Natural selection and discriminating palates have seen to it that we choose our foods carefully, so it’s not surprising that much of what we consume has been part of our diets for a long time. We’ve sprinkled salt on our food for thousands of years; there are grains that we have eaten for 17,000 years. Not that humans haven’t made great strides in food production and preparation over the ages; the variety of available foods is greater now than ever. In this chapter we take a look at many of our most common foods and track them back as far as we can. Some of our foods date back only to the previous century. But it might come as a surprise to learn that chewing gum goes back to ancient times, both in Europe and the Americas. Among other revelations: salt has been used in warfare; the spread of margarine caused an interesting backlash by dairy farmers. You’ll also discover what is the most popular dessert in the United States, which grain was generic for “local grain”. The fact that some foods have been on the menu for a long time does not seem to make them any more or less popular than recent items. While we have more packaged, easily prepared foods than did our ancestors, we have more choice in what we eat and thus every reason to fill our shopping carts with the market’s best offerings, both ancient and modern.
DAILY FARE
Modern nutritionists caution that one of the worst things for human diets is too little variety; the more kinds of foods people eat in a day or week, the more likely they are to get all of the necessary nutrients to make their bodies strong and healthy. Societies have instinctively evolved diets that rely on a diverse array of nutritious staples—and, of course, the choice of those foods depends on geography, religion, climate, culture, and many other things. Following are a few of the foods that modern Americans like to eat, even if not every one of them is entirely healthful.
Pancakes
The humble pancake truly spans the globe—regional variations can be found in Europe, Asia, Africa, Central America, and North America. Whether they’re called pancakes, griddle cakes, flapjacks, johnnycakes, hotcakes, Pfannkuchen, crêpes, crespelle, Palatschinken, nalesniki, Pannenkoeken, blini, or dosa (and that’s not a complete list), this common and versatile food starts with a batter, usually sweetened, that can be poured onto a griddle or into a pan and cooked through.
We may never know which culture or cook made the first pancakes, but one Christian tradition may provide a clue: “Fat Tuesday” or “Pancake Day” is the day before Ash Wednesday, which starts the liturgical season of Lent. It was the last day people could use fat or oils in their cooking before the 40-day fast. In other words, pancakes may have developed as a means of quickly using up cooking fats before they spoiled.
The modern pancake is similar to the Roman flatbread alita dolcia (“another sweet”), made from flour, milk, eggs, and spices; they were often served with pepper and honey. The first reference to pancakes in English is in a culinary book from the 1430s.
Native Americans of the Narragansett tribe made a soft batter shaped by hands called a nokehick. Other cornmeal pancakes were called Indian cakes as early as 1607, while buckwheat pancakes were made by Dutch settlers, and by 1740, colonists were cooking “hoe cakes” in the fire on the flat blade of that tool.
American pancakes are traditionally served with maple syrup and butter, a practice that may have its roots in the recipe for crêpes Suzette (perhaps originally served by one Monsieur Joseph at the Restaurant Marivaux) that Henri Charpentier, a French maître d’hotel, brought to the United States in the 1930s. Crêpes Suzette are covered with a sauce of caramelized sugar, citrus juice, and liqueur, and their sweet stickiness brought about a vogue for pancakes with similar toppings.
Waffles
Its batter similar to pancakes, the waffle gains distinction through its cooking method. The “wafer,” as medieval people called it, was cooked between hinged metal plates often embossed with heraldic symbols. Today, the waffle’s indented pattern (source of the term “waffling,” both for fabric and for back-and-forth behavior) provides nooks for toppings.
Breakfast Cereal
Cold breakfast cereals composed of flakes were invented in the United States but breakfasts of different kinds of grains have been consumed for many thousands of years. Not just a millennia or three, either; emmer and einkorn wheat consumption have been dated back 17,000 years. The word cereal derives from the name Ceres, for the Roman goddess of the harvest, and refers to grasses with edible grains or seeds.
Most cereal grains need to be soaked or at least softened with liquid before eating, making a “porridge.” An example is the rice congee popular in China, or Indian poha. Congee is often eaten cold, but many porridges are served hot, particularly in northern climates.
In their unrefined form, cereal grains are extremely nutritious; the grains contain all the nutrients that the plant in its embryonic form needs to grow. Unfortunately, in some Western countries, milled cereal grains, with fewer nutrients, have become popular because they have a longer shelf life—the outer layers of unmilled grains are high in fat and can spoil more quickly.
Although there are many different cereal grains, including spelt, teff, quinoa, barley, sorghum, buckwheat, and grain amaranth, most American breakfast cereals (hot and cold) are based on wheat and oats. Oatmeal, Cream of Rice, Cream of Wheat, and Wheatena are usually served with hot or cold milk and sweetened to individual taste. Residents of southern states often eat hot cornmeal known as “grits” for breakfast, served with butter and salt or sugar. Besides being cheap and easy to make, porridges of cereal grains are easy to digest, and thus are often given to people recovering from illness.
Kellogg and Health Foods
William “Will” Keith Kellogg did not set out to invent corn flakes. He was soaking wheat bran to make bread dough in the health sanitarium he ran with his brother John Harvey Kellogg when he noticed that the finished dough was breaking into smaller pieces. He baked the pieces and served them. The crispy wheat “flakes” became a huge hit with the patients, who asked to have packets shipped to them at home after they were discharged. Soon Will discovered that corn made a lighter, tastier flake. He founded the world’s first ready-to-eat-cereal company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Company, now known, of course, as Kelloggs.
Sandwich
John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, certainly contributed his title’s name to the popular snack of two pieces of bread holding some type of filling. In 1762, Montagu, a notoriously avid gambler, realized that the type of food he’d seen in his Middle and Near Eastern travels would allow him to sate his appetite while remaining at cards.
