Fun Food Facts

These food facts are sure to satiate your weird and fun food fact appetite!

WTF Fun Fact 13085 – Horatio Magellan Crunch

You think you know someone. All this time, we assumed that Cap’n Crunch was an uncomplicated cartoon cereal mascot. But there’s more to Horatio Magellan Crunch than meets the eye.

Finding Cap’n Crunch

In 2013, the Wall Street Journal turned the cereal world on its head by revealing that an investigation into the origins of Cap’n Crunch had revealed his real name and rank.

Food & Wine Magazine (cited below) noted that the normally serious newspaper revealed a dark secret. That year, the paper wrote that “the legendary cereal icon’s status as a captain has come under fire… Cap’n Crunch only wears the bars of a Navy commander, not those of a captain. In the U.S. Navy, captains wear four bars on their uniforms, while commanders — one rank below captain – have three bars.”

Way to blow our minds.

You can’t handle the truth about Horatio Magellan Crunch

After the controversy broke, Cap’n Crunch went on Twitter to address the allegations.

“All hearsay and misunderstandings!,” @realcapncrunch wrote.”I captain the S.S. Guppy with my crew – which makes an official Cap’n in any book!”

He also insisted that “It’s the Crunch – not the clothes – that make a man.” The Navy would beg to differ.

In a tongue-in-cheek reply, Lt. Commander Chris Servello, director of the U.S. Navy’s news desk at the Pentagon revealed: “We have no Cap’n Crunch in the personnel records – and we checked. We have notified NCIS and we’re looking into whether or not he’s impersonating a naval officer – and that’s a serious offense.”

Then again, the so-called “Cap’n” wears a Napoleonic-era hat. Could he be French?!

He first debuted as a Quaker Oats Co. character in 1963, so it’s a little late to be fighting that battle. His official biography only tells us he was born on Crunch Island, in the Sea of Milk. We’re not sure which flag they fly there.

We do know that he commanded the S.S. Guppy and spent time near Mt. Crunchmore, but that raises more questions than it answers. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Cap’n Crunch’s Real Name Isn’t Cap’n Crunch and Everything You Know Is a Lie” — Food & Wine

WTF Fun Fact 13069 – Enoteca Maria’s Nonnas of the World

A restaurant on Staten Island has two kitchens – and both are run by grandmothers with cooking skills. Enoteca Maria’s Nonnas of the World program provides customers with a rotating series of international grandmothers who offer their own menu each night based on their homeland’s regional cuisine. The main kitchen is always staffed by an Italian nonna.

Nonnas in the kitchen

According to the restaurant website: “Our two kitchens at Enoteca Maria will continue to serve regional Italian cuisine from the nonne of Italy, while offering a second menu of a different nonna every night from any and every country in the world.” Start following the online book that is being generated at www.nonnasoftheworld.com“

The restaurant’s unique angle was born out of tragedy. According to Atlas Obscura (cited below): “The project came about after owner Joe Scaravella lost his mother in the early 2000s. When he opened Enoteca Maria two years later, Scaravella staffed his kitchen with Italian grandmothers (“nonnas”) to create a feeling of homey comfort in his restaurant.”

Enoteca Maria’s nonnas go international

Once the restaurant was up and running, Scaravella tried an experiment. In 2015, he invited a Pakistani grandmother to cook for a night. It was such a success that he opened up a second kitchen in the restaurant with its own rotating menu of international cuisine. Patrons can choose from the Italian nonna or the international nonna menu.

While the nonnas are all skilled in regional cuisine, these days they live in and around Brooklyn. Atlas Obscura notes that “To date, Nonnas of the World has featured cooks from Japan, Syria, France, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Poland, Greece, Turkey, Liberia, Kazakhstan, the Dominican Republic, Czechia, Belarus, Pakistan, and of course, Italy, just to name a few.”

How does it work?

“Two nonnas work in the kitchen at any given time, one as the head chef, the other as her sous chef. This means a South American nonna and a Middle Eastern nonna could be working side by side in the kitchen, learning from each other’s recipes. Cooking classes are offered as well—for women only, many of whom are grandmothers themselves—and get booked months in advance. It’s another opportunity for cross-cultural recipe sharing, as well as a chance to eat food made with love.”

