70 Fun Facts About Hard Food and Drink

Which Japanese chemist identified umami as a distinct taste in 1908 and co-founded Ajinomoto?

He traced the taste to glutamic acid; the company's first product was monosodium glutamate, launched in 1909.

Which USDA chemist established the mechanism of the Maillard browning reaction in 1953?

Louis Camille Maillard had first described the reaction between amino acids and sugars four decades earlier while trying to reproduce protein synthesis.

Saffron's golden colour comes from which carotenoid pigment?

Safranal supplies the aroma and picrocrocin the taste. The ISO 3632 grading standard measures all three in the dried stigmas.

Casu martzu, the Sardinian cheese containing live maggots, is made from which animal's milk?

Larvae of the cheese fly are introduced to pecorino, and their digestion softens it until a liquid called làgrima, or teardrop, seeps out.

Fresh meat of the shark used for Iceland's hákarl is poisonous because of its high content of what?

The Greenland shark is buried under gravel for weeks to press the fluids out, then hung to dry for four or five months.

Roughly how many copies of the first, free Michelin Guide were distributed to French motorists in 1900?

There were fewer than 3,000 cars in France at the time; the Michelin brothers hoped more driving would wear out more tyres.

Since what year has 'Worcestershire' been a generic sauce name, after a court denied Lea & Perrins a trademark?

The two Worcester chemists had commercialised their fermented anchovy sauce in 1837, claiming a nobleman's recipe from India.

On which 1924 date was Caesar salad created in Tijuana, when a holiday rush emptied the kitchen?

Caesar Cardini ran the restaurant across the border to serve Americans dodging Prohibition, and tossed the salad theatrically at the table.

On an ice sculpture of which animal did Escoffier first serve the dessert that became Peach Melba?

The soprano was performing Wagner's Lohengrin at Covent Garden, and the dish was originally called Pêche au cygne. Raspberry sauce came later.

Nachos were invented in 1943 by Ignacio Anaya at the Victory Club in which Mexican border city?

A group of US Army officers' wives from Fort Duncan arrived after the cook had gone, so the maître d' improvised with fried tortillas, cheese and jalapeños.

Under EU law, cheese may only be called Roquefort if it is aged in the natural caves of which mountain?

Legend says a shepherd abandoned his lunch in a cave to chase a girl and returned months later to find Penicillium roqueforti had done its work.

Kinder Surprise eggs are illegal in the United States under a 1938 law banning candy that contains what?

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act forbids trinkets embedded in confectionery. In 1997 regulators also ruled the toys had small parts.

Importing traditional haggis to the US has been illegal since 1971 due to a ban on food containing what?

Lung makes up 10 to 15 percent of the traditional recipe. The separate ban on British lamb was lifted in 2022, but the lung rule remained.

Wilbur Scoville, whose 1912 test gave us the chilli-heat scale, worked in which profession?

His organoleptic test relied on trained tasters diluting extracts until the heat disappeared; today labs use chromatography instead.

Variations in which gene make coriander (cilantro) taste soapy to some people?

Surveys found about 21 percent of East Asians and 17 percent of Caucasians dislike the herb, versus only 3 percent of Middle Eastern respondents.

The true nutmeg tree is native to, and its spice mainly produced in, which island group?

The same fruit yields mace from the seed covering. Nutmeg's essential oil contains myristicin, which is toxic in large doses.

Under what brand name did Momofuku Ando launch the world's first instant noodles in 1958?

Nissin's Cup Noodles did not arrive until 1971. The wavy-noodle curving process had been invented separately by Yoshio Murata in 1953.

Tabasco sauce has been made since 1868 on which Louisiana island?

Edmund McIlhenny was a former banker from Maryland. Historians note a New Orleans politician, Maunsel White, was bottling a tabasco pepper sauce two decades earlier.

A cookie like the modern fortune cookie was being made in the 19th century in which city?

The Japanese tsujiura senbei used sesame and miso. Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden is credited with serving the US version in the early 1900s.

Before Escoffier's five mother sauces, which chef described four 'grandes sauces' in 1833?

Escoffier's sauce tomate, one of his five, was built on salted pork belly, mirepoix, thyme and white stock.

Swedish surströmming is traditionally released for sale on the third Thursday of which month?

A 1940s royal ordinance banned selling the year's fermented Baltic herring before that date; the law is gone but the 'premiere' survives.

Fugu's poison, tetrodotoxin, kills by doing what?

Victims stay fully conscious and die of asphyxiation; there is no antidote. Farmers can now raise poison-free fugu by keeping the fish away from toxin-carrying bacteria.

Pule, reportedly the world's most expensive cheese, is made in Serbia mostly from which milk?

Only about 100 Balkan jennies are milked for it, and it takes 25 litres of milk to make a single kilogram at the Zasavica reserve.

Which food technologist developed Vegemite in 1922 from yeast that breweries were throwing away?

