a legend with no evidence behind it.
Source: History Hit, French Baguette: How a Humble Stick of Bread Became a Cultural Icon
Baileys was invented in London, not Ireland. In 1973 drinks consultants David Gluckman and Hugh Seymour-Davies mixed Jameson whiskey, cream and Cadbury drinking chocolate for a brief from Gilbeys of Ireland, and it went on sale in 1974 as the first Irish cream. The name came from Baileys Bistro, a restaurant below their office in Soho.
Source: VinePair, The Surprising History of Baileys Irish Cream
Beans baked slowly in a pot go back to Native American cooking, and molasses baked beans gave Boston the nickname Beantown. The tinned kind reached Britain in 1886, when Henry J. Heinz brought samples to Fortnum & Mason in London and the store bought them, selling them as a luxury. Over time Heinz made the sauce less sweet for British tastes.
Bakso was brought to Indonesia by Chinese cooks. The name probably comes from the Hokkien bak so, roughly minced meat, and the first versions were made with pork. As it spread to Indonesia's mostly Muslim population it became a beef, chicken or fish dish, and some food historians think the Dutch colonial kitchen shaped the meatball too.
Source: SBS Indonesian, Discovering Chinese Indonesian heritage through food
People first grew bananas in New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago, crossing several wild species that were full of hard seeds. From there the plant spread through Southeast Asia to India and Africa, and much later to the Americas. Genetic studies show today's bananas also carry traces of wild ancestors nobody has found yet.
Banana bread is an American idea from the early 1930s. During the Great Depression nobody wanted to throw away a brown banana, and baking powder and baking soda had just become cheap and easy to buy everywhere. Recipes with mashed banana soon filled cookbooks from Pillsbury, Better Homes and Gardens and the United Fruit Company, a big banana importer.
The French brought the baguette to Vietnam in colonial times, and banh mi simply means wheat bread. The sandwich as we know it took shape in Saigon after 1954. The story goes that the small Banh Mi Hoa Ma made a shorter, cheaper loaf and, to serve the queues faster, put the cold cuts and vegetables inside the bread instead of on a plate. Vietnamese emigrants carried it around the world after the war.
These folded buns are gua bao, a snack that came to Taiwan from Fujian in China, where the original had just braised pork belly and lettuce. Taiwan added the pickled greens, peanut powder and coriander. They are also called tiger bites pig, because the bun looks like a mouth closing on the pork. David Chang put them on the menu at Momofuku in New York around 2004 and started the craze in the West.
Drying strips of meat in sun and wind is older than any written record, but the name comes from the Andes. The Quechua word ch'arki meant dried meat, often llama, the Spanish made it charqui, and American English turned that into jerky around 1850. Beef became the usual meat for it in the United States.
Rendang comes from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, who call it randang, from marandang, to cook coconut milk slowly until dry. Nobody knows exactly when it began, as old written records are scarce. One theory says travelling Minangkabau traders needed food that kept for weeks, and spices from Indian and Arab settlers shaped the flavour. A CNN poll in 2011 named it the world's most delicious food.
People were brewing long before they baked bread in ovens. In Raqefet Cave in Israel, a team led by Stanford archaeologist Li Liu found traces of a beer made from wheat or barley about 13,000 years ago, probably for feasts honouring the dead. Some archaeologists think the traces could come from bread making instead, so the debate is still open.
Read the full story · Source: Stanford University News, An ancient thirst for beer may have inspired agriculture
Bibimbap means mixed rice in Korean, and nobody knows exactly where it began. One theory says households mixed up leftovers at the lunar new year, another that it came from food offered at ancestral rites, a third that farmers ate it at harvest. The first known recipe, as bubimbap, is in Siuijeonseo, a cookbook from the late 1800s. The city of Jeonju claims to be its home.
The Big Mac was created by Jim Delligatti, who ran McDonald's restaurants around Pittsburgh, and first sold at his branch in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on 22 April 1967. It flopped under the names Aristocrat and Blue Ribbon Burger first. McDonald's credits the name Big Mac to Esther Glickstein Rose, a 21 year old advertising secretary, though Delligatti's family disputes it.
Biryani is of Persian origin, and its name is traced to the Persian birinj biriyan, fried rice, because the rice is fried in ghee before it is layered with meat and spices. In India it was first recorded in the Deccan, in the south, which suggests merchants brought it by sea. Since then nearly every region has made its own, and it travelled on to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Oman.
Black beans are a variety of the common bean, a plant from the Americas. Genetic studies show it was domesticated twice, once in Mexico, probably in the Oaxaca valley, and once separately in the Andes. Farmers there grew beans for thousands of years beside maize and squash, and Europeans only got to know them after Columbus.
Blueberries are native to North America and were picked wild for thousands of years. Farming them began in New Jersey: USDA botanist Frederick Coville bred them with cranberry grower Elizabeth White, who had local pickers tag the best wild bushes for her. In 1916, at Whitesbog, they brought the first cultivated blueberries to market, so as a crop the fruit is only about a century old.
Source: New Jersey Agricultural Society, The beginning of blueberry farming: the story of Whitesbog
The name comes from borshch, the old Slavic word for hogweed, the wild plant the first versions of the soup were made from. Over the centuries other vegetables took its place, and in Ukraine beetroot became the heart of it, which is where the deep red comes from. In 2022 UNESCO put the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking on its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
Source: Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, A Brief History of Borshch
Bounty was first made by Mars in Slough, England, in 1951, and went on sale in the UK and Canada. Forrest Mars Sr based it on the American Mounds bar, a coconut bar from 1936 that was not sold in Britain. Mars later tried Bounty in the United States, in 1989, but it never caught on there.
The oldest bread found so far is a flatbread baked about 14,400 years ago at Shubayqa 1, in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan. Hunter-gatherers ground, sieved and kneaded wild barley, einkorn and oat, some 4,000 years before anyone farmed grain. The researchers think the work of making bread may have pushed people to start growing cereals.
Brie is named after the Brie region east of Paris, where farm made Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun are still the most prized versions. The story goes that Charlemagne tasted it at an abbey around 774, and that diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 crowned it king of cheeses. Both tales are told often, but neither is easy to prove.
Broccoli comes from the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor and has been grown in Italy since Roman times. Its name is Italian: broccoli is the plural of broccolo, a cabbage sprout, from brocco, a shoot. It reached England and America in the 1700s, but it only became common in the US after Italian immigrants, the D'Arrigo brothers, started growing it in California in the 1920s.
The story goes that the brownie was made at Chicago's Palmer House hotel in 1893, when Bertha Palmer asked for a small cake that would fit in lunch boxes at the World's Fair. Historians have found no record from that year, though. Fannie Farmer's 1896 brownies were molasses cakes with no chocolate at all, and chocolate brownie recipes only start appearing in American cookbooks around 1899 to 1904.
Source: Wikipedia, Chocolate brownie (citing The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America)
Halušky go back to the shepherds of the Slovak mountains, who needed a filling meal they could cook over a fire. The tangy sheep's cheese, bryndza, came with Wallachian herders who settled in the Carpathians between the 14th and 17th centuries. In 1787 Ján Vagač opened a bryndza creamery in Detva and packed the cheese in barrels, so it could travel as far as Vienna and Budapest.
Bubble tea comes from Taiwan in the 1980s, and two tea houses still argue over who was first. Chun Shui Tang in Taichung says a staff member dropped sweet tapioca balls into iced milk tea in 1988. Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan says its founder had the idea in 1986, after spotting white tapioca pearls at a market, which is why it is also called pearl milk tea.
Read the full story · Source: Taipei Times, The story of bubble tea (2018)
Burek comes from the Turkish börek, a family of filled and layered pastries that Turkic peoples brought west from Central Asia. It became a delicacy in the Ottoman imperial kitchens, and five centuries of Ottoman rule spread it across the Balkans, where every country now has its own. The name probably goes back to an old Turkic word, though linguists still argue about it.
Nobody knows who made the first burger. The name points to the German port of Hamburg, and Britannica says the patty and the sandwich were probably brought to the United States by 19th century German immigrants. Several Americans claim the bun, from fair stands in Wisconsin and New York in 1885 to Louis Lassen, said to have served a beef sandwich in New Haven in 1900.
Read the full story · Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hamburger
The burrito most likely comes from Sonora in northern Mexico, wheat and cattle country where flour tortillas and beef were the norm. Burrito means little donkey, and the word was already in Mexican Spanish dictionaries by 1895. One theory says it looked like the bedrolls travellers tied to a donkey, another that vendors sold them from baskets on donkeys. Mexican immigrants brought it to Los Angeles in the 1930s.
Butter is one of the oldest dairy foods there is. It already appears in the very first written records of Mesopotamia, from the late fourth millennium BC, more than 5,000 years ago, where it was eaten in sweets with dates and also rubbed on as an ointment. The English word goes back to the Greek boutyron, which seems to mean cow cheese, though that may be a folk reading of a Scythian word.
Source: LMU Munich, Mesopotamian Oils project, Butter and Ghee
It is named after a restaurant owner, not a Roman emperor. Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini ran a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, where Americans came to drink during Prohibition. The story goes that on a busy holiday in 1924 he ran low on supplies and tossed romaine, parmesan, lemon, bread cubes, egg and Worcestershire sauce at the table. His brother and one of his chefs have also been credited.
People around the Mediterranean have eaten squid since ancient times. The name is Italian, the plural of calamaro, and goes back to the Medieval Latin calamarium, an ink pot or pen case, from calamus, a reed pen. That fits the squid, with its ink and its long, tapered body. In English the word was first used for squid as food in 1826.
The name comes from the Capuchin friars, an order founded in 1529 whose brown habits had a long pointed hood, a cappuccio. In 18th century Vienna, coffee with whipped cream was called a Kapuziner because its colour matched those robes. When espresso machines spread through Italy in the early 1900s, the drink became espresso with milk and kept the friars' name in Italian.
Read the full story · Source: USC Scribe, The history of cappuccino
The carrot we eat was domesticated from the wild carrot in Central Asia around the year 1000, and the early ones were purple or yellow. By the 1200s carrots were grown in China and northwestern Europe. Orange carrots came later, bred in Western Europe, with Dutch growers playing a big part. The story that they did it to honour William of Orange is popular, but there is no proof of it.
Carrots sweetened puddings long before sugar was cheap, and an early carrot pudding is known from 10th century Baghdad. The carrot cake we know took shape in the late 1930s. In wartime Britain, with sugar and fat rationed, the Ministry of Food pushed carrots, and its War Cookery Leaflet No. 4 of July 1943 printed a carrot cake recipe.
The cashew tree is native to northeastern Brazil. In the late 16th century Portuguese missionaries took it to East Africa and India, where it spread along the coasts at low altitudes. That is how a nut from South America ended up so much a part of Indian and East African cooking.
Cauliflower was bred from the same wild plant as cabbage, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. Arab botanists of the 12th and 13th centuries said it came from Cyprus, and Western Europe bought cauliflower seed from the island until well into the 1500s. It reached Italy around 1490, and the name comes from the Italian cavolfiore, cabbage flower.
The name comes from the Ottoman Turkish kebap, which reached the Balkans with the Ottoman Empire. The word ćevapi turns up in documents from the 1850s, and grill masters from Leskovac in southern Serbia made them famous in Belgrade from the 1860s. The Sarajevo and Banja Luka styles took shape later, in 1950s and 1960s Yugoslavia, and who really invented them is still argued over.
Ceviche comes from the coast of Peru, where fishing peoples such as the Chincha ate raw fish. The Spanish brought limes and lemons, and fish marinated in citrus became the dish we know. The name may come from the Arabic sakbāj, meat cooked in vinegar, the root of escabeche, or from a Quechua word. In 2023 UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list.
Chai is simply the word for tea in Hindi, from the Chinese cha. Most Indians drank little black tea until the Indian Tea Association promoted it in the early 1900s, and street chaiwalas stretched it with milk, sugar and spices like ginger and cardamom. The chai latte is the American café version: Starbucks added one in 1998, made from a sweet concentrate.
Champagne is named after the region in northeast France where it is made. Legend says the monk Dom Pérignon invented the bubbles, but historians doubt it: from 1668 at Hautvillers Abbey he became known for blending wines. Sparkling wine became a deliberate choice in the region between about 1670 and 1720, helped by cork stoppers, which reached Champagne in 1685.
Read the full story · Source: Comité Champagne, Champagne and its history
Nobody knows who made the first cheese, but the oldest hard evidence is about 7,000 years old. In the Kuyavia region of Poland, archaeologists found clay sieves full of tiny holes, and traces of milk fat in them showed they were used to strain curds. Cheese had a clear advantage back then: it holds far less lactose than milk, and most adults at the time could not digest it.
Source: University of Bristol, first cheese making in Northern Europe (study in Nature, 2012)
The oldest known recipe for cheese melted with wine, with bread dipped in it, is in a book printed in Zurich in 1699, under the name Käss mit Wein zu kochen. The name fondue comes from the French fondre, to melt. It became the Swiss national dish largely thanks to the Swiss Cheese Union, which promoted it from the 1930s to sell more cheese.
Source: Wikipedia, Fondue (cites the 1699 Zurich recipe and the Swiss Cheese Union)
The cheeseburger is usually credited to Lionel Sternberger, who at 16 worked the grill at his father's sandwich shop, The Rite Spot, in Pasadena, California. The story goes that in 1924 he dropped a slice of American cheese on a sizzling hamburger, and it went on the menu. Other diners in the United States make their own claims, so being first is hard to prove.