However, the snack itself dates back to the first-century B.C. Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, who placed lamb and bitter herbs between pieces of matzo bread during Passover; the Romans called this concoction cibus Hilleli, or “Hillel’s snack.” Other cultures, including Middle and Near Eastern, made sandwiches long before they caught on in the West, and in Europe it seems the Dutch belegde broodje (“filled roll”) was popular a century before the Earl of Sandwich ever saw a cribbage board.
It took a while for sandwiches to progress from late-night men’s fare to general society snack, but by 1824, oyster loaves appeared in The Virginia Housewife, and by the end of the 19th century sandwiches had become so accepted that they appeared in the 1887 White House Cookbook. As sandwiches grew in popularity, they also grew in variety: From ham biscuits to deli Reubens, muffulettas to BLTs, loosemeats to cheesesteaks, Americans found many ways to put meals between pieces of bread. From their British forebears Americans also took the concept of “sandwich bread,” also known as the Pullman loaf, that was shaped in a convenient rectangle and had a firmly packed crumb so that sandwich eaters would not lose most of their bread in their laps while eating.
Today sandwiches are made for and eaten at every meal. While many sandwiches are made at home (especially those with sweet fillings, like peanut butter and jelly), the market for custom and prepackaged sandwiches has gotten bigger. Sandwiches like Vietnamese banh mi and Scandinavian smorrebrod are available everywhere in the world, proving that one man’s snack has become the world’s favorite.
Sliced Bread
Invented by an Iowan in 1917, the bread-slicing machine got its commercial start in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1928 but got its commercial breakthrough when it was used to section nutrient-enriched Wonder Bread in 1930. Though the U.S. government attempted to impose a World War II ban on the machines, it lasted only three months.
Canned Goods
The history of canned goods owes a great deal to two modern conflicts. During the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), the famous French general realized that in order to keep his armies fed, he needed a new method of food preservation. Bonaparte decided to offer a prize to the man who could figure it out, and in 1810, Nicolas Appert won with his method of heating and then sealing food.
Also in 1810, Englishman Peter Durand developed his own way of heating food, then sealing it in unbreakable containers made of tin. For many years, in Europe and the United States, commercial canning methods remained the same (home canners, of course, used glass jars and bottles, sterilizing them in a water bath, as they do today): After preparation, foods would be heated to about 250°F, then sealed into containers. It wasn’t until Louis Pasteur’s experiments later in the 19th century that people began to understand that the heating process killed off bacteria already contained in the food, and the airtight sealing prevented any further bacteria from contaminating the processed edibles.
The canning process’s simplicity is probably why no great leaps in its development were made until World War I, when once again large armies needed foodstuffs that would last a long while and be portable over great distances. Not only did commanders agitate for cheap, high-calorie fare—they also tried different regional favorites in attempts to keep their soldiers happy. This resulted in manufacturers’ experimenting with many of the dishes we keep in our cupboards today, like canned bean dishes, pastas, and tomato sauces.
Meanwhile, manufacturers were finally making improvements to the tin cans, which, while strong and convenient, were also prone to leaks and often harbored botulism toxin when leaks were unnoticed or ignored. The new, tin-coated steel, double-seamed cans with welded side seams keep food airtight for much longer.
Noodles
For many years, several cultures vied for the title of noodle inventor; in 2005, China staked its claim to the honor when archaeologists discovered a bowl of perfectly preserved long noodles in the northeastern area of Lajia.
However, just because the Chinese invented noodles doesn’t mean they invented pasta—what Americans knew for years as “macaroni.” Pasta is not simply noodles in a different shape; it’s actually made from a different wheat. While many types of noodles could be made from Triticum aestivum, or soft wheat, macaroni can be made only from Triticum turgidum var. durum, the “durum wheat” with a high gluten content that makes possible hard, dry pasta with a long, stable shelf life.
The interesting and important thing that that tells us is that it wasn’t the ancient Romans or their forebears the Etruscans who invented pasta, because neither of those groups knew of durum wheat. Who did? It seems to have been the Arabs; in a dictionary compiled by the ninth-century Syrian physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali, itriyya is defined as stringlike pasta shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking. A few centuries later, Arab writers found a variety of itriyya they called triyakh in Sicily; it’s difficult to know if Sicilians had developed the pasta on their own or through contact with another culture.
Of course, Sicilians and their fellow mainland Italians were responsible for forming pasta made of semolina flour into dozens of forms and shapes, designed for different mouth feels and for serving with different kinds of sauces. In the 1880s, the first significant waves of Sicilian immigrants came to the U.S., bringing their cuisine and its maccheroni with them (of course, immigrants from other Italian regions brought their pasta shapes, too; however, Sicilians came in large numbers).
Tortillas
Soft or fried, corn tortillas are an unmistakable sign of Mexican cuisine, and that’s partly because maize itself is unmistakably part of the Mexican diet. Maize (from the Latin Zea mays) was sacred to the Mexica, or Aztec, people, supplying their main source of starch, as well as some protein and fat.
Though some corn was eaten green, most of it was stored in ventilated cribs and later boiled in limewater to make a softened gruel called nixtamal. This could either be soaked for a tender, starchy dish known as pozole or, more often, ground into a mealy flour known as masa for tortillas. The traditional method of making tortillas involves a stone slab called a metate and a stone roller that’s used to turn a lump of the nixtamal into masa. Once that’s done, a cook will take a golf ball-size lump of masa between her moistened hands and pat it into a round, flat cake that’s thrown on to a hot griddle, or comal, for 20 to 30 seconds per side.