— WTF fun facts

Source: “Nonnas of the World” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 13055 – The Original Thanksgiving

America celebrates Thanksgiving each year on the 4th Thursday of November. And while most of us learn a similar origin story for the holiday in elementary school, that version was largely manufactured for children. The original Thanksgiving in America was a religious holy day. And Puritan immigrants commemorated it by fasting rather than feasting.

The story of the original Thanksgiving

Here’s the gist of what many (but not all) Americans learn as children regarding Thanksgiving: The Pilgrims were persecuted in England and sailed to America to find religious freedom. They were sick and hungry when they landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. The local Native American Wampanoag tribe helped the Pilgrims plant corn and hunt turkey. To celebrate a successful harvest, they shared a communal meal.

Thanksgiving is also considered a secular holiday in America. While the Pilgrims immigrated for religious reasons, those aren’t really part of the Thanksgiving story (other than the occasional mention that they all said a prayer before their meal).

The real story of Thanksgiving

For some more context into Thanksgiving, it’s important to know that the Pilgrims were a splinter group of Puritans. They were called Separatists and followed the teachings of John Calvin. Calvin taught that Scripture was the only guide to life. The Separatists first tried to go to Holland after leaving England but eventually decided to leave Europe altogether and set out for what Europeans called “the New World.”

On the way to their ship from Holland, the Separatists stopped in Plymouth, England, for supplies. The Mayflower carried them to the shores of North America, where they did struggle to survive on what they called Plimoth Plantation.

There were multiple small groups of Separatist immigrants, and each established its own church with its own pastor. Only one church has records of any harvest-time feast in 1636. We don’t have any other records from these early immigrants, so the story of Thanksgiving is entirely concocted from later stories.

Even 100 years later, there are some vague references to harvest-time feasts to celebrate American military battles. But none that refer to Native Americans.

A religious holiday of fasting and repentance

The Puritans would practice “public days” in response to things like droughts or other meaningful events. But these days involved reading Scripture, attending church services, and fasting to repent for their sins.

If there were formal 17th-century “Thanksgiving” celebrations, they would have originated from these public days and would not have involved feasting. Public atonement would have been highly religious in nature as well, not a secular holiday.

The Boston Globe (cited below) describes one such public day. In the archives was a record of a January 1697 public day of atonement for the Salem Witch Trials and the execution of innocent women.

If Thanksgiving stemmed from an early Puritan settler tradition, it was likely days like these.

The Boston Globe states, “It may be hard to see a connection between such earnest supplications and our modern Thanksgiving, but it was that Colonial holiday that America’s founders had in mind when they declared national days of thanksgiving.”

The first – but not original – Thanksgiving

In 1777, the Continental Congress announced the first national day of thanksgiving (not yet a formal holiday, so with a lowercase “t”). They instructed the public to give thanks and offer “penitent Confession of their manifold Sins.” It had nothing to do with a meal.

President George Washington declared a national day of thanksgiving on November 26 in honor of the Constitution to thank God “for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed.” His instructions for Americans were to “unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions.” Again, no turkey.

Later, “President John Adams called for national fast days in 1798 and 1799. His proclamation announcing the first ‘day of fasting & humiliation’ was ‘a loud call to repentance and reformation’ in the face of possible war with France. President Madison called for two thanksgiving days, but by 1815 the custom of public days in America had died out.”

Abraham Lincoln created the enduring legend of the Native Americans and Pilgrims during the Civil War. He created what we now celebrate as Thanksgiving in 1863, declaring it a federal holiday. He also linked the day to the harvest, shifting the focus to food as a means of celebrating national unity. — WTF fun facts

Source: “The opposite of Thanksgiving” — The Boston Globe
* Note: While containing factual info, this was printed in the opinion section. A scholarly article on the same topic is available in the journal Gastronomica but is partly behind a paywall.