Cakes made with cheese go back to ancient Greece, and the story goes that athletes ate them at the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, though that is hard to prove. The Romans baked cheese, flour and egg together too, in a recipe written down by Cato the Elder. New York cheesecake needed cream cheese, which dairyman William Lawrence of Chester, New York, first made in 1872 while trying to copy French Neufchâtel.
Sweet cherries come from the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Balkans, and the best early ones grew in Pontus, on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. The story goes, as told by the Roman writer Pliny, that the general Lucullus brought cherry trees to Rome from there in the 70s BC. The word goes back to Greek kerasos, and English cherry lost its final s because cherise sounded like a plural.
Chia is native to Mexico and Guatemala, and its name comes from the Nahuatl word chian, meaning oily. The Aztecs grew it beside maize and beans, roasted and ground it into flour, and warriors and messengers carried the seeds on long journeys. After the Spanish conquest it was pushed aside for wheat and barley, and only came back as a crop in the 1990s.
Chickens descend from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. A 2022 study found the oldest bones of truly domestic chickens at Ban Non Wat in central Thailand, dated to about 1650 to 1250 BC, later than many had thought. The researchers think fields of rice and millet drew the wild birds close to people, and that is how they ended up living with us.
Source: PNAS, The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens (Peters et al., 2022)
The word comes from kari, used in south Indian languages such as Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam for spiced sauces and dishes. Portuguese traders probably turned it into caril, and English had curry by the 1590s. In India there was never one dish called curry, it is an outsider's word for many very different sauces.
Chicken McNuggets were created by René Arend, McDonald's first executive chef, who came from Luxembourg, and the recipe was ready in 1979. They were tested in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1980 and sold so fast that McDonald's ran short of chicken. Once the supply was sorted they went nationwide in 1983.
In 1963 Robert C. Baker, a poultry professor at Cornell University in New York State, worked out how to hold ground chicken together and keep the breading on through freezing and frying. He called it the chicken stick. Baker never patented it, so he earned nothing when McDonald's later came up with its own Chicken McNuggets.
The first known record of chicken soup as a remedy is Chinese, from around the 2nd century BC, where it was a warming yang food. In the 12th century the Jewish physician Maimonides recommended chicken broth for fevers and coughs, part of how it earned the nickname Jewish penicillin. Studies since have found it helps a blocked nose about as much as any hot drink.
Source: McGill University Office for Science and Society, Chicken soup
Every chicken thigh goes back to red junglefowl that started living off rice and millet fields in Southeast Asia about 3,500 years ago, with the earliest remains found at Ban Non Wat in central Thailand. A 2022 study suggests the first chickens were probably not eaten at all: some were buried with people, as if they were special. They reached Mediterranean Europe about 2,800 years ago.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, Researchers Pinpoint Date When Chickens Were First Domesticated
Most accounts place its birth in Britain, not India. Ali Ahmed Aslam of the Shish Mahal in Glasgow said he made it for a customer who found his chicken tikka too dry, but other chefs in Britain claim it too, and the famous tin of tomato soup in the tale was later called made up. In 2001 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook called it a true British national dish.
Read the full story · Source: Wikipedia, Chicken tikka masala
Buffalo wings were first served in 1964 at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, by Teressa Bellissimo, who ran it with her husband Frank. She cut the wings in two, fried them without batter, tossed them in hot sauce and served them with celery and blue cheese. The family tells it two ways, a wrong delivery of wings or a late night snack for her son's friends, and a local cook, John Young, said he was first.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, A Brief History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing
Chickpeas were domesticated roughly 10,000 years ago in what is now southeastern Turkey, the small area where their wild ancestor, Cicer reticulatum, still grows today. They were part of the first wave of farming in the Fertile Crescent, together with wheat, barley, lentils and peas, and spread from there east to India and west around the Mediterranean.
The first written account dates from 1826, when English naval officer George Francis Lyon ate dried meat in chili sauce in northern Mexico. In San Antonio, Texas, women known as the chili queens sold it cheaply, and a San Antonio Chili Stand at the 1893 Chicago world's fair introduced it to the rest of America. Texas made it the official state dish in 1977.
Belgium and France both claim chips. A Belgian story says villagers on the Meuse fried potato strips in the 1680s when the river froze and they could not catch fish. Historian Pierre Leclercq points out potatoes only reached that area around 1735, and thinks frying sliced potatoes may have started in Paris, where they were sold on the Pont Neuf by the late 1700s.
Read the full story · Source: The Brussels Times, Fry me a river: the sizzling debate on the origin of Belgian fries
People drank cacao for thousands of years before anyone ate a bar, but milk chocolate is a Swiss idea. In Vevey, chocolate maker Daniel Peter first tried mixing in the milk powder of his friend Henri Nestlé, but it went mouldy. He switched to Nestlé's condensed milk, and in 1875 he finally got it right, and the new chocolate became a hit across Europe.
Read the full story · Source: Swissinfo, Cocoa kings: the pioneers of Switzerland's chocolate revolution
For most of its history chocolate was a drink. In 1847 the Fry family firm in Bristol, England, combined cocoa butter with ground cocoa and sugar to make sweet chocolate you could eat, usually counted as the first chocolate bar. Milk chocolate came nearly 30 years later, when Daniel Peter in Switzerland worked out how to add milk in 1876.
The Irish doctor Hans Sloane is often called the inventor of chocolate milk. He went to Jamaica in 1687, found the local cocoa drink hard to stomach and took home a recipe mixed with milk, which was sold in London as medicine. But Jamaicans were already brewing cocoa with milk and cinnamon before he arrived, so historians say he learned it rather than invented it.
Source: Natural History Museum, London: Hans Sloane, physician, collector and botanist
Cured sausages were made on the Iberian Peninsula even before the Romans, but chorizo as we know it needed pimentón. Peppers reached Spain from the Americas in the 16th century, after Columbus, and once they were dried and ground into paprika they gave chorizo its red colour and its flavour.
Nobody is sure where churros began. A popular story says Spanish shepherds fried dough in the mountains and named it after the ridged horns of their Churra sheep, but that is a legend. Another theory says Portuguese sailors brought the idea back from the Chinese youtiao. Food historians mostly see churros as one of the piped fried doughs eaten around the Mediterranean for centuries.
Source: Food Republic, The Murky Origins Of Churros, From China To The Spanish Mountains
Cider in Britain is often linked to the Normans in 1066, but it is older than that. The Celts probably made it from crab apples, and under the Romans managed apple growing began, with imported varieties mixed with the wild ones. From the 13th century new apple varieties kept arriving from Normandy, first planted mostly in Devon, and they shaped English cider.
Sweden claims the cinnamon bun. The kanelbulle became popular there in the 1920s, after the First World War, once butter, sugar and spices were affordable again. Swedes put cardamom in the dough and pearl sugar on top instead of icing. Since 1999 Sweden even has a Cinnamon Bun Day on 4 October, started by the Home Baking Council for its 40th birthday.
Source: The Local Sweden, Swedish Cinnamon Bun Day: What's it all about?
Nobody knows for sure. The earliest known mention is from 1889, in a New York newspaper describing toasted bread with turkey or chicken and ham, and several early sources credit the chef of the Union Club in Manhattan. Another story places it at the Saratoga Club House in Saratoga Springs in 1894. By 1899 it was on restaurant menus across the US.
Coconut water comes from young coconuts, and the coconut palm was domesticated twice. A 2011 genetic study of 1,322 coconuts found one group from island Southeast Asia, around the Philippines and Indonesia, and another from southern India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Austronesian seafarers later carried Pacific coconuts all the way to Madagascar.
Source: Gunn, Baudouin and Olsen, PLOS One 2011, Independent Origins of Cultivated Coconut
Cod has fed Europe for over a thousand years. Cod bones from Haithabu, a Viking trading port on the Baltic, dated between 800 and 1066, turned out through their DNA to come from the Arctic waters off Lofoten in northern Norway. They were carried there as stockfish, cod dried in the cold air, which makes it one of Europe's earliest long distance trades.
Coca-Cola Zero was launched in the United States in 2005, a sugar free cola meant to taste like regular Coca-Cola. In 2016 and 2017 it got a new recipe and the name Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, to make the point plainer. When the change reached the US, some fans compared it to the New Coke flop of 1985.
Source: The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar launches in United States
The first glass of Coca-Cola was poured on 8 May 1886 at Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta, where pharmacist John Pemberton brought his new syrup. It cost five cents a glass and sold about nine glasses a day in its first year. His bookkeeper Frank Robinson picked the name, thinking the two Cs would look good in adverts, and wrote it in the flowing script still on the can.
Read the full story · Source: The Coca-Cola Company, The Birth of a Refreshing Idea
Kyoto in Japan has made slow drip cold coffee for centuries, and the story goes that Dutch traders brought the idea in the 1600s, though that is hard to prove. Today's cold brew goes back to Todd Simpson, a Cornell trained chemical engineer who tasted coffee concentrate on a trip to Latin America and patented his Toddy cold brew system in 1964.
The name is Dutch: koolsla means cabbage salad, from kool, cabbage, and sla, salad. Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, today New York, brought the dish with them, and the English word coleslaw is first recorded in 1794. Americans often misheard it as cold slaw, because it is served chilled.
Source: Merriam-Webster, coleslaw (etymology and first known use)
The chocolate chip cookie was born in the 1930s at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, where Ruth Wakefield chopped up a Nestlé chocolate bar for her dough. The pieces kept their shape instead of melting, and Nestlé printed her recipe on its packaging in exchange for chocolate for life. The word cookie comes from Dutch koekje, little cake.
Corn, or maize, was bred in southern Mexico around 10,000 years ago from Balsas-teosinte, a wild grass whose small hard ears look nothing like a cob. Native Americans spread it as far north as southern Maine before Europeans arrived. Columbus and the explorers after him took it to Europe, and the word maize comes through Spanish from mahiz, a word of the Taíno people of the Caribbean.
Corn flakes began by accident at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan around 1894. The Kellogg brothers left a batch of cooked wheat standing overnight, put it through the rollers anyway and got flakes, which they toasted for the patients. In 1906 Will Keith Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which became the Kellogg Company.
Source: EBSCO Research Starters, Kellogg's Corn Flakes Launch the Dry Cereal Industry
Corona comes from Cervecería Modelo in Mexico City, a brewery that opened in 1925 and put Corona on sale in the years after, with German immigrants among its early brewers. Corona is Spanish for crown, which is why there is a crown on the label. Nobody knows who first pushed a lime into the neck; there are plenty of stories, and none of them is proven.
Soft fresh curds have been made on farms for a very long time, but the name cottage cheese is first recorded in 1831, in Philadelphia, where people also called it smearcase. The name probably comes from the cottages where farm families made it at home, from the milk left over after the cream had gone into butter.
Squash comes from the Americas and reached Europe by the early 1500s, but the courgette itself is Italian. Farmers around Milan bred the long, dark green squash in the mid 19th century, and the Italian name zucchini means little squash, from zucca. The French word courgette, which Britain borrowed, is a 20th century coinage from courge, the French for gourd.
Couscous comes from North Africa and probably started with the Amazigh, or Berber, peoples, though nobody knows exactly when. Rolling semolina by hand into tiny grains and steaming them is a skill shared by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. In 2020 the four countries had it listed together by UNESCO as cultural heritage, a rare joint entry.
In 1872 William Lawrence, a dairyman in Chester, New York, began making a rich, spreadable cheese with extra cream. A popular story says it was an accident while making French style Neufchâtel, but some food historians doubt it. In 1880 a distributor named the brand Philadelphia, after a city famous for its dairy, although it was never made there.
Thin pancakes are eaten all over the world, but the crepe is tied to Brittany in northwest France. Buckwheat, which went into the Breton version, arrived there in the 15th century, not with the Crusades as the story often goes. The Breton word for crepe already appears in a dictionary from 1499, and Bretons who moved to Paris made creperies popular there in the 1950s.
Source: Bécédia, Bretagne Culture Diversité: Did the Bretons invent the crêpe?
The famous story says chef George Crum invented crisps in 1853 at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, to annoy a guest who sent his fried potatoes back for being too thick. Historians doubt it: an English doctor, William Kitchiner, printed a recipe for potatoes fried in shavings in 1817. Crum did help make them popular, and in the US they were sold as Saratoga chips.
Read the full story · Source: Smithsonian Magazine, The Curious History of the Potato Chip
The croissant began as the Austrian kipferl, a crescent shaped bread known since at least the 13th century. Around 1838 or 1839 August Zang, a former Austrian artillery officer, opened a Viennese bakery in Paris, and French bakers copied it and named it after its crescent, croissant. The story that it was invented after the 1683 siege of Vienna is a legend.
Read the full story · Source: Europeana, The history of the croissant
The croque monsieur is French, and its name joins croquer, to crunch, with monsieur, mister. It is often said to have first been served in 1910 at a café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, though that date is hard to pin down. Proust used the name in his novel in 1918, and the croque madame with a fried egg on top turned up around 1960.
Source: Barry Popik, The Big Apple: Croque Monsieur (Croque Madame)
Cucumbers come from South Asia, from India to the Himalayan foothills and southwest China, and have been grown for at least 3,000 years. The Roman writer Pliny says the emperor Tiberius had cucumber on his table every day, summer and winter, grown in beds covered with sheets of mica, an early kind of greenhouse. In America, Jamestown colonists were planting them by 1609.