The finished tortilla ideally is less than one-eighth inch thick and about six to eight inches in diameter. Tortillas aren’t just bread; they’re also spoons, forks, serving plates, and the building blocks for other Mexican dishes such as tacos, enchiladas, and burritos. Having cornered 32 percent of the sales for the U.S. bread industry, tortillas trail white bread sales by only 2 percent, making them the second most popular bread type in America, with sales surpassing whole wheat bread, bagels, and rolls. Annual growth for the tortilla industry has expanded 9 percent; in 2002, the U.S. tortilla industry had sales reaching $5.2 billion.
TV Dinners
Frozen meals are a relatively recent innovation, although ancient cultures, including the Chinese and Greek, experimented with cellars made of ice or insulated by snow. It wasn’t until Clarence Birdseye, a Canadian engineer and avid fisherman, applied freezing technology to food so that it could be marketed as a convenience. However, the public didn’t embrace frozen foods until World War II metal needs made canned goods scarce.
Once frozen foods caught on, people started looking for new ways to use them. The war was over, the standard of living was high, and a new style of cooking and dining was on the rise. Into this mix came television, drawing families around it and making people unwilling to spend time on cooking when a particular show was due to start.
But it wasn’t the TV itself that inspired “TV dinners”; it was a turkey surplus. In 1953, C. A. Swanson and Sons, a frozen foods company based in Omaha, Nebraska, grossly overestimated the demand for frozen turkeys at Thanksgiving and had 520,000 pounds of extra frozen poultry. A traveling salesman for the company, Gerry Thomas, had experimented with aluminum trays that airlines used for heated food and developed a three-compartment design. He presented his design to the Swansons, filled with turkey and trimmings and made to look like a television, complete with “control” knobs. Most food historians agree that the segmented tray, which kept foods tidy and reminded consumers of childhood, made TV dinners such a success.
On the Side
The phrase “on the side” can refer to a way of serving food as well as the dishes that traditionally accompany a main course. In this section, however, we cover mostly spices and condiments, those items “on the side” that add flavor and savor to our favorite foods. From the most basic—salt—to the slightly more complicated—mayonnaise—these delicious extras have stories at least as interesting as other foodstuffs in this chapter. Don’t see your favorite sauce or flavoring h
Salt
Salt is more than just a foodstuff. Earth’s only edible rock has been used as a weapon —armies once “salted the earth” to prevent enemies from being able to regrow crops. Salt is sacred to many cultures, and was once placed on a baby’s lips during baptism in reference to Jesus calling his disciples the “salt of the earth” in Matthew’s gospel. It’s been used as currency—the word salary comes from the Latin salarium, or “payment in salt.” It’s even essential to life— humans once got all of their salt from eating meat, but as agrarian societies developed, more salt was needed as a supplement (every human takes in about 1.6 pounds of salt per year). Ironically, while some salt is needed for survival, over-consumption of salt can cause health problems like high blood pressure.
Salt made civilization possible, since humans were able to preserve food with it and travel distances. Since salt can be produced both through evaporation of seawater and in salt mines, both coastal and inland cultures had access to it, and control of large salt mines has often been a method of empire building. Taxes on salt, such as the 18th-century French gabelle and the 20th-century Indian tax, have incited social change and revolution.
Today both sea and mined salt from different countries is available, for both eating and cooking uses. The salt many of us use on our tables was revolutionized by a man named Joy Morton, whose Morton Salt Company now supplies most of the salt in the United States. In 1911, Morton pioneered the use of magnesium carbonate (now calcium silicate) in salt to keep it free-flowing even in humid weather. Morton Salt’s slogan, When It Rains It Pours, and logo of a little girl with an umbrella have appeared on its blue packages since 1914.
Salt Extraction Industry
Before frozen food, the most practical method of preserving meat involved salting it. The main source of salt in the young United States of America was the ocean along its Atlantic coastline. As salt prices rose, extraction via solar evaporation became the preferred method of obtaining salt, and it involved windmills to pump water into wooden vats that could be covered in case of rain. In the early 19th century Captain John Sears of East Dennis, Massachusetts, proposed some improvements that included the eventual running off of brine into “salt rooms” for crystallization. While his ideas were at first known as “Sears’ Folly,” the captain’s salt works eventually grew to be the largest on Cape Cod, and even after salt production ceased to be profitable for food manufacturing, Epsom and magnesium salts were produced near the Bass River at South Yarmouth.
Salt Superstitions
Thrown, sprinkled, or dissolved, salt figures in many superstitious practices, like tossing a pinch of salt over one’s shoulder after spilling some. These beliefs stem both from salt’s historical costliness and its properties as purifier and preservative, making the mineral a symbol of a good and long life.
Pepper
Although there are many different kinds of pepper fruits around the world, when modern Westerners refer to “pepper,” they are usually talking about the dried ground “corns” that are the fruit of the Piperaceae family, with Piper nigrum (black pepper) the most common. The black pepper plant is a climbing vine native to India’s Malabar Coast that can reach 30 feet or more.
Green peppercorns all come from the same plant, growing in spiky clusters on the vines, which are planted on small, carefully tended plots. Each clustered spike (about 50 berries in all) must be picked at a different time depending on the type of pepper desired. Pink “peppercorns” are actually a completely different kind of spice, but sometimes marketed as pepper.
Pepper came to world attention through Roman trade, and after it weakened in the third century A.D., Arabs held control of the spice trade for centuries, trading in Venice, Constantinople, and Alexandria. Pepper was very costly, and European nations wanted a new source of the spice. This fueled the great exploration boom of the Renaissance; for example, Vasco da Gama of Portugal reached Kerala in East India in 1498, and for a century, Portugal ruled the spice route, with Lisbon becoming a wealthy town. In 1602, the Dutch (who had won their freedom from Spain in the 16th century) founded the Dutch East India Company and gained trade supremacy, until after 200 years, the British East India Company gained that power.
