A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
My recent post on the superfood called moringa got me wondering: has the term “superfood” been used for a long time? Or is it a recent thing? I went to the Google Ngram Viewer to get an answer. Ngram Viewer displays the frequency of use for a word or phrase in Google’s massive collection of […]
This is part two of a two-part series about fruit crate labels. Part 1 of the series was about the early history of fruit crate labels. “Accidental Artifacts” In the excellent Pat Jacobsen’s Millennium Guide to Fruit Crate Labels, the author calls fruit crate labels “accidental artifacts.” It’s a good description. They were never meant […]
(Disclosures: the farm tour was a pre-conference excursion arranged by the International Food Bloggers Conference. Although I paid to go on the excursion, it is possible that California Endive or the California Pear Board provided some subsidies to reduce participants’ costs. In addition, I received a discount on the registration fee in exchange for writing […]
Reducing food consumption on the homefront was a major initiative of the U.S. government during the First World War, even before U.S. troops were fighting “Over There.” The U.S. Food Administration (run by future president Herbert Hoover) spearheaded the effort with promotional posters, outreach to restaurants, public education efforts, encouragement of gardens, and more. Some […]
A dinner party for the elite in ancient Rome was often as much about politics and social climbing as about food and drink: who was and wasn’t on the guest list, who sat next to who, who sat where, what foods were served, and so on. The food was often carefully chosen to illustrate the […]
An Old Approach from Ancient Rome In ancient Rome, it was common for guests at a banquet or dinner to bring their own container – usually a napkin – and carry something home. This worked well for everyone, as there were no storage facilities for cooked food and it allowed the host’s generosity to be […]
Preface: For various reasons, the images in this post (which are ’embeds’ from Google’s Ngram Viewer) might not going to look quite right — there will be spillover across the right boundary and spacing will be quirky. To see higher quality versions of the charts, click on the chart and it will appear all by […]
The other day, I noticed something odd on a bottle of ketchup. Because of my eating habits at home and at restaurants, I don’t see a lot of ketchup bottles, and so when I bought a bottle of Safeway brand ketchup so that I could make the delicious “Spicy Chipotle Toltec Barbeque Glaze” from Mark […]
One of the items on the special whale meat luncheon from 1918 was “Delmonico War Bread.” It was not defined in the newspaper article because most readers in 1918 were quite familiar with the concept of “war bread.” The massive destruction in lands of the United States’ allies — the Triple Entente of France, Russia […]
Updated, May 2016: 1) The mystery of the “ice cream, bisque of black bread a la Delmonico” is solved in my post about rye bread ice cream! 2) I found the original menu in the NY Public Library archive and comment on it in this post about the whale meat luncheon menu. If you follow […]