Source: Wikipedia, Cucumber (history, with cited sources including Pliny the Elder)
Currywurst was first sold by Herta Heuwer on 4 September 1949 at her stand in Charlottenburg, West Berlin. The story goes that she got ketchup, or perhaps Worcestershire sauce, and curry powder from British soldiers, mixed them with other spices and poured the sauce over a grilled pork sausage. She patented her Chillup sauce in 1959, and the exact recipe is still a secret.
Read the full story · Source: The Local Germany, Currywurst: a product of the British?
In 1850 Danish bakery workers went on strike, and the owners hired bakers from abroad, several of them Austrian. They brought the Viennese way of folding butter into dough in thin layers. Danish bakers kept it, added more egg and fat, and called the result wienerbrød, Viennese bread. Danish immigrants later took it to the United States around 1915, which is why the rest of the world calls it a Danish.
Dark chocolate goes back to cacao itself, and cacao is older than anyone thought. Residue on pottery shows that the Mayo Chinchipe people of the Ecuadorian Amazon were using cacao around 5,300 years ago, found through starch grains, theobromine and ancient DNA. The Olmec and Maya of Mexico and Central America, long credited as the first, only started making their famous cacao drinks about 1,500 years later.
Source: Science News, Ancient South Americans first domesticated chocolate
The date palm has been prized since earliest antiquity and probably comes from what is now Iraq, the land of ancient Mesopotamia. It became the staple food of desert oases across North Africa and the Middle East. The big Medjool comes from Morocco: in 1927, when disease threatened the palms there, eleven offshoots were sent to California to save the variety.
Döner comes from the Turkish dönmek, to turn, after the vertical spit. In the 19th century Ottoman cooks switched from horizontal to vertical spits, and both İskender Efendi of Bursa and Hamdi Usta of Kastamonu claimed the idea. The doner in bread is younger: Turkish guest worker Kadir Nurman is widely credited with first selling it as a sandwich in West-Berlin in 1972, though others claim it too.
Read the full story · Source: National Geographic, What is Turkish doner kebab
Doritos started in the early 1960s at Casa de Fritos, a restaurant inside Disneyland in California, where leftover tortillas were cut up, fried and seasoned. Arch West, a Frito-Lay marketing executive, noticed how well they sold, and in 1966 Doritos went on sale across the United States, the first tortilla chip sold nationwide. The name plays on the Spanish dorado, golden.
Dutch settlers in New York fried balls of sweet dough called olykoeks, oil cakes, and Washington Irving described doughnuts in 1809. The hole is credited to Hanson Gregory, an American sailor who said he cut out the raw middle in the 1840s, using a tin pepper lid. Historians treat his tale as a story, but the hole really did help big doughnuts cook all the way through.
Dragon fruit grows on a climbing cactus from southern Mexico and the Pacific side of Central America, where it is called pitaya or pitahaya. The French are said to have brought it to Vietnam around 1860, and its Vietnamese name thanh long, green dragon, is probably where the English name comes from. Vietnam is now one of the biggest exporters.
Nearly all farmed ducks descend from the wild mallard, which people in China, Egypt and Europe were already keeping thousands of years ago. The Muscovy duck is a separate species, tamed in Central and South America before Columbus. In 1873 one Pekin drake and three hens were shipped from China to Long Island, New York, and started the American duck industry.
Source: University of Wisconsin Extension, The origin of ducks
Dumplings are ancient in China. Archaeologists found small triangular dumpling like foods about 2,500 years old in a tomb in Shandong, and some 20 Tang dynasty dumplings from the Astana tombs at Turpan look much like today's. Legend credits the Han dynasty doctor Zhang Zhongjing, said to have folded them like ears to treat frostbite, but that story is folklore.
Source: China Confucius Foundation, China's history of dumplings
The kroket descends from the French croquette, which turns up in French court cookbooks around 1700. It reached the Netherlands later, and the first Dutch recipe dates from 1830. For a long time it was a dish for the well off, until cooks started using leftover meat for the ragout, and after the Second World War snack bars like Kwekkeboom and Van Dobben made it everyday food.
Source: Kenniscentrum Immaterieel Erfgoed Nederland, Kroketten
The eclair grew out of choux pastry and a 19th century French pastry called pain à la duchesse. The great Paris chef Antonin Carême, who cooked for Napoleon and Tsar Alexander, is said to have perfected it in the early 1800s, though that is hard to prove. By about 1850 Parisians called it éclair, French for a flash of lightning, perhaps because it is eaten so fast.
Soybeans were first grown in China thousands of years ago, and eating them young and green is an old habit in both China and Japan. The oldest known use of the word edamame is from 1275, in a thank you note the Buddhist monk Nichiren wrote to a parishioner who had left some at his temple. The name means branch beans, as they were often sold still on the stem.
Source: SoyInfo Center, Chronology of Green Vegetable Soybeans and Edamame
Most eggs we eat are hens' eggs, and the chicken comes from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. A 2022 study dates its domestication to about 3,500 years ago, when fields of dry rice and millet drew the wild birds down from the trees and close to farmers. The oldest known chicken bones come from Ban Non Wat in central Thailand.
Source: PNAS, The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens (Peters et al., 2022)
The Egg McMuffin was made in early 1971 by Herb Peterson, who ran a McDonald's in Santa Barbara, California, as a handheld take on eggs Benedict. Packaged hollandaise didn't work, so he swapped in a slice of cheese and Canadian bacon, with the egg cooked in a round ring. Patty Turner, wife of executive Fred Turner, suggested the name, and it went nationwide in 1975.
Source: McDonald's, A brief and delicious history of the Egg McMuffin
People have eaten egg whites for as long as they have kept hens, so nobody invented them. Their proper name, albumen, comes from the Latin albus, white, and entered English in the 1590s meaning simply the white of an egg. Around 1800 the word also came to mean the protein found almost pure in it, later spelled albumin.
Eggs Benedict comes from New York in the late 1800s, but two stories compete. One says chef Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico's made it for regulars named LeGrand Benedict. The other says stockbroker Lemuel Benedict ordered toast, bacon, poached eggs and hollandaise at the Waldorf in 1894 to cure a hangover. Nobody can say for sure which is true.
Read the full story · Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, eggs Benedict
Its exact origin is unclear, but the empanada probably grew out of filled pastries from the Middle East that reached Spain after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The name comes from the Spanish empanar, to wrap in dough or bread. Spanish colonists then carried it to Latin America and the Philippines, where each country made its own.
The Maya of the Yucatán were already rolling tortillas around fillings and covering them in sauce long before the Spanish came. In 1519 in Tenochtitlan, conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo saw the Aztecs eat tortillas dipped in chilli sauce, a dish called chīllapīzzali, chilli flute. The Spanish name comes from enchilar, to season with chilli.
One of the first was Lipovitan D, launched in Japan in 1962 by Taisho Pharmaceutical as a tonic for workers, with taurine and B vitamins. The modern energy drink took off when Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz adapted the Thai drink Krating Daeng and, after three years of work, launched Red Bull in Austria on 1 April 1987.
In 1884 Angelo Moriondo patented a steam machine in Italy that made coffee in bulk. Luigi Bezzera then built one that pushed water through the grounds into a single cup in about 30 seconds, and with Desiderio Pavoni he presented caffè espresso at the 1906 World's Fair in Milan. Espresso means fast, or express, in Italian.
The espresso martini was made by London bartender Dick Bradsell around 1983 at the Soho Brasserie. The story goes that a model asked for a drink to wake her up, and the coffee machine sat right next to his station. He first called it a Vodka Espresso and served it on ice, and the version in a martini glass came in the late 1990s.
Fajitas began on the ranches of South and West Texas in the 1930s, where Mexican vaqueros were given cheap skirt steak as part of their pay and grilled it over a campfire. The name comes from faja, Spanish for belt or strip, after the shape of the cut. In 1969 Sonny Falcón ran the first known fajita taco stand, at a fair in the small town of Kyle, Texas.
Falafel most likely comes from Egypt, where it is called ta'ameya and made with fava beans, though nobody knows exactly when. A popular story credits Coptic Christians eating it during Lent, but the first written mentions only date from the 19th century. From the port of Alexandria it spread across the Middle East. The name is the Arabic plural of filfil, pepper.
Michele Ferrero put Ferrero Rocher on sale in 1982. Rocher is French for rock, and the story goes that he named it after the Rocher de Massabielle, the grotto at Lourdes where Bernadette said the Virgin Mary appeared to her. Ferrero was a devout Catholic who went to Lourdes every year, and the bumpy shape is said to echo that rock.
Source: Aleteia, How Ferrero Rocher chocolates were inspired by the Virgin Mary
Feta comes from Greece, where shepherds have made brined white cheese from sheep's and goat's milk for thousands of years. In Homer's Odyssey the Cyclops Polyphemus makes a sheep's milk cheese that was probably a forerunner. The name is younger and probably comes from the Italian fetta, a slice. Since 2002 only feta from parts of Greece may carry the name in the EU.
Fried fish came to Britain with Jewish immigrants from Spain, Portugal and later Eastern Europe, who coated it in flour and fried it the Portuguese way. Dickens mentions fried fish warehouses in Oliver Twist in 1838. The fish and the chips were sold separately for years before anyone put them together, in Joseph Malin's shop in London's East End around 1860 and John Lees's in Mossley, Lancashire, in 1863.
Australia and New Zealand both claim the flat white. A Sydney café review mentioned it in 1983, and Alan Preston put it on the permanent menu of Moors Espresso Bar in Sydney in 1985. Wellington says it was born at Bar Bodega in 1989 from a cappuccino that would not foam. The argument has never been settled.
The Frappuccino was born in Boston, not Seattle. In 1992 George Howell's Coffee Connection cafes wanted a summer seller, so marketing manager Andrew Frank blended coffee, sugar, milk and ice in a frozen yogurt machine. He named it after the frappe, New England's word for a milkshake, and the cappuccino. Starbucks bought the chain in 1994 and launched its own version in 1995.
French toast is older than France. A Roman cookbook credited to Apicius, from around the 4th century, already soaked white bread in milk and beaten egg, fried it in oil and covered it in honey. In France it is pain perdu, lost bread, probably because it uses up stale slices. The English name French toast is first recorded in 1660, and nobody is sure why it was called French.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, There Are Many Names for French Toast
Southern fried chicken grew out of West African cooking and perhaps Scottish settlers, who liked to fry rather than bake or boil, and enslaved cooks perfected it. The first American recipe was printed by Mary Randolph in The Virginia Housewife in the 1820s. Later, Black women in Gordonsville, Virginia, sold fried chicken to train passengers straight from the platform.
The fried egg starts with the chicken, which was probably domesticated in Southeast Asia about 3,500 years ago. The oldest bones that are clearly from tame chickens come from Ban Non Wat in Thailand, dated to around 1650 to 1250 BC. Researchers think rice and millet fields drew wild junglefowl close to people, and that chickens were special birds before they became everyday food.
Source: PNAS, The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens (2022)
Fried rice comes from China, where frying cold leftover rice with egg, oil and scraps was a way to waste nothing. Its earliest record is usually placed in the Sui dynasty, around 589 to 618, in the city of Yangzhou, though the written evidence for that is thin. Yangzhou fried rice is still one of the best known versions.
Frozen yoghurt was invented in the United States in the early 1970s. H.P. Hood, a dairy company in New England, sold it as a soft serve dessert called Frogurt, a lower fat choice than ice cream. Many people found it too tart at first, and it took sweeter recipes and shop chains in the 1980s, such as TCBY, to turn it into a craze.
Source: International Frozen Yogurt Association, Industry FAQs
In the Middle Ages breakfast was mostly ale and bread. The big cooked spread grew up in the country houses of the gentry in Georgian and Victorian times, a leisurely show of eggs, bacon, kidneys and kedgeree for the guests. The new middle class copied it, factory workers needed something filling too, and by the 1950s almost half of British adults started the day with a fry up.
Gado gado comes from western Java, most famously Jakarta, and probably started as a Sundanese dish. In Betawi, the old language of Jakarta, digado means eating something without rice, and gado gado is often read as mix mix. Its exact birth is unknown: theories range from Portuguese settlers in the 1700s to Chinese residents adapting the Javanese salad pecel.
Garlic bread as you know it is Italian American. Its ancestor is bruschetta, Italian toast rubbed with garlic and olive oil, but olive oil was hard to find in the US in the early 1900s, so immigrants probably swapped in butter. By the 1950s it was on restaurant menus across America, and in the 1970s Cole's in Muskegon, Michigan started selling it frozen.
Gazpacho began in Andalusia as a simple soup of bread soaked with olive oil, vinegar, garlic and water, and soups like it are mentioned by Greek and Roman writers. The name probably comes from a word for soaked bread. Tomatoes only reached Spain from the Americas in the 16th century, so the red gazpacho of today is a much later version of the old one.
In 19th century British India, soldiers and officials took quinine against malaria. It was so bitter that they mixed it with soda water and sugar, and then with their gin ration. Tonic water went on sale in 1858, and the first known mention of a gin and tonic, in the Oriental Sporting Magazine in 1868, already treats it as a drink for the races. Today's tonic has far less quinine.
Italians made dumplings long before potatoes, from flour, bread, semolina or even ground almonds. Potato gnocchi only became common in the 1800s, after the potato had come over from the Americas and flour was expensive for poor families. The name probably comes from nocchio, Italian for a knot in wood, after their knobbly shape.