WTF Fun Fact 13044 – The History of Pink Lemonade

The history of lemonade is far older than we would have imagined. The same goes for the history of pink lemonade – which has its origins in the circus of all places.

The origins of lemonade

The first lemonade dates back to 1630s France and was made from sparkling water, lemons, and honey (yum!). In the U.S., that means lemonade goes back to the first immigrants in the 17th century.

The trend of harvesting ice in the 19th century made drinks like lemonade even more popular. And it makes sense that – since traveling circuses date back to around that time – it would be associated with community events.

Where does pink lemonade come from?

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below), “The earliest known mention of pink lemonade comes from an 1879 article in West Virginia’s Wheeling Register, explicitly linking the two.”

As for it’s precise origin, we can’t be sure. But it likely started at the circus.

In How the Hot Dog Got its Bun: Accidental Discoveries And Unexpected Inspirations That Shape What We Eat And Drink, author Josh Chetwynd says there are two stories that vie for the the best pink lemonade origin story.

“The first, he says, is a 1912 New York Times obituary for Henry E. Allott , a Chicago native who ran away to the circus in his early teens. Allott is believed to have ‘invented’ pink lemonade after accidentally dropping red-colored cinnamon candies in a vat of traditional lemonade. Adhering to the old circus adage ‘the show must go on,’ Allott simply sold the pink-hued beverage as is.”

That would be nice, but there’s an earlier origin story for the history of pink lemonade that isn’t so sweet. It was recounted by lion tamer George Conklin who “claims his brother Pete Conklin came up with pink lemonade in 1857 while selling lemonade at the circus. Conklin ran out of water and thinking on the fly, grabbed a tub of dirty water in which a performer had just finished wringing out her pink-colored tights. In true circus form, Conklin didn’t miss a beat. He marketed the drink as his new ‘strawberry lemonade,’ and a star was born.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “The Unusual Origins of Pink Lemonade” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 13043 – The Whiskey Empire of George Washington

George Washington spent his post-presidential years running a booming whiskey business. Seemingly not content to retire from working life altogether, at age 65 he decided to into the alcohol trade thanks to the ability to grow rye at Mount Vernon.

George Washington’s whiskey

In 1797, Washington returned to Mount Vernon. When he hired a Scottish plantation manager who had moved to Virginia a few years earlier, the man – James Anderson – noticed that the estate could be used to grow rye as a cover crop.

Rye not being a very popular grain for eating, Anderson pitched the idea of turning it into whiskey. Washington ran the idea past a friend who was a rum maker and presumably got the thumbs up.

Using just two stills, Anderson’s first whiskey was so appealing to Washington that he greenlit the construction of a full distillery with five stills.

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below), by 1799, Washington’s distillery was the largest in the U.S. and “produced 11,000 gallons of clear, un-aged whiskey, which Washington sold for a total of $1,800 ($120,000 by today’s standards).”

What happened to Washington’s whiskey empire?

Of course, Washington also died in 1799, and he left the distillery to his nephew. Lawrence Lewis wasn’t able to keep things running. And when a fire destroyed the operation in 1814, he didn’t have it rebuilt,

The state of Virginia purchased the site of the former distillery in the 1930s. But turning it back into an alcohol producer was thwarted by Prohibition and the Depression.

It wasn’t until 1997 that archaeologists found the site of the distillery. They used imaging technology to reconstruct what it would have looked like.

Smithsonian notes that “after securing key funding from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) in 2001, a group of archaeologists, historians, and distillers …carefully searched records for hints about how the distillery functioned on an industrial level…” And by 2007, the distillery was reconstructed and opened to the public.

Today, they do distillation twice a year, just as Anderson did for Washington. And they also make peach brandy. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Long Before Jack Daniels, George Washington Was a Whiskey Tycoon” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 13010 – The Invention of the Chocolate Chip Cookie

Fun fact: We have a woman named Ruth Wakefield to thank for the invention of the chocolate chip cookie in 1939. She ran the restaurant at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. She assumed adding broken pieces of Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate to her cookies would make the chocolate melt into the batter. But the chocolate largely maintained its shape, and the cookies became so popular that she published the recipe in a Boston newspaper.