The Spice Trade
One of the most important things to consider about the spice routes is that ancient and medieval peoples who were eager for substances like cinnamon and cloves weren’t simply on a quest for tastier food—they sometimes needed spices to preserve food properly, to mask bad flavors, and for use as currency. The European demand for spices that grew primarily in Asia and Africa led to the centuries-long search for new shipping routes that would be faster and safer, avoiding the treacherous Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa. Eventually, the search for new routes led explorers to the Americas
Margarine
Margarine, once and sometimes still known as oleomargarine, seems a most modern substance, so it might be a little surprising to learn that it’s been around for more than a century. Emperor Louis Napoleon III offered a prize to formulate a substitute for butter “for the working class and, incidentally for the Navy.” Western Europe was running low on fats and oils, and popular demand for soaps (caused by a rising standard of living) was cutting into vegetable fat sources. A Provençal chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès mixed beef tallow with skimmed milk.
Mège-Mouriès used something that he and others called “margaric acid,” from a slight error by a chemist named Michel Chevreul. Chevreul had isolated a fatty acid that formed “pearls” of animal fat, and he named it after the root of the Greek word for “pearl.” Margarine caught on quickly in Europe and in the United States beginning with World War II and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s—so quickly that the powerful American dairy industry pushed back against its supply. Margarine was so cheap that dairy farmers tried everything to slow its production, from having it declared a “harmful drug,” to taxing its sale, requiring stores that sold it to have a special license, and, finally, forcing it to be sold without the food dyes that made it look appetizing. Some opponents of the spread even wanted it to be colored pink so it would be truly unappealing.
After a while, many companies began selling uncolored margarine accompanied by a little sack of yellow food coloring that users would knead in so that their margarine would be a buttery yellow. In 1950, federal taxes on margarine were abolished. Tub margarines were introduced in the 1960s, which provided soft, easily usable, butter-colored spread.
Today, many people choose margarine over butter as their spread of choice due to health reasons rather than cost.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, a single tablespoon of butter contains 33 of the 200 milligrams of cholesterol recommended as the daily maximum, and 7 of the 10 to 15 grams of saturated fat recommended per day. On the other hand, many people prefer to continue eating butter, while simply exercising moderation. Julia Child famously said, “I don’t eat so much butter and cream—just enough!”
Peanut Butter
You probably learned in school that African-American agricultural chemist George Washington Carver “invented” peanut butter. It’s true that Carver, who figured out 300 different uses for the peanut, discovered that when ground into a paste, peanuts were delicious and filling. However, Carver did not believe in patenting his findings. “God gave them to me,” he would say about his ideas. “How can I sell them to someone else?”
Thus Carver’s best known concoction didn’t make him rich, and he would have said that was just fine. Peanut butter has actually been “invented” and then reinvented many times since the crop’s early origins in Brazil, around 950 B.C. The ancient Inca pounded peanuts into a paste, and that was one of the specimens early explorers brought back to the West. It became a commercial crop in the United States, first in North Carolina (around 1818) and then later in Virginia, which became famous for its peanuts.
Many other inventors contributed to peanut butter’s development as a popular foodstuff, including Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Kellogg’s cereal fame, who marketed a nut-grinding machine in the late 1890s. However, when Joseph L. Rosenfield of Alameda, California, invented a mixing process to smooth out the previously lumpy peanut butter, the nut paste really took off. Rosenfield licensed his process to Pond’s in 1928, which began selling Peter Pan peanut butter. A few years later, Rosenfield introduced Skippy, his own brand of peanut butter, sold in crunchy and creamy styles.
Today more than half of all edible peanuts grown in the United States are used to make peanut butter, and the Procter & Gamble plant that makes Jif brand peanut butter produces 250,000 jars every day. In recent decades, higher numbers of people sensitive to peanut allergies have made peanut butter unwelcome in some schools and childcare centers. However, peanut butter remains a staple, with the average American consuming nearly four pounds each year.
Peanut butter and jelly existed independently long before World War II, but it took hungry young GIs (and perhaps the newly available sliced loaves of bread) to think of putting the two spreads into one sandwich. Since the 1940s, this salty-sweet combo has captured the taste buds of Americans young and old.
Pickles
Crisp green pickled cucumbers are common sandwich sides around the United States, but anything can be pickled—even a side of beef. While pickled vegetables and fruits most often go by the name “pickles,” pickling is a process that has been around for thousands of years in nearly every culture’s foodways, from South Asian hot pickles (which are often made from vegetables and citrus fruits) and Korean kimchi (pickled cabbage and other vegetables) to kosher dills.
Pickling, also known as “corning,” involves submerging food in a salt solution, or brine. This solution can also be a marinade with a more acidic edge; the important thing is that the process causes anaerobic fermentation, adding B vitamins and breaking down necrobacteria so that food can be preserved for long periods of time.
The preservational properties of pickling meant that early sailors could bring along salt pork and salt beef (“corned beef” is another term for pickled or salt beef). Pickled foods were originally introduced to American cuisine from English and German traditions, in which brined meats and vegetables (onions, cabbage, cucumbers, carrots, beans, hardcooked eggs) played a large role.
As immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, especially from Jewish backgrounds, settled in New York and other urban areas, their traditional cucumber pickles became a staple in delicatessens. On New York City’s Lower East Side, “pickle men” had shops with large wooden barrels of their different wares displayed near the street. There were so many people working in pickling by 1893 that they formed a trade organization called Pickle Packers International.
Today cucumber pickles can be found whole, in spears, in slices, sizes large and small, and flavors sweet or sour. One of the perennial favorites, “Kosher dills,” may or may not be prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary laws (kashruth), but their garlicky flavor is now beloved by Americans of all religious and ethnic persuasions.