Goulash began with the cattle herders of the Great Hungarian Plain, small groups of men who cooked meat and onions in a cauldron over an open fire. The name comes from gulyás, Hungarian for herdsman, so goulash is really herdsmen's meat. Paprika came in around the late 1700s, and in the 1800s the dish moved into city kitchens and became a symbol of Hungary.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, The Humble Beginnings of Goulash
Granola started out as Granula, made in 1863 by Dr James Caleb Jackson at his health spa in upstate New York. It was baked graham flour broken into pieces, so hard it had to be soaked in milk overnight. When John Harvey Kellogg sold a similar cereal under the same name, Jackson sued, and Kellogg renamed his version granola.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, The First Breakfast Cereal Had to Be Soaked Overnight
Granola starts with Granula, a twice baked wheat cereal made by Dr James Caleb Jackson at his health spa in Dansville, New York, in 1863. John Harvey Kellogg made a similar cereal and called it granola to avoid a legal fight. The bar came much later: in 1975 Nature Valley launched what it calls the first granola bar from a major food company, in Honey and Oats, Cinnamon and Coconut.
The grapefruit is young for a fruit. It appeared on Barbados in the 1700s as a natural cross between an orange and a pomelo, and the Reverend Griffith Hughes first described it in 1750, when it was often called the forbidden fruit. The name grapefruit came later, probably because small green fruits hang in clusters that look a bit like bunches of grapes.
Grapes were among the first fruits people ever farmed. A 2023 study of almost 2,500 grapevines found they were domesticated twice, at about the same time, around 11,000 years ago: once in Western Asia and once in the Caucasus. The Western Asian vines travelled into Europe with early farmers and are behind many of the wine grapes grown there today.
Source: Science, Dual domestications and origin of traits in grapevine evolution (2023), PubMed
Its Greek name, horiatiki, means village salad, and it grew out of the simple summer meals of farmers: tomato, cucumber, onion, olives and whatever local cheese there was. As a fixed tavern dish with feta on top it is surprisingly young, probably from the 1960s or early 1970s, when tourism to Greece took off. Some older Greeks first saw it as a pricey dish for tourists.
Source: Aglaia Kremezi, Horiatiki, the peasant roots of Greek salad
Straining yoghurt through cloth to make it thick is an old tradition in Greece. The name Greek yoghurt took off in Britain after the Greek dairy FAGE, which had been making strained yoghurt since the late 1920s, launched its Total brand there in 1983. In 2014 a UK court ruled that yoghurt sold there as Greek must be strained, free of additives and made in Greece, which is why other pots say Greek style.
Green beans are the young pods of the common bean, which people in Mexico and Peru have grown for thousands of years. Beans reached Europe after Columbus's voyages from 1493, and in Britain they are often called French beans. For a long time the pods had a tough string along the side, until Calvin Keeney of Le Roy, New York, bred the first stringless bean in 1894.
Toasted cheese sandwiches are older than you might think: Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in Britain in 1861, has one made with brown bread, butter and Cheshire cheese, toasted in the oven. In the US an open faced version called the cheese dream was popular in the Great Depression, and Navy cooks served cheese sandwiches in World War II.
Guacamole was already part of Aztec cooking when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. The name comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacamolli, avocado sauce. People in Mexico have been eating avocados for around 9,000 years, and the first recipe in English was written down by the privateer William Dampier in 1697.
On 31 December 1759 Arthur Guinness signed a lease on a disused brewery at St James's Gate in Dublin, for 9,000 years at £45 a year. Most leases then ran for 21 or 99 years. Guinness has since bought the land outright, so the lease no longer matters, and the original document sits under glass in the floor of the Guinness Storehouse.
Gummy bears were invented in Bonn, Germany, in 1922 by Hans Riegel, who had started Haribo in his kitchen two years earlier. The name Haribo is short for HAns RIegel BOnn. His first bears, called Dancing Bears, were bigger and slimmer than today's and were reportedly inspired by the performing bears at European fairs. In 1960 they were renamed Goldbears.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, The colorful history of Haribo Goldbears
Meat roasted on an upright turning spit is credited to a 19th century butcher named İskender in Bursa, in the Ottoman Empire, whose döner kebab spread to its neighbours. In Greece it became gyros, which means turn, the same meaning as the Turkish döner. By 1970 gyros wraps were already everyday fast food in Athens, and in Chicago and New York too.
Halloumi is Cyprus's cheese, first written down there around 1554 by a Venetian official who called it calumi. Similar cheeses are made around the eastern Mediterranean, so exactly where it began is still debated. The name probably goes back through Arabic and Coptic to an ancient Egyptian word for cheese. Since 2021 the EU protects it as Cypriot.
Curing a pig's leg is old. Around 160 BC the Roman writer Cato the Elder explained how to do it: bury the hams in salt for about twelve days, hang them in the wind for two, smoke them for two more, then rub them with oil and vinegar so neither moths nor worms will touch them. The English word ham first meant the back of the knee, from Old English hamm.
Source: Cato the Elder, De Agri Cultura 162, LacusCurtius (University of Chicago)
It is named after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, in 18th century England. The story, from a French travel book, is that he had meat and bread brought to the gaming table so he could keep playing. Historians think he more likely ate it at his desk. People had eaten meat in bread long before, the Earl just lent it a name.
Heineken began on 15 February 1864, when 22 year old Gerard Adriaan Heineken bought De Hooiberg, the Haystack, an Amsterdam brewery dating back to 1592. In 1886 Dr Hartog Elion, a pupil of Louis Pasteur, developed the Heineken A-yeast in the company's own lab, and that yeast is still used in the beer today.
People were eating honey long before anyone kept bees. A rock painting in the Cuevas de la Araña near Bicorp in eastern Spain, thought to be around 8,000 years old, shows a figure clinging to ropes to take honey from a wild hive. It is the oldest known picture of honey gathering. Much later the ancient Egyptians kept bees and even used honey for embalming.
People in Mesoamerica were drinking chocolate more than 3,000 years ago, starting with the Olmec. The Maya drank it thick and frothy, sometimes with chili, and the Aztecs, who called it xocolatl, valued cacao beans more than gold. Europeans later sweetened it with cane sugar and cinnamon and drank it in fashionable chocolate houses in London and Amsterdam.
Frankfurt and Vienna both claim the sausage, which is why it is called a frankfurter or a wiener. German immigrants brought it to New York in the 1860s, where it was sold as a dachshund sausage, and the name hot dog was in print by 1884. In 1871 a German immigrant named Charles Feltman opened a stand at Coney Island, tying the hot dog to days out for good.
Hummus simply means chickpea in Arabic, short for hummus bi tahina, chickpeas with tahini. The oldest known recipe for something close to it is in a 13th century Cairo cookbook, but it had no tahini or garlic. Historians think the version we eat today took shape in 18th century Damascus, and English dictionaries only picked up the word in the 1950s.
Chilled treats are ancient: people in China had a kind of frozen syrup some 4,000 years ago, and Persians drank sharbat cooled with snow. The idea that Marco Polo brought ice cream from China to Italy is disputed, and many historians call it a myth. Ices made with milk show up in Naples in the 1690s, in a book by Antonio Latini, who cooked for the Spanish viceroy.
Source: National Geographic, How long has everyone screamed for ice cream?
One of the first cold coffees is the mazagran, from Algeria. The story goes that French soldiers besieged at the fort of Mazagran in 1840 drank their coffee cold with water, and back in Paris cafés began serving it in tall glasses as café mazagran. The iced latte, with espresso and cold milk, is a much later café drink.
Iced tea is often said to have been invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where tea merchant Richard Blechynden served chilled tea through iced pipes in a heat wave. That made it famous across the US, but it was not new: a sweet iced tea recipe appeared in Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree in 1879.
Source: Georgia Public Broadcasting, Sweet Tea: History of the Nectar of the South
The oldest known recipe is in the Roman cookbook of Apicius, from about the 4th century: quince mashed in honey. Jam as we know it needed sugar, which was grown in Persia by the 6th century, and the Crusades brought sugary fruit preserves to medieval Europe, where they were a luxury for the rich. Where the English word jam comes from is still not known.
Source: National Geographic, The short, sweet, and sticky history of jam
Ginza Swiss in Tokyo says katsu curry was born there in 1948, when baseball player Shigeru Chiba asked for his two favourite dishes on one plate, a cutlet and curry. The restaurant still calls it Chiba-san's curry. But Kawakin in Asakusa claims 1918 and Oroji in Shinjuku 1921, and even Ginza Swiss says it cannot be sure it came first.
Source: Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Updates: Japan's Dueling Katsu Curry Creators
Kefir comes from the Caucasus Mountains, where herders have fermented milk with kefir grains, small clumps of yeast and bacteria, for centuries. The name probably comes from the Turkish keyif, meaning pleasure. By the 19th century it was prized as a health drink, and a popular story says a young dairy worker brought the first grains to Moscow in the early 1900s.
Ketchup started out as a fish sauce. The word probably comes from a pickled fish brine from southern China and Southeast Asia that European sailors met in the 1600s, and early English ketchups were made from mushrooms, walnuts or anchovies. One of the first American tomato ketchup recipes appeared in 1812 in a book by Philadelphia doctor James Mease, who called tomatoes love apples.
Read the full story · Source: Smithsonian Magazine, The birth of non-alcoholic ketchup
Kimchi began as vegetables salted for winter. Korea's oldest written mention is in the History of Goryeo (918 to 1392), with radish, water parsley, chives and bamboo shoots. Chilli only reached Korea around the Imjin War of 1592 and took about 200 years to go into kimchi. Napa cabbage, now the classic base, has only been grown for it since the early 20th century.
Source: The Korea Herald, Centuries-old staple now enjoyed around the world
Ferrero, the Italian family company from Alba in Piedmont, launched Kinder Bueno in 1990. The name mixes two languages: Kinder is German for children, the brand Ferrero had used since 1968, and bueno is Spanish for good. Unlike most Kinder sweets, it was aimed at teenagers and young adults rather than small children.
KitKat was launched in 1935 by Rowntree's of York, England, under the plain name Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp, and became KitKat Chocolate Crisp in 1937. The name goes back to a London literary and political club of around 1700 that met at the pie shop of pastry cook Christopher Catling, whose name was shortened to Kit Cat. Nestlé has made it since buying Rowntree's in 1988.
Kiwi is not from New Zealand but from China, where it was called mihoutao, macaque fruit, because monkeys love it. In 1904 Isabel Fraser, a headmistress from Wanganui, brought seeds home from the Yangtze Valley. New Zealanders called it Chinese gooseberry until 1959, when exporters renamed it kiwifruit after the national bird, partly because US tariffs on melons ruled out the name melonette.
Kombucha's origins are cloudy. Popular stories place it in China in 221 BC or in Japan with a doctor called Kombu, but there is no evidence for either. The first solid reports come from Russia and Ukraine in the late 1800s, and from there it spread to the rest of Eastern Europe and to Germany. It has also been called Manchurian tea.
Source: Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, The Cloudy Origins of Kombucha
The sticky red version was born in 1980 in Daegu. At his small chicken shop, Yoon Jong-gye first tried kimchi seasoning, then found that corn syrup and chilli powder made a glossy sauce that clung to the crust: yangnyeom chicken. He also came up with the pickled radish cubes served on the side. In 1985 he launched the Mexicana chain, which grew to about 1,700 shops.
Lamb comes from sheep, among the first animals people ever farmed. More than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land from today's Turkey and Syria to Iraq and Iran, people tamed the wild mouflon, at first for meat, milk and skins. Woolly sheep only came later, around 6000 BC.
Lángos takes its name from láng, the Hungarian word for flame. It was once made from the last scraps of bread dough and baked right by the open flame of the brick oven, as breakfast on baking day. The idea probably came with the Turks in the 16th century. When home bread ovens disappeared in the 20th century, people started frying it instead, and that is the lángos you know.
Lasagne is one of the oldest pasta dishes there is. The Romans already layered sheets of dough, in a dish Apicius described in his cookbook. The name probably comes from the Greek laganon, a flat sheet of dough, or from lasanum, a Latin word for a cooking pot borrowed from Greek, so the food may be named after the dish it was baked in.
Latte is short for the Italian caffè e latte, coffee and milk, which Italians have long drunk at home, mostly at breakfast. Ask for just a latte in Italy and you will get a glass of milk. The steam wand, added to espresso machines in the early 1900s, made the café version possible, and the big milky latte took off in Seattle in the 1980s before spreading round the world.
One of the oldest lemon drinks comes from medieval Egypt. By around 1100, Jewish traders in Cairo were selling and exporting a bottled sweetened lemon juice called qatarmizat. In 1676 Paris had a Compagnie de Limonadiers, whose vendors carried tanks of lemonade on their backs and poured cups for people in the street. The fizzy kind came much later.
Lentils are one of the oldest farmed foods in the world, probably first domesticated in the Near East. A lentil stew is already in the Bible, where Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of red pottage. From there lentils spread around the Mediterranean and north into Europe, and remains have turned up in Bronze Age lake villages in Switzerland.
Lentils are among the very first crops people ever farmed. They were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, in the same early wave as wheat, barley, peas and chickpeas, roughly 10,000 years ago. Charred lentils turn up in some of the oldest farming villages of the region, in what is now Turkey, Syria and Israel.