***

Even if chocolate chip cookies aren’t you’re favorite, it’s hard to claim they don’t hold an iconic place in American culinary history. According to the Nestlé website,

“It all started back in 1939. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the successful Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, was mixing a batch of cookies when she decided to add broken pieces of Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate into the recipe expecting the chocolate to melt. Instead, the semi-sweet bits held their shape and softened to a delicate creamy texture and the chocolate chip cookie was born. Ruth’s ‘Toll House Crunch Cookie’ recipe was published in a Boston newspaper and her invention of the chocolate chip cookie quickly became the most popular cookie of all-time.”

The original chocolate chip cookie recipe

Want to make the original chocolate chip cookie? Nestlé shared the recipe on their website:

The recipe that started it all

More than 80 years later, Nestlé Toll House’s Original Chocolate Chip Cookies are a true classic and a go-to recipe for all occasions.

Ingredients:

  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 cups (12-oz. pkg.) Nestlé Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels
  • 1 cup chopped nuts (if omitting, add 1-2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour)

Instructions:

Step 1: Preheat oven to 375° F
Step 2: Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract in a large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets
Step 3: Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

— WTF fun facts

Source: “A timeless discovery: The chocolate chip cookie” — Nestlé

WTF Fun Fact 12998 – The Oldest Recipe In The World

You know the oldest recipe in the world was going to be for something kind of weird, right? Well, at the very least, it’s a pudding with a kick. The world’s oldest recipe is roughly 8,000 years old and contains instructions for making nettle pudding.

The oldest recipe in the world is for…pudding

Researchers at the University of Wales Institute (Uwic) in Cardiff, led by Dr. Ruth Fairchild, have been studying ancient recipes for years. In fact, they’ve managed to translate the into something you really can cook (though there’s no promise of whether it’ll be palatable or even remotely worthwhile).

If you’re thinking nettle pudding sounds like a bad idea, we’re with you. People have long used nettles in medicines. But there’s a reason we refer to them as “stinging nettles” – they sting!

However, Fairchild assures adventurous cooks that heating up the nettles “takes the sting right out of them. ” Fingers crossed!

In 2007, Dr. Fairchild told BBC Breakfast (cited below) “nettle pudding was made by mixing nettles with ground-down barley and water.” And, here, Americans will note that “pudding” means something completely different to the British.

Antiquity Now says:

“For those of you not familiar with non-dessert puddings, it has the consistency of a dumpling and is often eaten with chunks of bread and the meat it is cooked along side.”

What is nettle pudding?

You may recognize some ingredients in nettle pudding (which is not the gloppy, smooth stuff we eat in America). It includes sorrel, watercress, dandelions, and nettles…you know, weeds.

Antiquity Now also assured readers that “the stinging nettle has long been an important food source and was greatly appreciated by ancient cultures. Its use as food has always been closely tied to its medicinal value. Often it would be ingested during the spring because it was believed to help in circulation and could restore warmth to the body after the cold winter months. Generally, the younger plants were chosen for food because they are less bitter, but more mature leaves can be boiled until they are suitable for ingestion. The Romans boiled nettles along with meat in order to tenderize it. Europeans used it in soups and puddings like the one below. In fact, in 2007, the recipe below was named Britain’s oldest recipe and is believed to be from around 6,000 BCE.”

We had no idea – we had always assumed that giving something a name like “stinging nettle” was a cue not to put it in your mouth under any circumstances.

Antiquity Now also shared the step-by-step recipe:

The Nettle Pudding Recipe

Interested in trying the oldest recipe in the world?

Ingredients

1 bunch of sorrel, 1 bunch of watercress, 1 bunch of dandelion leaves
2 bunches of young nettle leaves
Some chives
1 cup of barley flour
1 teaspoon of salt

Instructions

Chop the herbs finely and mix in the barley flour and salt.
Add enough water to bind it together and place in the center of a linen or muslin cloth.