Salsa
The Spanish word “salsa” can be combined with others (“roja,” “verde,” “cruda”) to mean different kinds of sauces, but in the U.S. it usually means a chunky blend of tomatoes, peppers, and onions, with its origins in Mexican cuisine. Once considered “ethnic food,” salsa has now surpassed tomato ketchup as America’s favorite condiment.
Mayonnaise
The term mayonnaise has murky beginnings. Some think it’s derived from mahonnaise, for the Spanish port of Mahon, where the French defeated the British in a 1756 naval battle, and enjoyed the port’s allioli, an egg-based sauce flavored with lots of garlic. Others say it’s from the French verb manier, “to mix or blend.” Still others say the word derives from the Old French moyeu, egg yolk. We could go on, but the most important thing for connoisseurs to know is that the first recorded English use of mayonnaise was in an 1841 cookbook. Ironic, considering that the always slightly anti-Gallic British rechristened this condiment “salad cream” in 1914—even keeping the name after an attempt to return to “mayonnaise” resulted in a public outcry in 1999.
On a large and diverse continent, regional tastes regulate mayonnaise sales. However, given the dozens of delicatessens in New York City, it won’t surprise anyone to know that the first manufactured mayo was born there, in Richard Hellman’s Columbus Avenue storefront in 1905. Hellman packaged and sold his wife’s homemade recipe, and it became so popular that in 1912 he built a factory to produce it in larger quantities. He called the new product Hellman’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise.
Mustard
By combining “must” (unfermented grape juice) with seeds of the “Sinapis hirta” plant, Romans made “mustum ardens,” or “burning must.” Thus our third most popular American condiment, mustard, takes its name not from the “mustard plant,” as we often think, but from the vinegar that is usually mixed with “mustard powder” to make the sharp-flavored spread.
Ketchup
Today “ketchup” is synonymous with “tomato,” but its origins are completely different. The thick red sauce takes its name from the Chinese ki-tsiap, a savory, fermented fish sauce. Dutch and English sailors brought a taste for the salty stuff back home, but in place of its exotic ingredients tried more indigenous items like walnuts, celery, and mushrooms. Mushroom ketchup (with nary a tomato in sight) is still widely available in the United Kingdom.
When ketchup reached the New World, it coincided with the latest food trend: tomatoes. Tomatoes were indigenous to the Americas (possibly originating with the Aztecs in about A.D. 700), but it took European exploration to introduce them to and popularize them in North America.
Snacks
Your mother was probably quick to tell you not to spoil your dinner, but you have history on your side when it comes to snacking. Even ancient cultures created small dishes or treats to eat while traveling, and nearly every culture has enjoyed small dishes and treats to serve family and friends at certain times of the day. Some of the modern snacks in this section are fairly substantial, like cheese, pizza, and hot dogs, but when you consider them alongside a miner’s Cornish pasty or a farmer’s hearty sandwich, their relative lightweight status is apparent.
Swiss Cheese
In countless television cartoons, mice are lured out of their baseboard homes with chunks of the hole-spotted dairy product viewers recognize as “Swiss cheese.” This mild yet distinctively flavored fromage is a favorite in U.S. kitchens, but that’s not because Americans have an obsession with Switzerland. First of all, “Swiss cheese” is a slight misnomer. The cheese we know as “Swiss” does have its origin in a cheese from Switzerland called Emmentaler. Emmentaler is produced in the Emme Valley, part of the Swiss canton of Bern. (Switzerland is home to 450 varieties of cheese.)
Although the appellation “Emmenthaler Switzerland” is protected, “Emmental” is not. Many countries produce some type of Emmentaler, and in the United States when Swiss and Scandinavian immigrants began producing Emmentaler, the cheese became known simply as Swiss cheese.
Swiss cheese gets its holes (technically known as “eyes”) from a bacterium called Propionibacter that eats lactic acid produced by two other bacteria (Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus). Carbon dioxide released from Proprionibacter forces bubbles into the cheese, and that makes the eyes. The propionic acid is also responsible for the nutty flavor and “bite” of Swiss cheese. Americans eat a lot of cheese, maybe even too much: In 1975 the per capita consumption of cheese was 14.5 pounds. By 2006, that number was up to 32.5 pounds. There’s good reason for that, at least as far as Swiss cheese is concerned: As a snack or appetizer, Swiss cheese is a satisfying combination of taste and texture. It’s a firm enough cheese to be eaten in cubes with fingers or toothpicks, sliced on a cracker, with fruit on a cheese plate, or with cold cuts on bread. Because of its mild flavor, many children like Swiss cheese.
The bigger the eyes in Swiss cheese, the more intense the flavor—because more propionic acid has been generated. The large eyes can make slicing the cheese into uniform pieces difficult. It used to be that Swiss cheese eyes needed to be between 11/16 and 13/16 inch (about the size of a nickel) to be stamped Grade A. Now cheese with holes as small as 3/8 inch, about half the originally required size, can earn the highest grade.
Cold Cuts
Nearly every culture’s cuisine includes some form of sausage and/or cured meat. A list of different types would be as long as this entire chapter! Native Americans made “pemmican,” a primitive type of sausage consisting of dried buffalo meat and berries, which could be considered the first American cured meat. Naturally, each group that arrived in this country introduced a different sort of meat product that falls under the category of lunch meat, luncheon meat, deli meat, cold meat, sandwich meat, and more.
Dutch and English settlers would have contributed their softer sausages, which often include some sort of cereal grain mixed with ground meat. English “bangers” are one example, and live on today in some mild deli meats that are sliced, like “Devon sausage.” Dutch and German settlers also made mixed sausages and loaf meats like “headcheese” that inspired pickle loaf, Lebanon bologna, and olive loaf. German and Italian immigrants brought numerous varieties of cured meats, including cured sausages like Jagdwurst and salami, as well as pastrami and prosciutto.