British Marmite imports had been disrupted after the First World War. Vegemite finally reached shops on 25 October 1923.

Which Neapolitan pizzaiolo reportedly created the pizza Margherita for the queen in June 1889?

Of three pizzas he made, Queen Margherita preferred the one in the colours of the flag: tomato, mozzarella and basil.

Hawaiian pizza was invented in 1962 by Sam Panopoulos in which country?

The Greek-born restaurateur in Chatham, Ontario named it after the tinned pineapple brand he used, not the US state.

The West African miracle berry makes sour food taste sweet thanks to which glycoprotein?

The molecule binds to taste buds and only switches on the sweet receptors at low pH, so lemons taste like lemonade for up to half an hour.

The prized white truffle, Tuber magnatum, is most famously found around Alba in which Italian region?

The black Périgord truffle is the second most valuable species and grows with oaks and hazelnuts; its genome was sequenced in 2010.

Count Negroni created his 1919 cocktail by swapping which Americano ingredient for gin?

Bartender Fosco Scarselli at Caffè Casoni also swapped the lemon garnish for orange to mark the new drink.

Around 1870 the base spirit of the Sazerac cocktail switched from cognac to rye whiskey. Why?

Phylloxera had devastated France's vineyards. After the 1912 US absinthe ban, the locally made Herbsaint stood in for absinthe.

What was the Bloody Mary originally called at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in 1921?

Petiot later claimed he perfected the drink in 1934 at the St. Regis in New York, where it is still served as a Red Snapper.

A Moscow mule combines vodka and lime with which mixer?

That makes it a 'buck', so it is sometimes called a vodka buck. Health advisories suggest the traditional copper mug should be lined to avoid copper leaching.

Which San Juan hotel claims its bartender Ramón 'Monchito' Marrero invented the piña colada in 1954?

Puerto Rico's governor marked the drink's 50th anniversary there in 2004. The earliest version was blended like a milkshake with vanilla ice cream.

Why did Raffles Hotel bartender Ngiam Tong Boon reputedly make the Singapore Sling look like fruit juice?

The pink long drink began life around 1915 as his house version of the gin sling, though historian David Wondrich dates the drink to the 1890s.

Joe Sheridan invented Irish coffee in the early 1940s at a flying-boat terminal in which Irish town?

Travel writer Stanton Delaplane carried the recipe to San Francisco's Buena Vista Cafe in 1952, and Sheridan later emigrated to work there.

Which London bartender is most often credited with inventing the espresso martini in the 1980s?

He said the coffee machine at the Soho Brasserie sat right beside his station, and everyone was drinking vodka at the time.

A Bellini pairs peach purée with which sparkling wine?

Giuseppe Cipriani of Harry's Bar in Venice created it between 1934 and 1948, naming it for the pink tones of a Giovanni Bellini painting.

The 1976 Judgment of Paris wine tasting was organised by which British wine merchant?

He mostly sold French wine and expected France to win. Napa's Stag's Leap Wine Cellars and Chateau Montelena topped the red and white rankings instead.

The famous Bavarian beer purity law was adopted across Bavaria on 23 April of which year?

It built on a Munich law of 1487 and was later pushed nationwide by Bavaria.

Which Belgian abbey lost its Trappist brewery status in 2021 after its last monks left?

Achel's final monks departed in 2021. At that time thirteen Trappist monasteries brewed, but the International Trappist Association's Authentic Trappist Product label went to just ten.

Arthur Guinness's 9,000-year St. James's Gate lease of 1759 set what annual rent?

The harp trademark, modelled on the Trinity College harp, was adopted in 1862. By the 2020s Guinness had become the top-selling beer in both Ireland and the UK.

By Mexican law, tequila must contain at least 35% alcohol and no more than what?

It must also be made only from blue agave in Jalisco and a few neighbouring municipalities. UNESCO listed the agave landscape around Tequila as a World Heritage Site in 2006.

Bourbon sold in the US must be made from a grain mix containing at least what share of corn?

It must also be stored in a new charred oak container. Congress declared bourbon a distinctive product of the United States in 1964.

Which Tennessee whiskey maker did a 2013 state law exempt from the Lincoln County Process?

Filtering whiskey through maple charcoal was practised in Tullahoma as early as 1825. Jack Daniel's became a brand in 1875; the 2013 statute grandfathered Benjamin Prichard's.

Masataka Taketsuru, the 'father of Japanese whisky', apprenticed in 1919 at which Scottish distillery?

He followed it with Hazelburn in Campbeltown. Shinjiro Torii's company, the forerunner of Suntory, built Japan's first whisky distillery at Yamazaki.

The Royal Navy's daily rum ration, abolished on Black Tot Day in 1970, was how large from 1866 onwards?

Junior ratings had it diluted with two parts water to make grog. New Zealand's navy was the last to end the practice, in 1990.

