Food History – FoodWatcher

The Sparkling Jewish History of Dr. Brown’s Soda

When June Hersh, author of the recent book Iconic New York City Jewish Food, walks into a Jewish deli, her “biggest decision is not rye bread with seeds or without seeds or Russian dressing or mustard,” she says. “[My] biggest decision is Cream Soda or…

When June Hersh, author of the recent book Iconic New York City Jewish Food, walks into a Jewish deli, her “biggest decision is not rye bread with seeds or without seeds or Russian dressing or mustard,” she says. “[My] biggest decision is Cream Soda or Black Cherry.”

That she doesn’t need to specify the brand is a testament to the enduring staying power of one in particular: Dr. Brown’s, the kosher soda whose celery “Cel-Ray” flavor was nicknamed “Jewish champagne” by columnist Walter Winchell in the 1930s. Today, Dr. Brown’s sells five flavors—the aforementioned Black Cherry, Cream Soda, and Cel-Ray, as well as the less commonly sold Root Beer and Ginger Ale—mostly alongside cured meat sandwiches and knishes at Jewish delis. Each can or bottle is adorned with a black-and-white sketch of a New York City landmark: the Central Park Carousel, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge.

This Homemade Sriracha Was Food52’s First-Ever ‘Viral’ Recipe

Sometimes you know a viral recipe when you see one—and back in 2010, one was dangled before our eyes. We ran a recipe contest with the theme, “Your Best Condiment,” and Edamame2003, from Pacific Palisades in California, entered a recipe for Fresh Srira…

By 2010, Sriracha had begun to challenge the Cholulas and other hot sauces in the American market. You started to see it more and more on restaurant tables, in your friends’ fridges, and on the shelf at the grocery store. As Edamame2003 wrote in their headnote, “It’s so popular that The New York Times has written about it and the ‘Rooster’ has a Facebook page with over 220,000 fans.” Sriracha comes from Thailand, but the ubiquitous green-topped bottled Sriracha is made by Huy Fong Foods, a company in California started by David Tran, who immigrated from Vietnam.

How a Buttermilk Cake From Oklahoma Won the 1955 World Series for the Brooklyn Dodgers

I’ll admit, I was skeptical when I first took this buttermilk cake out of the oven; visually, there’s very little to distinguish it from an average pound cake. But there’s more to this dessert than meets the eye.

I unexpectedly came across a version o…

I unexpectedly came across a version of this recipe in Tales From the Dodger Dugout, a book written by former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Carl Erskine that’s full of colorful anecdotes from his 12 years with the team. As a baseball fan who also happens to be a professional chef, one story stood out: how an unassuming buttermilk cake from Oklahoma became the team’s good luck charm during their unforgettable 1955 championship season.

How Butter Built a Cathedral—& Other Interesting Butter Facts

Butter has been around for over 10,000 years, and in those centuries it has been used in countless recipes, allegedly cured illnesses, and even built a cathedral. Before it was relegated to your kitchen counter (or refrigerator), butter led a life of international mystery. To celebrate the beauty that is butter, we’ve compiled six of the greatest butter facts we could find, including a few myth-busting anecdotes for good measure.

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1. The Butter Tax

Butter was once so ingrained in Scandinavian culture, that the 11th-century Norwegian king Svein Knutsson demanded each of his subjects provide him a bucket of butter as tax annually. While this tax was questionable at best, it begs the much more serious culinary question: If you were King Svein, what would you make with the people’s hard-churned taxpayer butter?

The Enduring Art of Turning Butter Into Sculptures

Making butter feels like magic. I say this with the authority of someone who lived on a farm as a child, grew up in a 4-H family, had dairy farmer great-grandparents, and now has a PhD in food studies. It’s such a simple process and only involves one ingredient (two, if you use salt), but the alchemy of making butter never fails to amaze me—one of the reasons why many cultures consider it something more than food and closer to art. Whether it’s marking freshly made rounds with an intricately carved stamp or sculpting great blocks of the stuff into life-like forms, people love using butter as a creative medium. To butter, I mean, better understand why this simple ingredient has captured our palates as well as our palettes, it’s helpful to understand how butter came to be.