Light beer was worked out by Joseph Owades, a biochemist at the Rheingold brewery in Brooklyn, who used an enzyme that let yeast eat more of the starch. Rheingold sold it as Gablinger's Diet Beer in 1967, and it flopped. The recipe ended up at Miller, which called it Miller Lite in 1975 and sold it as less filling rather than diet, and that worked.
Source: The New York Sun, Joseph Owades, 86, Devised Recipe for Light Beer
A dish called makerouns, pasta layered with butter and cheese, appears in The Forme of Cury, a cookbook from around 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II of England. In America it was served at Thomas Jefferson's table, though his enslaved chef James Hemings did the cooking. Kraft's boxed version arrived in 1937 and made it an everyday dinner.
Almond sweets made with egg white were around in Italy and France since the Middle Ages, and the name probably comes from the Italian maccarone, meaning a fine paste. The story that Catherine de Medici brought macarons to France when she married in 1533 is charming but undocumented. The filled double macaron was made famous in Paris in the 20th century by Pierre Desfontaines of Ladurée.
Mango comes from South Asia, where people have grown it for thousands of years, above all in India. The word reached English in the 1580s through Portuguese traders: their manga came from Malay mangga and Tamil mankay, from man, the mango tree, and kay, fruit. In 1793 Captain Bligh, of Bounty fame, carried mango trees from Timor to gardens in Jamaica and St Vincent.
Nobody knows for sure who invented the margarita. A popular story says Carlos Danny Herrera made it around 1938 at his restaurant Rancho La Gloria near Tijuana, for a customer called Marjorie King who could only drink tequila. Dallas socialite Margarita Sames said she created it in Acapulco in 1948, but a Jose Cuervo advert already used the name in 1945.
The Mars bar was born in 1932 in Slough, England, where Forrest Mars, son of the American candy maker Frank Mars, set up his own small factory. He based it on his father's Milky Way-bar and adjusted the recipe for British tastes. The Slough factory still makes Mars bars today, close to a century later.
Source: Mars, Mars invests £190 million in its historic UK chocolate factory
The name comes from a real plant, the marsh mallow, whose sticky root was used as medicine by ancient Greek doctors. The sweet itself was invented in France in the mid 1800s, a cross between a throat lozenge and a bonbon, made by beating the root juice with egg and sugar into a foam. Later the root was replaced by gelatine, which was quicker to work with and gave marshmallows their soft, springy texture.
Potatoes were domesticated in the Andes of Peru and northwest Bolivia thousands of years ago and reached Europe with Spanish explorers in the 16th century. One of the earliest written recipes for mash is in Hannah Glasse's English cookbook The Art of Cookery from 1747: boil and peel the potatoes, then mash them with milk, salt and butter. Who mashed the first potato, nobody knows.
Powdered tea reached Japan in the late 1100s with the Zen monk Eisai, who had studied in China and brought back tea seeds. It became the heart of the Japanese tea ceremony. The name joins matsu, to rub, and cha, tea, because the leaves are ground to a fine powder. Whisking it into steamed milk is a much later café idea.
Nobody knows for sure where mayonnaise got its name. The best known story ties it to the Duke of Richelieu's capture of Mahón on Menorca in 1756, so mahonnaise. Other theories link it to the Old French moyeu, egg yolk, or to manier, to stir, which the famous chef Carême preferred. What is certain is that it became a classic cold sauce of French cooking.
The cheeseburger has been on McDonald's menu since 1948, when Richard and Maurice McDonald relaunched their San Bernardino, California, restaurant with a nine item menu and their fast Speedee Service System. A hamburger cost 15 cents and a cheeseburger 19. Who first put cheese on a burger is not known for sure; several American cooks of the 1920s and 30s have been credited.
When Richard and Maurice McDonald cut the menu of their San Bernardino, California, restaurant down to nine items in 1948, the side was potato chips. In 1949 fries took their place. For decades they were fried in a blend that was mostly beef fat, until McDonald's switched to vegetable oil in 1990 after a long public campaign against saturated fat.
Source: Food Republic, The Greasy, Glorious History Of The McDonald's Fry
In 2018 Sweden's official Twitter account said Swedish meatballs came from a recipe King Charles XII brought home from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1700s. Food historians disagreed: meatballs called frikadeller turn up in Swedish writing in 1650, long before his stay, and the word köttbullar appears around 1755. Meatballs are old in many countries, and nobody can be named as the inventor.
Source: The Local Sweden, food historian Richard Tellström on köttbullar
Mie goreng grew out of the fried noodles that Chinese immigrants brought to Indonesia, much like chow mein. Goreng is simply Indonesian for fried. Local cooks made it their own with sweet soy sauce, sambal and fried shallots, and swapped pork for chicken or prawns. The famous instant Indomie Mi Goreng flavour was created by Nunuk Nuraini and is now sold around the world.
People began using animal milk soon after they started keeping cattle, sheep and goats. Traces of milk fat in more than 2,200 ancient pots show it was already being processed in Anatolia, the Levant and southeastern Europe in the seventh millennium BC, around 8,500 years ago. That pushed the start of dairying back some 2,000 years from what scientists had thought before.
Source: University of Bristol, A potted history of milk (study in Nature, 2008)
Milka was launched in 1901 by Carl Russ-Suchard, son-in-law of the Swiss chocolate maker Philippe Suchard. The name joins the German words Milch, milk, and Kakao, cocoa. The lilac wrapper was there from the very first bar, decades before the lilac cow became the face of the brand.
When the word milkshake first appeared in print in 1885, it meant something else: an eggnog style tonic made with eggs and whiskey. By 1900 it meant a drink with chocolate, strawberry or vanilla syrup. Then in 1922 Ivar Pop Coulson of the Walgreens drugstore chain in Chicago added two scoops of vanilla ice cream to a malted milk, and the thick shake was born.
For centuries butchers chopped meat into mince by hand with knives. The first meat grinder, a hand-cranked machine that pushes meat through a plate full of small holes, is credited to the German inventor Karl Drais in the 1840s. Drais is better known for something else: in 1817 he rode his running machine, an early forerunner of the bicycle, out of Mannheim.
Miso goes back to a Chinese fermented paste, called hishio in Japan, that reached the country around the 7th century. Miso soup came later, in the Kamakura period (1185 to 1333), when mortars from China let people grind the lumpy miso smooth enough to dissolve in hot water. Samurai then ate it daily in the meal called ichiju issai, one soup and one dish.
Source: Kikkoman Institute for International Food Culture, FOOD CULTURE No. 3: Miso
The mojito comes from Cuba. A forerunner called the Draque, said to be named after Francis Drake, who came to the Caribbean in 1586, mixed crude cane spirit with sugar, lime and mint as a remedy. When rum replaced the cane spirit in the 1800s it became the mojito, and Sloppy Joe's bar in Havana had it on its menu by 1931. The Hemingway link has no proof.
Monster Energy was launched on 18 April 2002 by Hansen Natural, a juice and soda company from Corona, California, run by Rodney Sacks and Hilton Schlosberg. Until then the company was known for natural juices. The drink grew so big that in 2012 the whole company renamed itself Monster Beverage.
Dishes of layered aubergine and spiced mince are old, and a 13th century Baghdad cookbook already has recipes very like it. The name came into Greek through Ottoman Turkish from Arabic. The thick béchamel on top is a Greek twist from the 1920s, by the French trained chef Nikolaos Tselementes, who wanted to make Greek cooking more European.
Mozzarella comes from Campania in southern Italy and was first made from water buffalo milk. The story goes that around the 12th century the monks of San Lorenzo in Capua gave pilgrims bread with a buffalo cheese called mozza. The name comes from mozzare, to cut off, as each ball is cut from the curd, and it first appears in print in 1570, in a book by the papal cook Bartolomeo Scappi.
Source: Great Italian Chefs, Mozzarella di bufala: white gold in Campania
Swiss doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner created muesli around 1900 for the patients at his clinic in Zurich, where he believed raw food healed. His original was oats soaked in water with lemon juice, condensed milk, grated apple and nuts. He is said to have got the idea from a dish served to him on a hike in the Alps. Muesli is Swiss German for a little mash.
Source: SWI swissinfo.ch, Muesli celebrates a century of good health
The word muffin first shows up in English in 1703, spelled moofin, and probably comes from Low German muffen, small cakes. The original English muffin is a flat yeast bread baked on a griddle. The tall, cakey muffin from the coffee shop is the American version, a quick bread that rises with baking soda or baking powder instead of yeast.
People have warmed and spiced wine for a very long time. The Romans already flavoured wine with honey and spices, and in medieval Europe a sweet spiced wine called hippocras, made with long pepper, ginger and cinnamon, was drunk partly as medicine. Its name probably points to the Greek doctor Hippocrates. The German name Glühwein simply means glow wine.
Source: Atlas Obscura, Gastro Obscura: Long Pepper (hippocras)
People picked wild mushrooms for thousands of years, but the white button mushroom became a farmed crop in France. Louis XIV's taste for it in the 17th century pushed growers near Paris to cultivate it, and they later moved their manure beds into old quarries under the city, where the steady cool let them crop all year. By 1880 Paris had over 300 mushroom farms.
Source: France Today, Champignons de Paris: the famous mushroom and their city farmers
The way much of France farms mussels comes with a legend. In 1235, the story goes, a shipwrecked Irishman called Patrick Walton drove wooden posts into the Bay of Aiguillon in western France to catch seabirds with nets, and found mussels growing on the posts instead. Those posts are called bouchots, and bouchot mussels are still grown on them today.
Source: France Today, Mussels from the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel
Naan simply means bread in Persian. It came to South Asia with the Delhi Sultanate, and around 1300 the poet Amir Khusrau described two kinds eaten by nobles, a light thin one and a heavier one baked in the tandoor. Under the Mughals it was a luxury of the court, and only by the 1700s did it reach ordinary people in the big cities.
Nachos were born in 1943 in Piedras Negras, Mexico, just across the border from Texas. The story goes that when a group of American army wives came into the Victory Club and the cook was nowhere to be found, Ignacio Anaya cut fried tortillas into triangles, added cheese and pickled jalapeños and heated them. His nickname was Nacho, so he called them Nacho's Special.
Nasi campur simply means mixed rice in Indonesian and Malay, so it has no inventor. It grew out of the everyday way of eating across the islands, rice with several small dishes cooked separately, and became the standard at warungs, where you point at trays behind glass. Every region has its own version, from Bali and Java to Malaysia and Singapore.
Fried rice began in China as a way to use up leftover rice, and Chinese traders carried the idea to the Indonesian islands centuries ago. Sweet soy sauce made it Indonesian. Javanese writing from the early 1800s mentions sekul goreng, Dutch colonial cookbooks printed recipes, and in 2018 Indonesia named it one of its five national dishes.
Nutella comes from Alba in Piedmont, a part of Italy known for its hazelnuts. In 1946 pastry maker Pietro Ferrero sold Giandujot, a block of hazelnut and cocoa paste that was much cheaper than chocolate and cut into slices for bread. It became the spreadable Supercrema in 1951, and the first jar called Nutella left the Alba factory on 20 April 1964.
Read the full story · Source: The Local Italy, Nutella turns 60
Oat milk as we know it came out of Lund University in Sweden. In the late 1980s and early 1990s food scientist Rickard Öste, who was researching lactose intolerance, worked out how to turn oats into a drink with qualities close to cow's milk. In 1994 he founded Oatly with his brother Björn, the first company to make oat milk commercially.
Source: Lund University Alumni Network, How one scientist's drink came to be on the lips of many
Olive oil is one of the oldest foods of the Mediterranean. Clay pots dug up at Ein Zippori in Israel's Lower Galilee, dating to about 5800 BC, still held traces of olive oil, among the earliest evidence of its use anywhere in the Middle East. At Kfar Samir, a 7,700-year-old village now under the sea off Israel's coast, archaeologists found remains of olive oil being made.
The olive was first grown in the eastern Mediterranean. People on Crete were cultivating it around 3500 BC, and Semitic peoples by about 3000 BC. In Homer's Greece olive oil was rubbed into the skin, and by about 600 BC the olive was an important crop for the Romans.
The name is French and it describes the shape. Omelette grew out of the old French alemelle, a thin blade or plate, which comes from the Latin lamella. Over the centuries alemelle turned into alumette, amelette and finally omelette, and English took the word over around 1611.
People in Japan have pressed cooked rice into shapes since the Yayoi period, about 2,000 years ago, and lumps of charred rice from that time have been dug up. An 8th century text mentions nigiri ii, pressed rice, and The Tale of Genji has tonjiki, small hand formed bundles of rice eaten on the move. The name grew from nigiri ii to nigiri meshi, and then onigiri with a polite o in front.
Source: Nippon.com, Onigiri: The Evolving Face of Japan's Beloved Rice Ball
The oldest known recipe is from English cook John Mollard, who in 1802 described onion slices dipped in a batter with Parmesan and fried. The Pig Stand drive in chain from Dallas, opened in 1921, later claimed to have invented onion rings, but it most likely came up with its own version more than a century after Mollard.
The sweet orange is an ancient cross between the pomelo and the mandarin, first grown in southern China and the lands around it. Portuguese traders brought sweet oranges to Europe in the 1400s and 1500s, where they pushed out the bitter kind. The name travelled from Sanskrit naranga through Persian and Arabic, and English named the colour after the fruit, not the other way round.
The sweet orange comes from tropical Asia. Roman conquests and Arab trade routes carried citrus west to the Mediterranean, and by Columbus's time orange trees grew in the Canary Islands, from where they probably crossed to the Americas. Until about 1920 people mostly ate oranges whole. Then drinking the juice caught on, and today frozen concentrate is the main thing American oranges are made into.