The term “cold cuts” came about when refrigeration became more widespread in food markets. These easily spoiled meats were kept in a cold case and sliced to order for customers. Today some deli meats are sausages, some roasts that are sliced (like roast turkey or roast beef), and still others are processed meat products, like chicken loaf or liverwurst. In the United States, cold cuts are most often consumed in sandwiches, and sometimes on buffets, but they are rarely eaten for breakfast as they are in Europe. Today, cold cuts are often purchased presliced and prepackaged, and can even be found in sandwich-making “kits” so that a consumer doesn’t need to worry about having on hand different ingredients like a roll, condiments, or cheese.
Popcorn
Popcorn is an indigenous food product that is also cheap, wholesome, low-calorie, and versatile. However, the word corn originally did not refer to cobs at roadside stands as it does today; it’s Old English for “local grain.” The “corn” in the Bible (e.g., Ruth “among the alien corn”) probably meant barley. In England it would have been wheat, and in Scotland and Ireland, oats. European settlers in the New World called the common grain found there “corn,” although its proper name is “maize” (Zea mays).
Maize has grown in the Americas for millennia, and has been popped for at least 2,500 years. The oldest popped whole ears of corn were discovered in New Mexico. Popcorn pops when water and oil trapped between its dense endosperm and hard hull boil up when heated. The pressure forces moisture into the endosperm and the outer hulls crack. Many people, including the early colonists, ate sweetened popcorn, sometimes with milk poured over it, for breakast. The Massachusetts Wampanoags, who introduced popcorn to the first Thanksgiving feast in Plymouth, even made beer from leftover popcorn that they would ferment like any other grain.
Around the 1890s, popcorn became a common snack food, partly because of that era’s health-food boom. Most popcorn (70 percent) is bought and consumed at home, and produced in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio. Some of the remaining 30 percent is eaten at cinemas, popcorn having gained popularity with moviegoers in the 1920s. One nostalgic popcorn-making method for modern Americans is Jiffy Pop, a foil-topped pan with a handle; its top becomes an aluminum mushroom cloud when shaken over heat.
Nachos
As befits its belly-filling qualities, the popular snack known as nachos came about out when some people had the munchies. It was 1943 in Coahuila, Mexico, and a group of military wives from the nearby U.S. Army base of Eagle Pass came into the town’s Victory Club looking for hors d’oeuvres after the restaurant had closed for the evening. Head chef Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya threw together deep-fried triangles of corn tortilla with cheese and jalapeño peppers and baked them briefly until the cheese melted. Before you could say “Bueno appetito,” the cheesy, crispy dish had been devoured. The Modernos Restaurant in Coahuila’s Piedras Negras serves the original recipe.
Hot Dogs
Everyone makes jokes about what goes into hot dogs. “You don’t want to see the sausage being made” has grown into a catchphrase about avoiding the inner workings of things like politics and business because many people think that the finely ground, highly spiced contents of a sausage casing might be anything from bits of offal to bits that are truly awful, like vermin droppings.
This isn’t fair to American’s favorite version of sausage. Hot dogs did not originate as a catchall for butcher castoffs. They come to us from Germany, where sausage-making is an elaborate art. Two cities contributed to the “Frankfurter wiener” that we now know as a “hot dog”; in Vienna, or Wien, a Frankfurt-trained butcher concocted the “wiener-frankfurther.” At about the same time, the early 1850s, the Frankfurt butcher’s guild created a new sausage called a “frankfurter” with a slightly curved shape. Legend has it that the shape came about because one of the butchers had a dachshund, and that’s how Americans came to call the cooked sausage a “hot dog.”
That might not be true, but it is true that the long, mild “wiener sausage” came to the U.S. with German immigrants. In 1867, Charles Feltman opened the first hot dog stand on New York’s Coney Island. While Feltman sold his sausages on rolls, as Germans and Austrians had been eating them for years, credit for the hot dog bun is generally given to St. Louis vendor Antoine Feuchtwanger, who in 1880 asked his brother-in-law to bake long, slender rolls to help keep his patrons’ hands from getting burned.
As for the term “hot dog,” it may have caught on after a 1902 New York Giants baseball game in which a concessionaire named Harry Mozley Stevens began hawking “dachshund sausages” by crying, “Get ’em while they’re hot!”
Pizza
Modern pizza is basically no more than a circle of dough spread with sauce and sprinkled with cheese. It’s probably these simple elements that have made pizza a worldwide staple; most cuisines include some kind of flatbread that can be topped with oils, vegetables, and meats. The ancient Greeks made circular dough “plates” that they called plankuntos. One of the earliest recorded “ancestors” of pizza is the dough that foot soldiers of Persia’s Darius the Great baked on their shields. The Persian soldiers put cheese and dates on their bread, and over the years olive oil, herbs, honey, pine nuts, goat cheese, and many other foods were tried and enjoyed on flatbreads. Our evidence that pizza was a specialty of Naples, Italy, comes from A.D. 79. The volcanic eruption that buried the Italian city of Pompeii and part of neighboring Neopolis, or Naples, preserved a bakery run by pizzaioli, forerunner of today’s pizzeria.
For reasons that may never be entirely clear, Neapolitans embraced pizza with gusto, perfecting a chewy crust (Romans prefer theirs crispy) and experimenting with New World tomatoes until the “pizza marinara” was born. Although marinara means “of the sea,” this pizza had nothing fishy about it—it was simply the favorite snack of sailors and anglers returning to town after weeks offshore.