Which trace compound in absinthe was blamed for 'absinthism', leading to bans by 1915?

The 'green fairy' was outlawed in the US, France, Switzerland and beyond, though studies show it is no more dangerous than other spirits of its strength.

Chartreuse liqueur is said to contain how many herbs, plants and flowers?

Carthusian monks have made it since 1737 from a 1605 'elixir of long life' manuscript given to them by a marshal of Henry IV.

Which spirit outsold whisky, vodka, gin, rum and tequila combined in 2018?

The Chinese grain spirit, usually distilled from sorghum, sold 10.8 billion litres that year, three times global vodka consumption.

Kopi luwak coffee is made from cherries that have passed through the digestive tract of which animal?

Wild-collected beans can retail for $1,300 a kilogram. It is a processing method rather than a coffee variety.

Red Bull was adapted from Krating Daeng, a Thai drink whose name translates as what?

Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz found it cured his jet lag and founded Red Bull with Chaleo Yoovidhya in 1984, carbonating it for Western tastes.

Gatorade was developed in 1965 at the University of Florida by a research team led by whom?

Football coach Ray Graves had asked for help with players wilting in the heat. Cade later joked a placebo would relieve pain a third of the time anyway.

Until the 1930s, 7 Up was marketed as containing which mood-stabilising drug?

The soda launched in 1929 as 'Lithiated Lemon Soda'; the government forced the health claims off in 1936 and the name shrank to 7 Up in 1937.

Fanta was created in 1940 in which country, because a trade embargo cut off Coca-Cola syrup?

Coca-Cola Deutschland's Max Keith sold three million cases in 1943. The orange version most people know was developed in Italy in 1955.

Angostura bitters was created as a tonic by Johann Siegert, a German surgeon general in whose army?

It is made in Trinidad today, contains no angostura bark, and its oversized label still shows the medal it won at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair.

Until 2006, Campari got its red colour from carmine, a dye derived from what?

Gaspare Campari invented the bitter in Novara in 1860. It is one of the three equal parts of a classic Negroni.

Under French law, Beaujolais nouveau is released at one minute past midnight on which day?

The date was fixed in 1985. The Gamay wine is fermented just weeks before release, and distributors race to be first to foreign markets.

Which sparkling wine, first made by Benedictine monks near Carcassonne in 1531, is the oldest recorded?

The monks bottled the wine before fermentation finished. Dom Pérignon, contrary to legend, did not invent sparkling wine.

Modern vermouth was first produced in the mid-to-late 18th century in which Italian city?

Fashionable cafés there served the aromatised wine around the clock before bartenders adopted it for the martini, Manhattan and Rob Roy.

Sake brewing depends on which mould to convert rice starch into fermentable sugar?

Known as koji, it makes the process closer to brewing beer than making wine. Chinese and Korean rice wines traditionally used Rhizopus and Mucor instead.

Irn-Bru was forced to change its name from Iron Brew in 1946 because of what?

The Scottish drink contained little iron and was not brewed. It has outsold Coca-Cola in Scotland for decades and even has its own tartan.

Pepsi was renamed from Brad's Drink in 1898 because its formula was said to include what?

Caleb Bradham sold it at his drugstore in New Bern, North Carolina, as an aid to digestion. The company went bankrupt in 1923 before being revived.

Much of the world's arabica coffee descends from a plant taken in the 1720s to which island?

Frenchman Gabriel de Clieu carried it there. By 1788 Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was supplying half the world's coffee.

Which Havana bar's wall inscription, attributed to Hemingway, claims his mojito was drunk there?

Biographers doubt Hemingway ever wrote it or even liked mojitos. The drink itself grew out of a sailors' remedy of crude cane spirit, lime, sugar and mint.

Which 12-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion discovered in 1841 that vanilla could be hand-pollinated?

Albius's technique enabled vanilla cultivation worldwide; botanist Jean Michel Claude Richard later falsely claimed credit.

Which apothecary to Elizabeth I created chocolate-free, vanilla-flavoured 'sweetmeats' in the early 1600s?

Until Hugh Morgan's sweetmeats, Europeans saw vanilla mainly as an additive to chocolate.

Who published the first known tomato ketchup recipe, in 1812?

Philadelphia's James Mease published it in 1812; an 1817 'tomato catsup' recipe even included anchovies and cochineal.

In Britain from the 1600s, ketchup was prepared with what as its primary ingredient?

Mushroom ketchup was the British norm and was made by colonists in America by at least 1770.

The word 'balsamic' was first used for vinegar in a 1747 catalogue of wines held by which ducal family?

The duke of Este's 1747 catalogue used the term to single out one type; by 1830 the court graded vinegars from 'balsamic' down to 'common'.

What is traditionally used to grate fresh wasabi rhizome in Japan?

Sharkskin graters were traditional; metal oroshigane are used today, and the paste loses flavour quickly once grated.