Oreo was first sold in 1912 by Nabisco, baked at its factory in Chelsea, New York City, in the building that is now Chelsea Market. The first recorded sale was to a grocer in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 6 March 1912. Nobody knows for sure where the name comes from; guesses include the French or, gold, and a Greek word for mountain.
Overnight oats go back to Bircher muesli. Swiss doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner created it in the 1890s to treat stomach complaints, and later served it at his clinic in Zurich: oats soaked overnight in water, then mixed with grated apple, lemon juice, condensed milk and nuts. He simply called it the dish, and took the idea from Alpine people who ate oats, fruit and milk in the evening.
Source: SWI swissinfo.ch, Le Birchermüesli, l'invention d'un Suisse pour soigner les maux d'estomac
Stir frying noodles is a Chinese technique, brought to Thailand by Chinese immigrants. In 1942, with rice paddies flooded, Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram's government urged people to eat noodles instead, handing out recipes and carts to street vendors. The name pad thai, simply Thai stir fry, first appears in print in a 1962 household manual, says historian Chatichai Muksong.
Paella comes from the rice fields around the Albufera lagoon near Valencia, where farm workers cooked it for lunch over a fire in the mid 19th century. Early versions used water vole, eel and butter beans, and later rabbit, chicken, duck and sometimes snails. Paella is simply the Valencian word for a pan, from the Latin patella.
Like the croissant, it has Austrian roots. August Zang's Viennese bakery, opened in Paris around 1839, sold Viennese pastries, and food historians see a chocolate filled bun from that tradition as its ancestor. Paris calls it pain au chocolat, while the south west says chocolatine, a quarrel that has even reached the French parliament.
Nobody invented the pancake: batter cooked on a hot surface is very old, and the ancient Greeks and Romans already made versions of it. In England pancakes appear in cookery books from 1439 and belong to Shrove Tuesday, when eggs, milk and butter were used up before Lent. The story goes that in 1445 a woman in Olney ran to church still holding her frying pan, and the town still runs a pancake race.
Panna cotta means cooked cream, and it is linked to Piedmont in northern Italy. One story says a Hungarian woman in the Langhe hills invented it in the 19th century, but nobody has proved it. A similar mix of cream, sugar and gelatine was printed in 1879 as latte inglese, English milk, and chef Ettore Songia put panna cotta on his menu in Cuneo in the 1960s.
Pão de queijo comes from Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil and goes back to the 18th century. Enslaved Africans on the farms there baked rolls from polvilho, the starch of cassava, a root whose use they learned from Indigenous people. Later, as Minas became dairy country after slavery ended, eggs, milk and Minas cheese went into the dough, and the cheese bread we know was born.
Papaya was first domesticated in Mesoamerica, in what is now southern Mexico and Central America, where wild papayas still grow. The Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described it in the early 1500s, and the Spanish soon carried the seeds across the Caribbean and on to the Old World. Today it grows across almost all of the tropics.
Parmigiano Reggiano was first made in the Middle Ages on the plains around Parma and Reggio Emilia, where monasteries are usually credited with the big, long keeping wheels. By 1351 Boccaccio was joking in the Decameron about a mountain of grated parmesan. Parmesan is simply the French form of Parmigiano, meaning from Parma.
Source: Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano, history
Nobody knows who made the first pasta. Marco Polo did not bring it from China: Italians were already eating it when he came home in 1295, so that story is a myth. In 1154 the Arab geographer al Idrisi wrote that Trabia, a town in Sicily, made a food of flour in the form of strings, dried it in the sun and shipped it to other parts of Italy and beyond.
Carbonara is younger than most people think. The name first appears in print in 1950, when the Italian paper La Stampa described it as a Roman dish American officers went looking for after Rome was freed in 1944. A popular theory says it grew out of army rations of bacon and powdered egg, but nobody can prove who cooked it first.
Read the full story · Source: HistoryNet, How WWII helped produce the savory bacon pasta known as carbonara
The recipe comes from the monks of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, Lisbon. Convents used egg whites to starch their clothes, so the leftover yolks went into sweets. When the monastery closed in 1834, the recipe was sold to the sugar refinery next door, whose owners opened the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém in 1837. It still bakes them from that recipe, which is kept in a secret room.
Peas are among the oldest cultivated crops, and remains from the late Neolithic have been found in the Middle East. Dried peas kept all winter, so they ended up in soup for thousands of years: in a comedy by Aristophanes, written in Athens in 405 BC, the hero Herakles is mad about pea soup. Later, sailors lived on dried peas and salt pork, the pairing behind pea and ham.
The peach was first domesticated in China. Peach stones dug up at sites in Zhejiang province show that people in the lower Yangtze valley were selecting bigger fruit at least 7,500 years ago. It reached Europe by way of Persia, so the Romans called it malum persicum, Persian apple, and that became pêche in French and peach in English.
Source: PLoS ONE, Archaeological Evidence for Peach Cultivation and Domestication in China (2014)
The Aztecs and Incas were already grinding roasted peanuts into a paste. The first patent for peanut butter went to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal in 1884, and Dr John Harvey Kellogg, of the cereal, patented his own in 1895 as protein for people who struggled to chew. Despite the popular story, George Washington Carver did not invent it.
M&M's were created by Forrest Mars Sr and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey, and the two Ms stand for their surnames. The plain ones came out in the United States in 1941, and the peanut version followed in 1954, at first only in tan. Forrest Mars is said to have been allergic to peanuts himself.
Peanuts come from South America. Archaeologists led by Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University found peanut remains about 7,600 years old in house floors and hearths in the Ñanchoc Valley of northern Peru. Peanuts did not grow wild there, so they must have been domesticated somewhere else first and carried in by traders or travelling farmers.
The common pear is probably European in origin and has been grown since ancient times. Homer's Odyssey, more than 2,500 years old, already describes pear trees in the orchard of King Alcinous. When Europeans founded colonies in the Americas they brought pears straight away, and Spanish missionaries planted them in Mexico and California.
Peas are one of the oldest crops there are: remains from the late Neolithic have been found in the Middle East, and the wild plant grows around the Mediterranean. For centuries they were mostly eaten dried. Fresh green peas became a craze at the court of Louis XIV from 1660, and in the 1860s the monk Gregor Mendel used peas to work out how heredity works.
Pelmeni come from the Urals and Siberia. The name was borrowed from the Komi and Udmurt languages, where it means ear bread, after the dumpling's folded, ear like shape. Researchers think these peoples were already making them in the Middle Ages, though some argue the idea came from Chinese dumplings via the Mongols. Russian cookbooks printed a recipe for Siberian pelmeni in the 1840s.
Source: N. I. Shutova, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (Russian Academy of Sciences), 2018
Peppers were domesticated in Mexico about 6,000 years ago, in a region stretching from southern Puebla and northern Oaxaca to Veracruz. Columbus met them in the Caribbean and called them pepper, mistaking them for a kind of the black pepper he had sailed to find. Sweet, mild types like the bell pepper belong to the same species as many chillies.
Source: Smithsonian Affiliations, A plant from the Americas that conquered the world
Pho appeared in northern Vietnam, near Hanoi, in the late 19th century, when the country was a French colony. Most food historians think villagers added beef, which the French ate far more of, to a local noodle soup. The name may come from the French feu, as in the stew pot au feu, but it may just as well come from the Chinese fen, a flat rice noodle.
The word comes from an old Slavic root, pir, meaning feast. Filled dumplings probably started in China and spread across Europe in the Middle Ages. The story goes that Saint Hyacinth brought pierogi to Poland in the 13th century and fed the hungry with them, but his medieval biography never mentions them. The oldest written recipe is in Poland's first cookbook, from 1682.
The Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, says its bartender Ramón Monchito Marrero created the piña colada in 1954, after three months of trying out rum, coconut cream and pineapple juice. Other bartenders in Puerto Rico have claimed it too, so the story is disputed. Either way, it has been Puerto Rico's official drink since 1978.
Pineapple is native to tropical South America and was grown across the Americas long before Europeans arrived. Columbus met it on Guadeloupe in 1493. The Spanish called it piña for its likeness to a pine cone, and English borrowed pineapple, an old word for a pine cone. Portuguese sailors then carried it to Saint Helena, Africa and India, and by 1600 it grew in most of the tropics.
Fried banana in batter is eaten all over Southeast Asia and has no known inventor. Bananas are native to the region, but they were mostly eaten raw, and the habit of coating them in batter and frying them probably came with the Portuguese in the 1500s, who brought new ways with flour and frying. Goreng simply means fried in Indonesian and Malay.
The pistachio comes from the dry hills of southern Central Asia, a wild range that reaches into northern Iran and northern Afghanistan, and researchers think it was first cultivated there. It spread west at least 2,000 years ago, perhaps a few centuries earlier to the mountains of what is now Syria. Outside its homeland it stayed rare for a long time, and was probably only widely grown in recent centuries.
Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza as we know it took shape in Naples in the 1700s, sold cheaply on the street to working people. The story goes that in 1889 Raffaele Esposito made a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita and named it after her. Historians doubt it: a pizza with those toppings was already sold in Naples decades before.
Read the full story · Source: National Geographic, Pizza Margherita may be fit for a queen, but was it really named after one?
The common European plum most likely began in the region around the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, and has been grown for at least 2,000 years. The Japanese plum, now the one most often sold fresh, was first domesticated in China thousands of years ago and developed further in Japan. The damson is linked to early growing around Damascus, which is where its name comes from.
Poke is Hawaiian for cutting raw fish crosswise into pieces. Native Hawaiians prized fresh raw fish seasoned with salt, roasted kukui nut and seaweed, and Captain Cook's surgeon saw raw fish being eaten in the late 1700s. The shoyu, the sesame and the bed of rice came much later, from Japanese, Chinese and Korean families who settled in Hawaii.
The pomegranate is native to Iran and the countries around it. It has been grown for so long that, well before modern times, it had spread all around the Mediterranean and through the Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan and India. Today it is also grown across the Americas, from the warmer parts of the United States down to Chile.
Popcorn is far older than the cinema. Corn was domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte, and cobs found at Paredones and Huaca Prieta on Peru's northern coast show people there were eating popcorn at least 6,700 years ago. That was before they even made pottery.
Source: Smithsonian Newsdesk, Ancient Popcorn Discovered in Peru
Every pork chop goes back to the wild boar, which people tamed more than once. In China the first domestic pigs date to about 10,000 years ago, with an unbroken line to today's breeds. Pigs were also domesticated in the Near East, and Europe's first pigs came from there, though they were later replaced by pigs bred from local wild boar.
Source: ScienceDaily, Chinese pigs descendants of first domesticated (Durham University, 2010)
For a long time oats were seen as animal feed: the Roman doctor Galen said people should only eat them in a famine. In 1755 Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined oats as a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. In Scotland, where wheat grows poorly, oat porridge was everyday food for centuries.
Source: Science History Institute, Distillations: Fitter for a Stable Than a Table
Potatoes reached Europe from South America in the 1500s, and potato salad grew up mostly in Germany and Austria. The oldest known recipe is in a 1621 work by Caspar Plautz, abbot of Seitenstetten Abbey in Austria. The south dressed it warm with vinegar and oil, the north added mayonnaise, and German immigrants took both styles to America.
Potatoes were domesticated several times by Indigenous peoples of the central Andes more than 7,000 years ago, and Andean farmers grew hundreds of kinds. Spanish conquistadors brought them to Europe in the late 1500s. The word potato first meant the sweet potato: it comes from Spanish patata, from batata, a Caribbean word for the sweet one.
Poutine comes from rural Quebec in the late 1950s, and more than one town claims it. Fernand Lachance of Warwick said a regular asked him for cheese curds on his fries in 1957, while Jean-Paul Roy of Drummondville said he created it at his drive in in 1964. In Quebec slang poutine means a mess, probably from the English word pudding.
People on coasts have eaten prawns for as long as they have fished, so there is no inventor, but the name is a small mystery. The English word prawn appears in the early 15th century as prayne, and nobody knows where it comes from, because no similar name has been found in any other language. Shrimp is a bit older, from the 14th century, and probably comes from an old word for something thin.
Nobody knows exactly who twisted the first pretzel. A popular story says a medieval monk shaped leftover dough like a child's arms crossed in prayer, and the name may come from the Latin for arm. That story cannot be proven, but by the 12th century the knot was already the sign of bakers in southern Germany. The dip in lye that gives the shiny brown crust is a German habit.
Read the full story · Source: Smithsonian Magazine, Pretzels for Oktoberfest
Pringles were developed by Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, and launched in 1968. The tube was designed by chemist Fredric Baur, who was so proud of it that part of his ashes was buried in a Pringles can in 2008. According to P&G the name was picked from a Cincinnati phone book, after Pringle Avenue in Finneytown, though other stories go around.
Prosecco is named after a village near Trieste in northeast Italy. In 1593 the English traveller Fynes Moryson wrote about a local wine once called Pucinum, praised by the Roman writer Pliny, and now called Prosecho. Since 2009 the grape itself has been called Glera, so Prosecco is the name of a place, not a grape.
The protein bar's ancestor has a link to space. Pillsbury food scientist Howard Bauman, whose team made the first solid food eaten by a NASA-astronaut in 1962, created Space Food Sticks in the late 1960s, a chewy snack rod with balanced protein, carbs and fat sold on the back of the Apollo missions. They are seen as the forerunner of today's energy and protein bars.