Naples is also home to the first true modern pizzeria, Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, which opened in 1830. By the late 19th century, “pizza a la Margherita” had become very popular. This tomato, mozzarella, and basil pie echoed the colors of the newly created Italian flag, and was the favorite of Queen Margherita di Savoia. Thus, when immigrants from the new nation came to the United States, they brought their trendiest pizza with them, and Americans came to regard this simple, tasty combination as the way pizza should taste. By the time Gennaro Lombardi opened the first U.S. pizzeria in 1905 on Manhattan’s Spring Street, “pizza pie” had come a long way from its origins as a plate.
Pretzels
Many people know the story of the early medieval German monk who took a scrap of bread dough, rolled it into a strip, then folded it into the shape of a child’s arms folded in prayer. The monks offered these pretiola (Latin for “little bribe”) to children who memorized Scripture verses and prayers.
These soft treats evolved to have a deliciously hard, dark crust that is created by sprinkling the dough with water while baking, causing a Maillard reaction (nonenzymatic browning), which contemporary bakers usually simulate by dipping finished unbaked pretzels in a sodium bicarbonate solution. The finished pretzels might be sprinkled with salt or sugar, depending on the baker’s whim. Eventually, German brezln would almost always be served topped with salt crystals, and other shapes became popular, too: Today you can find brezel broetchen (pretzel rolls) in round, oval, and log form in German bakeries.
No one knows exactly how Early American colonists knew about pretzels; some historians believe the recipe came over on the Mayflower. What is known is that the colonists made pretzels and sold them to the Native Americans. As the popularity of the snack grew, more bakeries made it. That’s how the favorite American version, hard pretzels, came to be. During the late 1600s, a baker’s apprentice in Pennsylvania fell asleep by the hearth, and the batch of pretzels he was baking was cold, dry, and hard when he finally retrieved them. Once he’d tried one, he was hooked. His boss must have been, too, or perhaps it was simply the fact that a hard, dry pretzel could be kept and sold for a much longer period of time than a soft, fresh one.
In 1510, a group of Turks attempted to invade the city of Vienna, but they were thwarted when early rising pretzel bakers not only heard something amiss and sounded the alarm for reinforcements, they kept the attackers at bay until help arrived. The Habsburg emperor awarded the guild a special seal in recognition of the bakers’ bravery, adorned with a pretzel.
In 1652, Dutch baker Jochem Wessels and his wife, Gertrude, were arrested in Beverwyck, New York (near the modern-day city of Albany), for selling pretzels to the Indians. It was a good business decision for Wessels, because the Indians loved the bready treats so much they would pay any price he asked, but Wessels’s peers prosecuted him for using up the best flour for the pretzels and saving leftover product for bread he sold to everyone else: “The heathen were eating flour while the Christians were eating bran.”
The first commercial pretzel bakery was established by Julius Sturgis in Lititz, Pennsylvania, a bit later, in 1861. In 1935, the Reading Pretzel Company introduced an automatic pretzel-twisting machine that sped up the process considerably. Perhaps that helped make pretzels the second favorite American snack, behind potato chips and before popcorn.
Today pretzels are eaten in hard and soft, large and small, salty and sweet forms. In the United States, they are often served with mustard but are also popular with other savory dips, and can even be found baked around that very American treat, the hot dog.
Potato Chips
No doubt some earlier cook sautéed potato in hot oil, but George Crum of Moon’s Lake House near Saratoga Springs, New York, gets the credit for “inventing” potato chips in 1853 after a grumpy customer complained about his thickly sliced side dish. Crum flash-fried wafer-thin pieces of potato, and the “Saratoga chip” was born.
Cookies
Our word for cookies comes directly from the Dutch koekje, or “little cake,” which is related to the German kek, while the British and French biscuit seems to derive from the same root as Italian biscotti, from the Latin bis coctum, or twice-baked. In other words, everyone enjoys cookies—usually small, rounded, flat baked goods based on flour and sugar and some kind of fat.
Everyone got their versions of cookies from seventh-century Persia (modern Iran), where some soldiers once found riverbank “reeds which produce honey without bees.” The sugar cane helped ancient Persian bakers begin concocting pastries for which they are still famous, and the small cakes spread to Europe during Spain’s Moorish era. Medieval and Renaissance cookbooks in Spain, France, and England have many recipes for “fine cakes” and “jumbles,” including several akin to shortbread, one of the simplest cookies to make (flour, sugar, and butter are the only ingredients).
As with many other foods and beverages, cookies came to the New World via colonization. By 1796, the first recipes for “cookies” were printed in Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery. Early Americans enjoyed shortbread, gingerbread, and macaroons, all types of cookies that can still be found readily today. The perennially popular brownies may have been made throughout the 19th century, but the first printed recipe for them dates to an 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalog.
As with many foods and beverages, when manufacturing processes and plants grew more sophisticated, homemade cookies lost some glamour to perfectly baked and symmetrical store-bought types, with names like Chips Ahoy!, Oreo, and Lorna Doone. During the late 20th century, older recipes, rustic textures, and unprocessed ingredients influenced large corporations and smaller artisanal bakers alike. Raisin-flecked hermits, cinnamon-scented snickerdoodles, and intentionally lumpy oatmeal cookies can be found at trendy cafés and farmers markets around the nation.
Ice Cream
Ice cream’s early history is spotty: some ancient civilizations knew about freezing foods, and some of the first iced “creams” (including the snow and syrup enjoyed by Emperor Nero in the first century A.D.) would resemble sorbets to modern palates. They must still have been delicious, since King Charles I of England in the early 17th century offered his chef a lifetime pension for keeping an “iced cream” recipe secret, for royal palates only.
By the 18th century, recipes for ice cream as we understand it appeared in British and American cookbooks. Several of the Founding Fathers ate ice cream regularly, and Dolley Madison served it at President James Madison’s Inaugural Ball in 1809. It was a rare treat, because it had to be prepared in small quantities and served immediately.
