Let us dive into the wonderful world of food and what better way to sit back and enjoy a lunch with fries and ketchup than to ponder about the origins of this popular side dish and condiment. But before you ponder away, let us give you some facts:
Q: If it wasn’t the French, then who invented french fries?
A: The Belgians are crazy about french fries; as a matter of fact, fries are their national dish, and they’ve been eating them with buckets of mussels since the mid-1800s. The French also claim inventing fries, because to “french” any food means to cut it very thin. The problem is that the Belgian claim predates the French technique by about fifty years. Usually this discussion ignores the fact that 40 percent of Belgians speak French, so they can take the credit.
The largest producer of french fries in the world is McCain Foods Limited, a Canadian company in Florenceville, New Brunswick. McCain has thirty potato processing plants on six continents around the
world.
Photography by rick
and on to one of our favourite condiments…
Q: What’s the origin of ketchup?
A: In the 1690s the Chinese mixed together a tasty concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it ke-tsiap. By the early 1700s, the table sauce had made it to Malaysia, where it was discovered by British explorers, and by 1740, it had become an English staple. Fifty years later, North Americans added tomatoes to the Chinese recipe, and ketchup as we now know it had arrived. Tomatoes were considered poisonous for most of the eighteenth century because they’re a close relative to the toxic belladonna and nightshade plants.
With all the crazy temperature changes across North America, you’ve got to wonder where the real cold spot is since we’ve definitely received our share of an odd blend of cold and warm temperatures here in Canada …
Photograph from Alaska by Podknox
Q: Where is the “Pole of Cold”?
A: The arctic is not all that cold. Temperatures at the North Pole average -24 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 degrees Celsius) in the wintertime and get up to 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) during the summer. The real cold spot north of the equator is Russia’s “Pole of Cold,” south of the Arctic Circle in Siberia.
Two towns in this area fight to be considered the world’s coldest permanently inhabited communities. Verkhoyansk, population 1,500, has official recognition with a temperature of -93.6 degrees Fahrenheit (-69.8 degrees Celsius). Oymyakon, a town of 800, created by the Soviet Government to encourage nomadic reindeer herders in the northern Siberia to modernize, claims a reading of -96.2 degrees Fahrenheit (-71.2 degrees Celsius), using methods that did not meet official standards.
Photograph by Alaskan Dude
Q: Where did the expression “bite the dust” come from?
A: We probably all heard “bite the dust” for the first time while watching an old Western B movie when a cowboy hero does away with a pesky varmint to impress the schoolmarm. The phrase was first used in English literature in 1750 to imply wounding or killing by satirical novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) in Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, his translation of the original French novel by Alain-Rene Lesage: “We made two of them bite the dust and the others betake themselves to flight.” The inspiration for the expression can be traced back to the Bible in Psalm 72: “They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him and his enemies shall lick the dust.”
Almost everyone loves piping hot soup — which got us to thinking about the whole expression…
Photograph by Szeto Clan
Q: Why do we describe warm food as “piping hot”?
A: Today, piping hot usually means comfortably warm food straight from your own oven to the table, but it took a few centuries to evolve into that meaning. There was a time when everyone bought freshly baked bread every day from a neighbourhood or village baker. When the bread was ready, the baker would signal from his front door by blowing on a pipe or horn, which caused people to hurry to get bread before it ran out and gave us the expression “piping hot.”
Photo by modomatic
Jukeboxes first appeared in restaurants and bars in the late 1930s. Juke is an African word meaning “to make wicked mischief” and came directly from American slaves, who described the illegal brothels or bootlegger shacks where they could occasionally escape their cruel lives with a jar of moonshine as “juke-joints.” Juke had an exotic and forbidden appeal, which inspired the name jukebox.
The ultra-conservative view of those who propose extending the welfare state is that they are “bleeding hearts.” That expression entered politics in the 1930s and by the 1990s “my heart bleeds for you” had become a general put-down. It comes from the Middle Ages, when a social conscious group known as the Order of the Bleeding Heart was formed to honour the Virgin Mary, whose “heart was pierced with many sorrows.”
Images from Mike Licht, NotionCapital.com
A “bender” is a prolonged, irresponsible, and dangerous bout of drinking, which took its name from the patrons of London, England alehouses during the 1850s. To promote drinking, it was common for a tavern to offer patrons all they could drink for a tuppence a day, so sixpence was good for three days. The six pence coin, which was worth about a quarter, was nicknamed a “bender” because if it wasn’t phony it could be easily bent. Since this bendable coin guaranteed three days of libation, the subsequent binge became known as a bender.
Ever wonder about the political issues that seem to be on the front page of the news almost everyday? Let’s dive into the realm of politics and take a look at some history.
Q: Why when someone tells a secret do we say they’ve “spilled the beans”?
A: As a system of voting, the ancient Greeks placed beans in a jar. These small beans or balls were called “ballota”, which gives us the word ballot. A white bean was a “yes” and a brown bean was a “no.” The beans were then counted in secret so the candidates wouldn’t know who voted for or against them. If the container was knocked over, and the beans were spilled, the secret was out of the jar.
Not yet spilled beans? Photograph by al-hayat