Protein powder took off in the United States in 1952, when weightlifting promoter Bob Hoffman of York Barbell launched a soy powder, later called Hi-Proteen. His ads spoke of a famous food lab, but his former editor said he saw Hoffman stir soy flour into melted chocolate with a canoe paddle. The whey shakes common today came later.
Source: USC Scalar, Shake It Up Baby: Protein Powder in America
Pulled pork grew out of Southern barbecue. The word comes from barbacoa, the Spanish name for the wooden frame the Taíno of the Caribbean cooked on, and Hernando de Soto brought pigs to the American South around 1540. In the Carolinas, cooking whole hogs and shoulders slowly over coals became a tradition long before anyone called it pulled pork.
Source: The Lexington Collection (ibiblio, University of North Carolina), Origins of barbecue
Pumpkins come from the Americas, and their seeds are among the oldest farmed foods there. In Guilá Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, archaeologists found seeds of domesticated Cucurbita pepo, the species that includes pumpkins, about 10,000 years old. Smithsonian archaeologist Bruce Smith confirmed the date in 1997, putting farming in the Americas as early as in the Near East and China.
Source: Archaeology Magazine (Archaeological Institute of America), Squash seeds from Guilá Naquitz
Quark is the fresh curd cheese of Central and Eastern Europe, and nobody knows who made it first. Its name was borrowed from a West Slavic language, compare Polish twaróg, and shows up in late medieval German as twarc before it became quark. Fun detail: since the 16th century Germans have also used Quark to mean nonsense.
People in Mexico were making corn tortillas long before the Spanish arrived, but cheese only came with the cows and goats the Spanish brought in the 1500s. The quesadilla grew out of that mix in colonial Mexico. The name comes from queso, Spanish for cheese, and in old Spanish a quesadilla was actually a sweet cheese pastry.
Quiche comes from Lorraine in northeast France, a region that has passed between France and Germany. The name is probably from the local dialect word for cake, a cousin of German Kuchen, and it is written down in Lorraine in 1605. The early quiche lorraine was eggs, cream and smoked bacon in a pastry case. The cheese most recipes add today came later.
Quinoa comes from the Andes, where it was probably domesticated several times, some 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. Together with corn and potatoes it was a staple for the Inca, Aymara and Quechua peoples. The Spanish colonists pushed it aside, possibly because of its religious importance to Indigenous people, and it only became popular worldwide in recent decades.
Raclette comes from the Swiss Alps, where herdsmen held half a cheese to the fire and scraped off the melted layer for a filling meal. The first written record is from Valais in 1574, and the name comes from the French racler, to scrape. Heidi has a scene with toasted cheese on a fork, but only in the 20th century did the mountain meal become a Swiss national dish.
Radler is German for cyclist. The popular story says innkeeper Franz Xaver Kugler, south of Munich, ran short of beer when thousands of cyclists turned up one June day in 1922, so he stretched it with lemonade and called it a Radlermass. It is a nice tale, but the name Radlermass already turns up in records from around 1900, so the drink is probably older.
Source: inFranken.de, Woher kommt das Radler und warum heißt es so?
Raisins are as old as winemaking, and the first were probably grapes that dried in the sun by accident. In ancient times the Phoenicians planted vineyards in Spain and Greece and the Armenians in Persia, and both traded raisins with the Greeks and Romans, who gave them as prizes at sporting events. California's first raisin crop in 1873 also happened by accident, after a heat wave dried the grapes on the vine.
Ramen came to Japan from China. In the early 1880s Chinese traders settled in the port of Yokohama and opened restaurants serving wheat noodles in broth, and the name comes from the Chinese la mian, pulled noodles. Japan's first ramen shop, Rairaiken, opened in Asakusa, Tokyo, in 1910 and could sell 3,000 bowls on a busy day. Instant ramen followed in 1958.
Read the full story · Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ramen
People have eaten wild raspberries since the Stone Age. The Latin name Rubus idaeus means bramble of Ida, after Mount Ida, where the fruit was said to grow in abundance. The Roman writer Palladius recorded raspberries as a cultivated fruit in the 4th century AD, and the English word probably comes from raspise, a sweet rose coloured wine.
Source: Royal Horticultural Society, Fascinating facts: raspberries
Ratatouille is the signature dish of Nice, in Provence, and grew out of country cooking with summer garden vegetables. The name first shows up in the late 18th century and the first known recipe in the 19th, though the dish is probably older. It comes from two French verbs, ratouiller and tatouiller, both about stirring and shaking things up.
Red Bull grew out of Krating Daeng, an energy drink Chaleo Yoovidhya sold in Thailand from 1976, popular with truck drivers. Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz tried it on a business trip in 1982 and found it helped his jet lag, and the two founded Red Bull in 1984. Krating Daeng means red gaur, a wild bull, and the fizzy western version launched in Austria on 1 April 1987.
Slow cooked ribs belong to barbecue, and that word comes from the Caribbean. The Taíno people cooked meat on a wooden frame of four posts with sticks tied across the top, and the Spanish turned their word, barabicu, into barbacoa. The explorer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo first put it in print in 1526, and from there it found its way into English.
Asian rice was first domesticated in China, and the earliest evidence, from central and eastern China, dates to around 7000 to 5000 BC. Early rice growing is also known from India and Southeast Asia, and Asia still grows more than 90 percent of the world's rice. Africa has its own species, African rice, which was domesticated separately in West Africa.
The rice cake grew out of puffed rice. In 1901 Alexander Anderson, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden, saw heated starch burst into a light, puffed mass, and at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis he showed off rice puffed under pressure. Pressed rice cakes came much later, and brands like Chico San and Quaker made them a diet snack in the 1970s and 1980s.
Rice cooked in milk is made in many parts of the world, and in England it goes back to the 14th century. The oldest English recipe is in The Forme of Cury, written around 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II, and it used almond milk and saffron. Rice was an expensive import then, so this was a grand pudding long before it became nursery food.
Risotto comes from northern Italy, from the Po valley, where rice grew well in the wet lowlands. It was only written down in the early 19th century, then described as a kind of pudding, and the name simply comes from riso, rice. A legend says Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I called it risum optimum, the best rice, but the name more likely grew from everyday speech.
Every roast chicken goes back to the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. A 2022 study puts the first clearly domestic chickens in central Thailand around 1650 to 1250 BC, probably drawn to villages by stored rice and millet. When chickens reached Europe they seem to have been revered rather than eaten at first, since butchery marks on their bones only appear centuries later.
Source: PNAS, The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens (2022)
The story goes that in August 1900 a US Army captain in a Havana bar mixed Bacardi rum with Coca-Cola and lime and toasted Por Cuba libre, for a free Cuba, after the war with Spain. That is Bacardi's own account, backed by a 1965 affidavit from one of its ad men who said he was there, so historians treat the details with care. The name Cuba Libre stuck.
Nobody knows exactly where salami began, but salted, dried sausage was made in ancient Roman times or even earlier, by many peoples around the Mediterranean. The name is Italian, the plural of salame, from salare, to salt, which comes from the Latin sal. Italy alone now has more than 150 named kinds.
Most salmon in the shops today is farmed, and that started in Norway. On 28 May 1970, on the island of Hitra, brothers Ove and Sivert Grøntvedt put young salmon into a floating open net pen in the sea. Their fish became the first successful generation of farmed Atlantic salmon, and Norway is still the biggest producer, with more than half of the world's farmed salmon.
Source: Norwegian Seafood Council, Celebrating 50 years of modern aquaculture
The samosa began in the Middle East and Central Asia as the sanbusak, and a 13th century Baghdad cookbook already gives three recipes. In the 14th century the traveller Ibn Battuta ate one at the royal court in Delhi, stuffed with minced meat, almonds, pistachios and walnuts. The potato version came much later, since potatoes only reached India in the 1600s.
Sangria takes its name from the Spanish sangría, bloodletting, after its deep red wine. Sweetening wine with sugar and spices is far older, and hippocras, a spiced wine, is probably a common ancestor of both sangria and mulled wine. Spaniards drank it for centuries, but Americans first met it at the Spanish pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair in New York, and it took off from there.
The word goes back to the Latin sardina and is often linked to the island of Sardinia, though nobody is sure. The tin is French: from the 1820s Joseph Colin, in the Atlantic port of Nantes, built up a market for sardines sealed in tins, and canneries soon spread along the coast of Brittany and on to Portugal and Morocco.
The word sashimi appears in the Muromachi period (1336 to 1573), when nobles and samurai ate sliced raw fish with salt or vinegar, before soy sauce took over. It means pierced body, and nobody is quite sure why. One theory says the tail or fin was stuck onto the slices to show which fish it was, another that kiru, to cut, sounded too ominous to use outside samurai circles.
Satay probably began with street vendors on Java, inspired by the kebabs of Indian and Arab traders who arrived from the 1700s on. The word is thought to come from the Tamil catai, meaning flesh. A photo from around 1870 already shows a satay seller in Java with his shoulder pole, and by the late 1800s the dish had crossed to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
Sausages are one of the oldest ways of keeping meat, and they were already eaten in ancient Babylonia, Greece and Rome. The word comes from the Latin salsus, meaning salted, because salt is what kept them from spoiling. Later many European cities gave their names to their own kinds, like the frankfurter from Frankfurt and bologna from Bologna.
The story goes that Field Marshal Radetzky brought the breaded veal cutlet to Vienna from Milan around 1857. Historians doubt it: Austria's own tourist board notes that Wiener Schnitzel is first mentioned in Austrian cooking in 1831, and a linguist later showed the Radetzky tale only turned up in 1869. Schnitzel simply means a small slice in German.
The scone comes from Scotland. The first written record is from 1513, when flour scones turn up in Gavin Douglas's Scots translation of Virgil's Aeneid. The word most likely comes from the Middle Dutch schoonbrot, meaning fine bread, so the popular idea that scones are named after the Stone of Scone, where Scottish kings were crowned, is a nice story rather than history.
Nobody knows who first scrambled an egg, since people have cooked eggs in a pan for as long as they have kept hens. The name is younger than the dish. In English, scrambled eggs, meaning eggs broken into a pan, mixed with butter, salt and pepper and cooked slowly, is first recorded in 1843.
Shakshuka is a North African dish, and its name is Maghrebi Arabic for mixture. In its tomato form it can't be very old, because tomatoes only reached the region from the Americas after the 1500s. Jews from the Maghreb brought it to Israel in the 1950s, and it became a fixture of Israeli breakfasts from the 1990s.
Shawarma comes from the Ottoman Empire, where seasoned meat was stacked and roasted on a turning spit. Ottoman texts called it çevirme kebabı, turned kebab, and çevirme became shawarma in Arabic, while Turkish later switched to döner. Lebanese emigrants took it to Mexico, where it turned into tacos árabes in the 1930s and then tacos al pastor.
Source: CNN via CP24, How roasted meats went spinning all the way around the world
Skyr seems to have been made in Iceland ever since the Norse settled it in the 9th century, and back then a dairy food with the same name was known across all the Nordic countries. Only Iceland kept the tradition going. The settlers' skyr was probably sourer and thinner than the thick pots sold today, which changed most when factory production took over in the last century.
Source: Matís, Iceland's food and biotech research institute, on traditional skyr
People smoked fish to keep it long before fridges, but London's smoked salmon came with Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland in the late 1800s. In 1905 Aaron Harry Forman, who had fled Odessa, started smoking salmon in the East End, using fresh Scottish fish from Billingsgate market. H. Forman & Son calls itself the oldest salmon smoker in the world.
Blended fruit drinks first caught on in health food shops on the US West Coast, once the electric blender had arrived. In the 1960s Steve Kuhnau began blending fruit, juice and protein powder as a dairy free alternative, and in 1973 he and Cindy Kuhnau opened Smoothie King in Kenner, Louisiana. The word smoothie was in recipes and trademarks by the mid 1980s.
The name simply means butter and bread. It probably began as a farm lunch, last night's leftovers piled on a slice of rye. Copenhagen dressed it up, and in the 1930s the restaurant Oskar Davidsen became famous at home and abroad for the world's longest open sandwich menu: 1.4 metres long, with about 170 kinds, including one called the vet's midnight snack.
Snickers was launched in 1930 by Frank Mars, and the first bars were made in Chicago and sold for five cents. The story goes that it was named after one of the Mars family's favourite horses from their Milky Way Farm, and even the brand itself says allegedly. It went on to become one of the best selling chocolate bars in the world.
Soto comes from Java, and historians think Chinese cooks helped shape it. The French historian Denys Lombard traced it to caudo, a Hokkien tripe soup popular among Chinese settlers in Semarang from the 1600s, and the name soto may come from that word. The turmeric points to Indian influence, and soto ayam is simply the chicken version.
Source: The Jakarta Post, Soto reflects RI's rich culinary culture (2017)
Soy milk comes from China. Food historians William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi of the Soyinfo Center traced the first clear written record to around 1365, when it was called doufujiang, a liquid made on the way to tofu. It probably only became an everyday drink there centuries later, and it reached Europe and America in the early 1900s.
Meat ragù for pasta comes from the area around Bologna. One of the earliest recipes was written in Imola at the end of the 18th century by Alberto Alvisi, cook to a cardinal who later became Pope Pius VII, and Pellegrino Artusi printed a Bolognese ragù in 1891. In Bologna it goes with tagliatelle, spaghetti bolognese grew up abroad among Italian emigrants.