Many people helped to develop ice cream into a widely available treat, including African American Augustus Jackson, whose recipes and technique are credited with improving ice cream’s overall taste and texture. In 1843, a New England housewife named Nancy Johnson invented and patented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer, which led to later manufacturing progress—by 1851 Jacob Fussell of Baltimore had opened the first commercial ice cream plant.
But it was advances in commercial refrigeration that really paved the way for modern ice cream consumption; when large freezers became available, especially in transport, merchants could start offering lots of different ice creams, all the time. Howard Johnson’s 28 Flavors were challenged by Baskin-Robbins’s 31 Flavors, with both of those popular chains receiving plenty of competition from the boom in unusually flavored ice creams during the 1980s and 1990s. Today ice cream is available in hard and soft varieties; dozens of flavors, even garlic and basil; full-fat, no-fat, low-fat, French-style, and gelato; in cones, sandwiches, on sticks, and in many other forms. More than 90 percent of U.S. households consume about 1.5 billion gallons of ice cream every year, making the frozen confection the nation’s most popular dessert.
Ice-Cream Cones
Edible cones of sweetened dough have held ice cream since the early 19th century, but it was not until 1903 that the treats could be mass-produced. That’s when New Yorker Italo Marchioni secured U.S. Patent #746971 for his cone-shaped baking mold (not, as is sometimes believed, for the cone itself).
Pie
Today a flaky, tender pie crust is a delicacy in its own right, but for hundreds of years, pastry was prized mainly for its strength: A crust had to not only hold its contents together but also serve as a utensil from hand to mouth.
Ancient Egyptians used bread dough to hold a mixture of nuts, honey, and fruits, but pastry as a substance in its own right can be attributed to the ancient Greeks. Their conquerors, the Romans, experimented a great deal with different kinds of fillings for pastry casing, including (but not limited to) eels, mussels, doves, and baby goats. The inventive Romans also made the earliest recorded version of cheesecake, according to Cato.
Since those inventive Romans built many roads and conquered lots of different lands, we know that pies came to quite a few places around the same time. In early medieval England, pies were known as “coffins,” in the sense of that word as a container. The use of lard and butter instead of oil made stiffer, more durable pastry possible. Different constructions were used, from deep-sided, open-topped “traps” to broad, flat “tartlets.” As cookbooks became readable, printed materials, cooks began to take more care with their ingredients and recipes, since the lady of the house might double-check their work.
Pies, having become an English specialty (Cornish pasties, shepherd’s pie, and steak-and-kidney pie are just a few examples), quickly caught on in the 13 Colonies. The phrase “to cut corners” may come from the colonial practice of using round pans (with no corners) for pies, thus allowing more even distribution of scant ingredients to more people. As the new United States of America grew, pies went west with pioneers, who discovered many ways to use preserved fruits and other ingredients encased in dough.
American Apple Pie
The first record of American apple pie consumption in the 13 Colonies dates back to 1697, a popular dish both because apples were plentiful in the New World and because pies were sturdy fare for pioneer consumption. The verbal identification didn’t come about until the 1960s advertising boom made slogans as popular as … well, apple pie.
Doughnuts
Fried dough or batter figures in cuisines around the globe, from China’s youtiao or “oil sticks,” to Poland’s paczki, to Iran’s sticky zooloobiya. As that quintessentially American cartoon character Homer Simpson might say: “Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do?” While fried treats from other lands can be found in the United States, our own indigenous “American donuts” date back to Dutch settlers’ olieboellen or olykoeks (the spelling varies), which were rounded balls of dense dough, sometimes studded with fruit or nuts.
The Dutch “cakes” were usually fried in pork fat, and they had a specific problem: If you drop a ball of dough into boiling oil, its outside will turn golden brown long before the center is close to being cooked. An apocryphal tale about how the American version got its name involves cooks who were attempting to help the cakes cook faster by inserting nuts into their centers. No one can confirm the truth of this story, but some versions of it involve a real-life New England woman in the mid-19th century named Elizabeth Gregory, who was well known for her excellent fried cakes. Her son Captain Hanson Gregory either stuck one onto the ship’s wheel during a storm or didn’t like the nuts and poked them out. Either way, Gregory’s cook began taking the center out of his fried cakes with a small circular cutter.
Doughnuts were so popular and ubiquitous in the United States that grateful French citizens cooked and served American-style doughnuts to World War I “doughboys.” Since then, the American Red Cross has always had “donut girls” (now guys, too, of course) on hand to provide a baked symbol of comfort and home for soldiers. The first doughnut machine was invented by Russian expatriate Adolph Levitt in the 1920s; by 1934, he was earning about $25 million per year through sales of his machines.
Chewing Gum
The ancient Greeks chewed the resin of the mastic tree; the Maya chewed chicle from the sapodilla, and North American Indians chewed spruce sap (mixed with beeswax, this would become the settlers’ first chewing gum). Chewing gum has a long history in the world, and a long history in the United States, too. The first gum produced for commercial sale was State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum, made by John B. Curtis in 1848.
If a Mexican general named Antonio López de Santa Anna, in exile on Staten Island, had not introduced a fellow boarder named Thomas Adams to the Central American chicle, Americans might still be chomping sticky spruce gum. Adams, a photographer, first tried to market the substance for tires, but soon realized it could be flavored to create a longer-lasting chewing gum. Adams New York Chewing Gum went on sale in January 1871, for a penny per stick. Adams’s company would eventually merge with six others to become a great conglomerate, and is responsible for the aptly named Chiclets.
Written by Bethame Patrick and John Thompson in "An Uncommon History of Common Things", National Geographic Society, USA, 2009,excerpts chapter one. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.