A Historic Accident

We food scholars don’t usually like to generalize when it comes to our area of study, but historically speaking, butter is ancient. The exact geographical origins are debated: Historian John Ayto has argued that butter was first “discovered” thousands of years ago by nomadic peoples of central Asia, while others like Elaine Khosrova believe it was herdsmen traveling across ancient Africa. Regardless of location, most scholars agree that whoever first made butter did so by accident. The delicious surprise was likely created when an animal-skin sack or some other temporary storage container full of milk was sloshed and jostled during a long journey—resulting in the separation of the fats from the watery buttermilk—forming little yellow bits of butter solids.

7 Common French Cheese Myths, Busted

In the world of turophilia (that’s “love of cheese” for the neophytes out there), there may be no nation more afflicted than France. Cheese is omnipresent: Supermarkets often have not one but two whole aisles dedicated to the product, and cheese cloches are available in the local equivalent of Target. Traditional meals so automatically include it that when former President Nicolas Sarkozy elided the cheese course from official state lunches, citizens were outraged. It’s no wonder that France is often held up as the bastion of cheese excellence.

That said, there are some pervasive myths about French cheese that are ripe for debunking. Here are the most egregious among them.

How Maru Toledo Is Preserving Jalisco’s Forgotten Culinary History

When Maru Toledo asked a 100-year-old woman about a “turco de garbanz[o],” an old wedding dessert made with shreds of chicken, the elder shook her cane at the chef, less than half her age, demanding answers. “Where did you get that recipe from; how do …

Toledo, a culinary historian, explained her work: She researches the disappearing recipes of Jalisco, her home state, and had combed through old documents to piece together this specific one.

3 Iconic Cocktails That Changed the Way We Drink

We’ve teamed up with ANGOSTURA® bitters to share the store of this centuries-old cocktail brand. From their nearly 200-year-old aromatic bitters recipe to two exciting flavors developed in recent years (we’re talkin’ cocoa and orange), ANGOSTURA® has i…

There’s three things every host needs to delight their guests: good snacks, great drinks, and mind-blowing historical anecdotes. We’ve got plenty of recipes for the first part and ANGOSTURA® has the rest covered. Founded in 1824, ANGOSTURA® has been the bartender’s BFF and a host’s secret ingredient for nearly two centuries—and it all started with a stomach ache. Under the employment of South American political leader Simon Bolivar, German surgeon Dr. Johann Siegert joined forces with the Venezuelan military to develop ANGOSTURA® as an elixir to cure soldiers’ abdominal ailments. Several shakes (and stirs) later, ANGOSTURA® has been a vital part of some of the most iconic cocktails in American drinking culture.

Why Is Umami So Hard to Describe?

Chef Kevin Tien started cooking professionally 15-odd years ago, around the time umami, the pleasantly savory fifth taste, catapulted into the national conversation after scientists identified umami taste receptors on the human tongue. If you’d asked T…

As a Vietnamese kid growing up in Louisiana, Tien’s umami took such savory, nostalgic forms as bun bo hue (spicy beef and pork noodle soup) and bo kho (slow braised beef stew with warm spices and lemongrass), and that of Southeast Asian home cooking brimming with fresh mushrooms and tomatoes, and seasoned with fish sauce and MSG.

The Culinary Traditions of Mainland Europe’s Only Indigenous People

The road into Huuva Hideaway narrows the closer you get to Liehittäjä—a village just south of the Arctic Circle populated almost exclusively by 22 relatives of the Huuva family. Liehittäjä is deep into Sápmi country—the cultural home of what many consider to be mainland Europe’s only indigenous people, the Sámi. Tragically, the narrative of modern Sámi history mirrors that of other indigenous peoples in the Americas and Oceania.

Although never the victims of a physical genocide, many Sámi do consider themselves the victims of a cultural genocide perpetrated by the nation states they suddenly found their homes in—namely Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Similar to indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, Sámi were forcibly sent to boarding schools and discouraged from speaking their language or practicing their religion. Racial scientists would force Sámi children to undress for photographs and measure different parts of their body for “research.” Historically nomadic, many Sámi were also forced to quit reindeer herding and live in permanent settlements.