Whaddya Think, Doctor Fink

What cookie is over one hundred years old, has a National Day, socks, and a street named for it? According to author Catherine Gilbert Murdock, “Heaven is paved with Oreos.” Impressive for a cookie that began as a knock-off. In 1908, Sunshine Biscuits introduced the Hydrox sandwich cookie. It was a hit. Looming in the background was a group of bakery companies who formed the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco). Sound familiar? They introduced Barnum’s Animal Crackers in a small colorful box designed to look like a circus. Each cookie was shaped like an animal and the box had a handle. Today forty million boxes of animal crackers are sold each year. In 1912, Nabisco “reimagined” the Hydrox cookie and called it Oreo. They were produced

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Peanut butter. You can gobble it like Presidents Jefferson, Carter, and Clinton, or consume enough (along with fellow Americans) to coat the floor of the Grand Canyon every year. Peanuts (and peanut butter) don’t grow on trees like pecans and almonds. They’re not even a nut. Peanuts are legumes like beans, lentils, and peas that grow in pods (peanut shells). The peanut bush is green, knee high, with tiny yellow flowers.  When the flowers wilt, the stem goes underground and four to five months later produces peanuts. The South American Incas and Mayans loved the native peanut plant. The tribes roasted and ground them into “peanut paste.” Can you picture Montezuma with a jar of Skippy?     The Spanish Conquistadores arrived in the 1600s.

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  Maybe buffalos don’t fly but their numbers are sky-high. Nearly 1.42 billion Buffalo wings are eaten on Super Bowl Sunday – a lot of wings for a critter that isn’t air-borne. So where do Buffalo wings come from?     It began with a mistake. The year was 1964. Teressa Belissimo ordered chicken parts for her small Buffalo, New York restaurant, Anchor Bar. Instead of chicken backs and necks that her husband used for the pub’s famous spaghetti sauce, they delivered wings. In those days chicken wings were scraps left over when the chicken was cut up. They were either thrown out or sold for pennies to poor families who made them into soup. Teressa was determined not to waste the wings. There were

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Happy New Year! Now it’s time to get down to serious business: donuts. What’s your pleasure? Glazed. Frosted. Jelly or cream? Ninety-six percent of Americans love donuts. The market is worth over sixteen billion dollars . . . and growing. In the U.S. alone there are over two hundred million donut consumers. That’s a lot of dunking. Where was it invented? Consider this: Japan has an-doughnut, Tunsia has gulgula,  Italy has zeppole.  Donuts are everywhere. The only way to trace its origin is to go back to basics. What is a donut (or doughnut, if you prefer)? Basically it’s a small, deep-fried cake, usually sweetened with different flavors, fillings, or frostings. They have been around for thousands of years. According to Michael Krondi, food historian and author,

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  Wontons. Kreplach. Tortellini. Dumplings can be found in almost every country. According to CNN, a dumpling is “a pocket of dough filled with some form of savory or sweet stuffing.” That leaves a lot of room for cuisines, fillings, and spices. Legend says the first dumpling was created in China. It was a cold, harsh winter in the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Zhang Zhongjing was a medical man who dabbled in pharmacology, medicine, and inventions. Zhang traveled often during a time when warlords battled for territory and people suffered from many infectious diseases. Zhang returned to his home town, Nanyang, only to find many people with frostbite and circulatory problems. He invented a “treatment” by wrapping mutton, black pepper, herbs, and

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The taco has a very humble beginning. Some believe it was around well before the sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico. According to Unocasa, “indigenous cultures viewed corn as the foundation of humanity or the seed of life.” They perfected the process of nixtamalizing – treating corn with lime and water, then drying, grounding, and producing flour. The nixtamalized corn was used for breads and tortillas. The infamous Montezuma was known to use corn tortillas to scoop out his food. Perhaps that made it easier to fight Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortéz? How did this humble food lead to Americans consuming nearly 4.5 billion tacos each year? The Spanish looked down on corn – they associated it with native gods and pagan rituals. Wheat was used for the Christian Eucharist and

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                         Birthdays are nature’s way of telling us to eat more cake – Edward Morykwas, author, photographer   It’s time to party! Is it your birthday? A family birthday? Kids? How about friends, pets, and celebrities? That adds up to a lot of celebrations and tasty birthday cakes. How much would you pay for the perfect birthday cake? Let’s find out. Birthday celebrations have been around for ages. According to How Stuff Works, “the ancient Egyptians were good bakers who made honey-sweetened breads.”  Their “cakes” were flat, dense, unleavened, and cooked on a smooth stone. Nothing like the colorful, frosted ones we eat today. Others argue it began with the ancient Greeks who made honey cakes

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Soup. It’s food for the soul. My legacy soup is rich, buttery red potato. You probably never heard of it. My family came from a small town in Austria-Hungry, beneath the Carpathian Mountains and near the Ukraine border. The soup was made by frying onions in sweet butter, adding diced potatoes, and paprika to turn it red. Water and tiny dough balls made it into  soup. True comfort food! My grandmother brought the recipe with her when she arrived in New York in the early 1900s. My mother made the soup for me. Then I made it for my kids. Now my kids make it for their kids. According to Soup Maker Guide, “every culture had its version of [legacy] soup . . . from

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So many choices. Peperoni or sausage? Red or white? Deep dish or thin crust? According to the popular saying: You can’t buy happiness. But you can buy pizza, and that’s kind of the same thing. There’s truth in numbers. Pizza is one of the most popular foods on the planet, leading to the question: where did it begin? The answer is in how you define pizza. Is it fast food, gourmet dining, or flat bread with toppings? Consider the facts. Three billion pizzas are sold every year in the U.S alone – an average of forty-six slices per person. There are nearly seventy thousand pizzerias with a quarter of them Dominos, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s. The most popular pizza day is Super Bowl Sunday.

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We play with food, laugh about food, and analyze every bite. Food is part of life – it’s been around as long as we have. As a result, there are a lot of funny stories about the precious and hopefully tasty morsels that we consume. Below are just a few true stories . . .  Spaghetti Trees It was April 1, 1957 (April Fool’s Day). Everyone knew that money didn’t grow on trees . . . but spaghetti?  BBC (British Broadcasting Company) aired a program about a “spaghetti tree” in Switzerland. A three-minute video showed workers harvesting spaghetti, noting that the “spaghetti weevil” – the tree’s only predator – had been eradicated.   Announcer Richard Dimbly reported that “this is the product of many years

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