I learned this today. Fruits have been preserved as jams since at least before the ancient Greeks. Since the Paleolithic period, people have been preserving foods in different ways. Drying was the easiest way and probably the first form of preservation. Chilling would have been possible in cold climates, but not all year round. People […]
#121 When did people start making jam? Read More »
I learned this today. Gin was sold from a cat in London in 1739 because Captain Dudley Bradstreet found a loophole in the 1736 Gin Act. Between 1690 and 1751, England went through a period of high consumption of gin. In 1743, it was estimated that people were drinking an average of 10 liters of
#120 Why was gin sold from a cat in London in 1739? Read More »
I learned this today. Bees make honey as a way to store food through the winter. Flowers cannot move, so they need insects to help them reproduce. To pollinate another flower, the pollen from one flower has to reach another flower. The best way for flowers to do this is to have the pollen stick
#92 Why do bees make honey? Read More »
I learned this today. Sugar came to England in 1069 but it wasn’t eaten by most people until 700 years later. The average British person eats about 90kg of sugar a year. This is not only unhealthy, it is also a relatively recent trend. In 1750, it was about 1kg a year. By 1820, that
#90 When did people in Europe start eating sugar? Read More »
I learned this today. Blue cheeses (like stilton and gorgonzola) are blue because they have veins of penicillin running through them. Legend says that blue cheese was discovered in the 7th century in a cave outside the village of Roquefort in France. The story is that a shepherd was eating a lunch of bread and
#53 What are the blue bits in blue cheese? Read More »
I learned this today. Yogurt is neither a simple liquid nor a solid, it is a non-Newtonian fluid-gel. A gel is a colloid, and a colloid is a substance that has microscopically dispersed insoluble particles suspended throughout another substance. A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that doesn’t follow Newton’s law of viscosity. This means viscosity
#47 What exactly is yogurt? Read More »
I learned this today. Canning preserves food by killing all of the bacteria present through heat and then keeping the food in a bacteria-free, airtight can. For food to rot, bacteria need water, oxygen, a neutral pH level, and a warm temperature. The different ways of preserving food each deal with one of these. Freezing
#15 How is food canned? Read More »
I learned this today. Salt preserves food by removing the water and vinegar preserves food by increasing its acidity. The refrigerator was invented in 1834. Before that, people used ice to keep food chilled. In the 1800s, Americans used over 5 million tons of ice annually. The ice was cut from northern countries (Scandinavian countries)
#7 How do salting and pickling preserve food? Read More »
I learned this today. Ketchup was created in the 17th century, but it wasn’t made of tomatoes. Ketchup began in Asia. The word ketchup either comes from the Hokkien Chinese word “ke-tsiap”, which was a salty sauce made from fermented fish, or the Malay word “kicap”, which was soy sauce. Whatever the origin of the
#2 Where did ketchup come from? What did it have to do with mushrooms? Read More »
I learned this today. We say, “the best thing since sliced bread”, but sliced bread has only been around since 1928. Humans have been eating bread for thousands of years. 30,000-year-old starch residue has been found on rocks used for pounding plants. Early humans could have spread the starch on a flat rock and cooked
#1 Who invented sliced bread? Read More »