Tie the cloth securely and add to a pot of simmering venison or wild boar (a pork joint will do just as well). Make sure the string is long enough to pull the pudding from the pot.
Cook the pudding until the meat is done (at least two hours).
Leave the pudding to cool slightly, remove the muslin, then cut the pudding into thick slices with a knife.
Serve the pudding with chunks of barley bread.

Bon appetit! — WTF fun facts

Source: “When nettles were dish of the day” — BBC

WTF Fun Fact 12980 – Pringles Are Not Potato Chips

If you think a potato chip is made from thinly sliced potatos, then Pringles are not potato chips at all. However, as far as British courts are concerned, they’re made with enough potatoes to call themselves potato chips.

What’s in a name?

It took 3 court cases at three different levels drawn out between the years 2007 and 2009 to decide whether the makers of Pringles were entitled to use the phrase potato chip to identify their product. As you might imagine, it was all about money.

According to HowStuffWorks (cited below): “Here’s how this comically complicated problem started. In the mid-20th century, a tax was born by way of France and England called the value-added or VAT tax. This ‘consumption tax’ started off as a 10 percent tax on all goods bought from a business. More than 20 percent of the world’s tax revenue comes from the value-added tax making it a pretty big deal.”

Deciding if Pringles are potato chips

Ok, so what does this have to do with potato chips?

“In Britain, most foods are exempt from the value-added tax, except for potato chips or ‘similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour.’ This led to a long, arduous journey to figure out whether or not Pringles (which, by the way, were touted at one time as the “newfangled potato chip“) were actually potato chips. If they were ruled as chips, Pringles’ parent company at the time, Procter & Gamble, would be subject to a 17.5 percent VAT tax.”

As you may have noticed, many companies will go to great lengths to reduce their tax burdens. But get this…”Procter & Gamble’s initial argument was that, no, Pringles were not potato chips because they didn’t “contain enough potato to have the quality of ‘potatoness.‘”

In 2008, a lower British court agreed with P&G , but a year later, the Court of Appeal re- reversed that decision, “calling Procter & Gamble’s argument that the ingredients of a product don’t define the product ‘hogwash.'”

Potatoness begets taxedness

That overturned decision was bad news for P&G because they were now on the hook for $160 million in taxes.

Apparently, 42% of potato flour is enough to constitute potatoness for the point of British taxes. — WTF fun facts

Source: “It Took a Court to Decide Whether Pringles Are Potato Chips” — HowStuffWords

WTF Fun Fact 12968 – Edible Burrito Tape

Do you love burritos but hate the mess they make when they’re not expertly rolled into a magical self-sealing pocket? Well, edible burrito tape could be the weirdest invention you never knew you needed.

What’s the deal with edible burrito tape?

Leave it to college students to solve this age-old conundrum.

It turns out that a group of Engineering majors at Johns Hopkins taking a product design course have found a way to make your burritos delicious and more convenient.

According to TODAY (cited below), “The all-female team of Tyler Guarino, Rachel Nie, Marie Eric and Erin Walsh came together and decided to solve one of life’s most frustrating problems: preventing a burrito from unraveling and making a mess. Their solution: an edible tape that keeps all the delicious ingredients inside the tortilla instead of on your plate or lap.”

The first step was to investigate what made tape, in general, work well (turns out the answer is twofold – a backbone and an adhesive compound). The next step was to make those components edible.

“Tastee” Tape

Student Tyler Guarino told TODAY: “We tried tons of different combinations, and formulations and really did a lot of trial and error until we were able to get a product that was clear in color, tasteless, didn’t have a noticeable texture, but was still strong enough to hold a big fat burrito together.”

It took the women a few months of trial and error to figure out how to make a cookable, edible burrito tape. After that, they set about making it pleasant to eat (not just edible). That meant playing around with the taste and texture.

They decided on a final product that carried little to none of it’s own taste or texture so people could just enjoy their burritos. The product is known as Tastee Tape.

“You simply just peel the piece off of the sheet,” Guarino said. “You wet it to activate it, and then you apply it to your tortilla.” 

The students aren’t keen to share their recipe, however. They’re looking to patent it. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Johns Hopkins students develop edible tape to make burritos easier to eat” — TODAY