Potatoes reached Spain from the Americas in the 1500s, but the oldest known written mention of potato tortilla is from 1817 in Navarre. It appears in an anonymous letter to the Cortes of Navarre about poor farmers, describing how a few eggs and potatoes made two or three tortillas to feed a family. Popular stories that a general invented it are legends.
Source: Noticias de Navarra, Una tortilla dorada con receta navarra
Spinach comes from Persia, today's Iran, where it was called isfanakh, which is where our word comes from. It reached China by the 7th century, and the Moors brought it to Spain about 400 years later. The story goes that Catherine de' Medici loved it so much that dishes made with spinach are still called Florentine, after her home city.
Source: National Geographic, Spinach: a vegetable in need of some love
The modern sports drink started at the University of Florida in 1965, after players on the Gators football team kept wilting in the heat. Kidney doctor Robert Cade and his colleagues mixed water, sugar and salts to replace what the players sweated out, and named it Gatorade after the team. It was first used in a game against LSU on 2 October 1965, and Florida won.
Spring rolls grew out of the thin spring pancakes the Chinese ate at the start of spring, wrapped around fresh vegetables to welcome the season and wish for a good harvest. Over time the pancakes were rolled up and fried, and in the Qing dynasty spring rolls were among the dim sum served at imperial banquets. The Chinese name, chun juan, simply means spring roll.
Roasting a thick slice of meat over a fire is as old as cooking, so there is no inventor. The word is the interesting part: English steke appears in the mid 15th century, probably from Old Norse steik, roast meat, related to steikja, to roast on a spit. So a steak was first meat stuck on a spit, and the word most likely reached English through Scandinavia.
The big strawberry we eat today was born in France in the 1700s. In 1714 Amédée François Frézier, a French officer sent to spy on Spanish forts in Chile, brought home five plants of the large Chilean strawberry. In French gardens it crossed with the Virginia strawberry from North America, and in 1766 the botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne worked out that this hybrid was a new fruit.
Source: University of Minnesota Fruit Research, A spy, a botanist and a strawberry
The stroopwafel comes from Gouda, where around 1800 bakers made it from leftover crumbs and syrup and sold it cheaply at the back door as a poor man's cookie. A Gouda baker, Gerard Kamphuisen, is often named as its inventor around 1810, though that cannot be proven. Until 1870 it was made only in Gouda, which once had about 100 syrup waffle bakers.
Source: Kenniscentrum Immaterieel Erfgoed Nederland, Baking syrup waffles
Sugarcane was first grown in the East Indies, probably New Guinea, and spread through Asia to India. The word sugar travelled from Sanskrit sharkara, which first meant grit or gravel, through Persian shakar and Arabic sukkar into European languages. Sugar from beets came much later, developed in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars when France wanted a homegrown supply.
The sunflower is one of the few food crops that started in North America, where Native Americans bred wild plants into tall ones with a single big head of edible seeds. It really took off in Russia: the Orthodox Church banned butter and lard during Lent, and sunflower oil was not on the list. Soviet breeders later raised the oil in the seeds by almost half.
Source: NPR, The Salt: How The Russians Saved America's Sunflower
Sushi began as a way to keep fish rather than as a dish. Fish packed in salt and rice to ferment, called narezushi, came from the river lands of Southeast Asia and reached Japan with rice farming. In the Edo period cooks started using vinegar instead of waiting months, and around 1824 Hanaya Yohei is believed to have created nigiri in Edo, now Tokyo, as quick street food.
Sweet potato was domesticated in tropical Central or South America and was being grown there at least 5,000 years ago. Spanish sailors took it to Europe, where it was the first plant called potato, from the Caribbean word batata. Surprisingly, it was already on Pacific islands centuries before Europeans arrived, and the Polynesian kumara sounds very like the Quechua name, a clue to early contact with South America.
Source: Wikipedia, Sweet potato (history and Polynesian contact, with cited studies)
Corn tortillas are thousands of years old in Mexico, but the word taco is fairly new. Historian Jeffrey Pilcher thinks it comes from the 18th century silver mines, where a taco was a paper charge of gunpowder pushed into the rock. The first written mentions only turn up at the end of the 1800s, and one of the earliest kinds was tacos de minero, miner's tacos.
Tradition says tea has been drunk in China since about 2700 BCE, but that cannot be verified. The first published account of how to plant, process and drink it dates from around 350 CE. Dutch traders brought tea to Europe in 1610, it reached the English market in 1669, and the British began growing it in India in 1836.
Tempeh comes from Java, and it is one of the few traditional soy foods that did not start in China or Japan. The oldest written mention is in the Serat Centhini, a Javanese work written in the early 1800s but set in the early 1600s, so tempeh may be at least that old. The word tempe itself seems to come from Central Java.
Source: William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Tempeh (Soyinfo Center)
Tequila is named after the town of Tequila in Jalisco, Mexico, where blue agave grows. People there fermented agave long before the Spanish came, and distilling it into a spirit began after the conquest in the 16th century. In 1795 King Charles IV of Spain gave José María Guadalupe Cuervo the first licence to distil from agave, and his family's company still runs today.
Teriyaki is a Japanese way of grilling from the Edo period (1603 to 1868), when soy sauce became widely available and was mixed with sweet mirin into a glaze. The name says what it does: teri means shine and yaki means grilling. At first it was used mostly on fish. Japanese workers in Hawaii made a sweeter version with chicken, and that is the one the rest of the world got to know.
Source: HistoryLink.org, A Taste of History: Teriyaki in Seattle
Green curry is younger than most people think. Thai cookbooks from the early 1890s describe other curries but not this one, and the first known mention is in a 1926 book by an author writing as L Phaehtraarat. The Thai name, kaeng khiao wan, means sweet green curry, but the sweet describes the soft, pale green colour, not the taste.
Source: National Geographic, Thai green curry: revealing the spicy secrets of a culinary classic
Tiramisu is younger than most people think. The best known story says Alba Di Pillo and pastry chef Roberto Linguanotto created it at Le Beccherie restaurant in Treviso on Christmas Eve 1969, and it went on the menu in 1972. Friuli Venezia Giulia has its own, earlier claims, and the argument still goes on. The name is Italian for pick me up.
People have browned bread over a fire for about as long as there has been bread to go stale, and the word comes from the Latin tostus, meaning scorched or parched. The pop up toaster is much younger: Charles Strite, tired of burnt toast in a Minnesota factory canteen during the First World War, patented his automatic toaster in 1921.
Source: MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society, Toastmaster bread toaster
Tofu comes from China and is believed to date from the Han dynasty, between 206 BC and 220 AD. The story goes that Prince Liu An of Huainan, whose court was full of alchemists, first curdled soy milk into tofu. Historians doubt the tale, and the oldest clear written mention of tofu is centuries later, so nobody really knows who made it first.
Tom yum comes from the river communities of central Thailand, where freshwater prawns were plentiful and people boiled them with lemongrass, lime leaves and galangal. The name joins tom, to boil, and yum, a sharp and spicy Thai salad. The soup is surely older than its paperwork, but the first written versions appear in Thai books from 1898 and 1908, under King Rama V.
Source: Thailand Foundation, Tom Yum Kung: The Symbol of Thai Culinary Spirit
The wild tomato comes from the Andes, mainly Peru and Ecuador, but it was domesticated in Mexico, and its name comes from the Aztec word tomatl. Spanish explorers brought it to Europe in the early 1500s. Italians called it pomodoro, golden apple, perhaps because the first ones were yellow, while many northern Europeans long distrusted it, because it belongs to the nightshade family.
The famous canned version starts with Campbell's in Camden, New Jersey, which sold a ready to eat Beefsteak Tomato soup in 1895. In 1897 a 24 year old chemist, John T. Dorrance, worked out how to take the water out, so soup fit in a small, cheaper can. The red and white label came in 1898, after an executive admired Cornell's new football kit, and Andy Warhol painted the cans in 1962.
Tonic water began as medicine. British officers in India in the 1800s took quinine, from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, to fight malaria, and mixed the bitter stuff with soda water, sugar, lime and often gin. Schweppes started selling Indian Tonic Water in London in 1870. Today's tonic has far too little quinine to protect anyone.
The tortilla is far older than the wrap. People in Mesoamerica made corn flatbreads for thousands of years and called them tlaxcalli in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. The Spanish, arriving in the 16th century, named them tortilla, little cake, and brought wheat. Flour tortillas, the kind used for wraps, came much later and caught on mainly in northern Mexico and the United States.
Nuts and raisins as a hiking snack go back at least to the 1910s, when American outdoorsman Horace Kephart wrote in his camping guide that a handful each of shelled nuts and raisins, with a cake of sweet chocolate, will carry a man far on the trail. The nickname gorp is often said to stand for good old raisins and peanuts, but that explanation may have been made up later.
Source: Wikipedia, Trail mix (quoting Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft)
Tuna has been fished for thousands of years, but the tin is fairly new. In 1893 Albert Halfhill opened Southern California's first sardine cannery on Terminal Island in San Pedro, and in 1903 he started canning tuna as well. It was sold as a cheaper alternative to chicken, and San Pedro grew into one of the big fishing ports of the United States.
Source: The Log, Southern California Fish Co.: San Pedro's First Cannery
Turkeys are American birds. The Smithsonian says the first evidence of people keeping and breeding them comes from Tehuacán in Mexico, about 2,000 years ago. The name is most likely a mix up: Europeans already called the African guinea fowl a turkey cock because it arrived through Turkish trade, and the American bird got the same name.
Twix was first made in 1967 at the Mars factory in Slough, England, and only reached the United States in 1979. In much of mainland Europe it was sold as Raider until 1991, when it took the Twix name everywhere. The name is usually explained as a blend of twin and sticks, after the two fingers in every pack.
Tzatziki comes from the Turkish cacık, a yoghurt dip with cucumber and garlic found all over the old Ottoman Empire. Cacık first appears in print in 1844, in the first Ottoman cookbook, described simply as yoghurt with cucumber and garlic. An older relative, yoghurt salads called jajaq, is already in a 10th century Baghdad cookbook.
Udon probably came to Japan from China. A popular legend says the monk Kukai, from Kagawa, brought wheat noodles home after studying in China about 1,200 years ago, which is why Kagawa is still Japan's udon capital. In the Edo period, pilgrims to the Kotohira shrine ate Sanuki udon at its gates and carried the taste back all over the country.
Russia and Poland both claim vodka, and nobody knows for sure who made it first. Britannica notes that a liquor called vodka was present in Russia in the 14th century, and some historians think it is older still. The name is a diminutive of voda, the Russian word for water, so it means little water. It only spread widely in the US and Western Europe after World War II.
Waffles grew out of thin wafers baked between two hot metal plates, a method that goes back to ancient Greece. In medieval Europe the irons were often decorated with crosses and Bible scenes, and the wafers were eaten by peasants and kings alike. Around the 15th century Dutch makers switched to rectangular plates, and the English word comes from the Dutch wafel.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, These Beautiful Medieval Wafer Presses Are Where Waffles Come From
The walnut tree is native to Iran and the lands around it, which is why it is also called the Persian walnut. People there have grown it for thousands of years, and the Greeks and Romans spread it around the Mediterranean. Its Latin name Juglans regia means royal nut of Jupiter.
Watermelon comes from northeast Africa. A 2021 study found its closest wild relative is the Kordofan melon of Sudan, which has pale, non bitter flesh people can eat raw. That fits a 4,300 year old Egyptian tomb painting at Saqqara showing a big green striped melon among other sweet fruits. For about 150 years, scientists had wrongly placed its origin in South Africa.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, Researchers uncover watermelon's origins
Whey is the liquid left over when milk is curdled to make cheese, so it is as old as cheesemaking itself. For a long time cheesemakers did not know what to do with it and fed it to animals or threw it away. Only around the early 2000s did the dairy industry start selling it as the protein powder in today's tubs.
Source: Texas A&M AgriLife Today, From cheese byproduct to protein supplement
The oldest written record of whisky making in Scotland is from 1494, when the Exchequer Rolls list eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor to make aqua vitae, Latin for water of life. In Gaelic that is uisge beatha, which became the word whisky. Whether monks brought distilling or Highland farmers worked it out themselves, nobody knows for sure.
Burger King co-founder James McLamore created the Whopper in Miami in 1957, and it sold for 37 cents. He got the idea after seeing a rival restaurant in Gainesville, Florida, do well with a bigger burger. He picked the name because it suggested something big.
The oldest wine found so far comes from Georgia, in the South Caucasus. Pottery jars dug up at Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about 50 km south of Tbilisi, held chemical traces of grape wine from around 6000 BC, roughly 8,000 years ago. The study was led by Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and published in 2017.
Read the full story · Source: Decanter, World's oldest wine comes from Georgia, new research
Nobody knows who made the first yoghurt. Milk probably soured and thickened by itself in warm pots thousands of years ago, likely somewhere in Western Asia, possibly in what is now Turkey. The word comes from Turkish yoğurt, linked to a verb for thickening. In 1905 Bulgarian Stamen Grigorov found the bacterium that does the work, still named after Bulgaria.
Zapiekanka was born in 1970s communist Poland. Edward Gierek's government allowed small private food stalls, and Poland had started baking French style baguettes under a licence he bought. Half a baguette with mushrooms and cheese was cheap, quick and filling in lean years, and the stalls sold it everywhere. The name simply means something baked.