People have cooked for an astonishingly long time, and told tall tales about it for nearly as long. These stories keep what the records support: stew recipes pressed into Babylonian clay, a chef who bargained for his freedom, a dishwasher built to protect fine china, and famous origin stories, like the Earl of Sandwich at his card table, that turn out to be shakier than the menu suggests.
Every tile in a Culinary History game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Dishes
nine stories
1The earl who probably ate it at his desk
On the tile: Sandwich1760sLegend
The story goes that John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, called for beef between two slices of toasted bread to keep gambling through a 24-hour session. A French travel writer, Pierre-Jean Grosley, supplied that tale, and the evidence for it is weak. The Earl's biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, concluded he was short of money and never bet heavily. Busy running the Admiralty, he more likely ate at his desk. The word already existed: in 1762 Edward Gibbon saw leading men at a London club supping on cold meat or "a Sandwich."
Romans seasoned their food with garum, a sauce made by layering fish with salt and letting it ferment. It was a close cousin of the fish sauces of Southeast Asian kitchens, and it gave dishes a rich, savory depth. Like wine, it came in grades. Archaeologist Claudio Giardino told NPR that a good bottle could cost something like $500 in today's money, while a very cheap version was made for enslaved people. Remains of garum factories have been excavated from Spain and Portugal to North Africa, some apparently employing more than 50 workers.
The earliest sushi was not about raw fish at all. It was a way to keep fish from spoiling. At Kitashina, a shop near Lake Biwa that opened in 1619, carp are packed in salt for two years, then fermented in cooked rice for one more. This is funazushi, a kind of narezushi, the fermented style that modern sushi grew out of. The method traces back to the rice paddies of China and is believed to have reached Japan in the 8th century. The same family has made it at Kitashina for 18 generations.
London and Lancashire both claim the first fish and chip shop. London credits Joseph Malin, an East End boy who paired chips with fried fish and opened a shop around 1860. Lancashire backs John Lees, who sold the pair from a wooden market hut in Mossley around 1863. Historian John K. Walton told the BBC nobody really knows who was first. The fried fish is older: Jewish refugees from Portugal and Spain brought a taste for it to London centuries before. In World War II, it was one of the few foods never rationed.
Caesar salad owes nothing to ancient Rome. Its Caesar was Cesare Cardini, an Italian-born restaurateur who moved his restaurant from San Diego to Tijuana, Mexico, so he could serve alcohol during Prohibition. As the story goes, a Fourth of July rush in 1924 cleaned out his kitchen, so he assembled what was left: romaine, Parmesan, lemons, bread cubes, olive oil, eggs and Worcestershire sauce, tossed at the table for show. Some tellings credit his brother. Cardini later trademarked his dressing, and by the 1940s the salad was a fixture at fine restaurants around the world.
In 1943 a group of hungry army wives walked into the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. With no chef around, the maître d', Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya, threw together tortilla chips, cheese and jalapeños and called the result Nachos Especiales. Yet another man, Frank Liberto, became known as the Father of Nachos. In 1976 he brought nachos with a pumpable cheese sauce to the concession stands at a Texas Rangers game in Arlington. That season they outsold popcorn at the ballpark.
General Tso's chicken is named for Zuo Zongtang, a Hunanese general who lived from 1812 to 1885 and helped put down the Taiping Rebellion. He never tasted it. The dish was created in Taiwan in the early 1950s by Peng Chang-kuei, a Hunan-born chef who cooked official banquets for the Nationalist government. Peng's version was tangy, spicy and not meant to be sweet. He moved to New York in 1973 and opened a Hunan restaurant, and in America the dish became a menu staple, usually with sugar added for local tastes.
In a 2001 speech, Robin Cook declared, "Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish." Where it began is less settled. Ali Ahmed Aslam, who opened the Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow in 1964, said he created it in the 1970s after a customer complained that his chicken tikka was too dry. The kitchen cooked the chicken in a sauce of yogurt, cream and spices. In 2009 a Glasgow member of Parliament sought protected status for the city's claim. The bid failed, and other restaurants around the United Kingdom also claim the dish.
9Japan's crisp classic may have sailed in from Portugal
On the tile: Tempura16th centuryLegend
Tempura seems as Japanese as a dish can be, yet its roots are widely traced to Portugal. Portuguese sailors reached Japan in 1543, and trade followed: guns first, then soap, tobacco, wool and even recipes. When the Portuguese were expelled in 1639, the story goes, they left behind peixinhos da horta, green beans dipped in batter and fried, which Japan made its own as tempura. Even the Portuguese dish is a bit of a mystery. A Lisbon chef told the BBC that nobody knows its exact origins, only that it existed by 1543.
Marcus Gavius Apicius, who lived under the emperor Tiberius, was Rome's model of extravagant eating, and the philosopher Seneca held him up as the picture of wasteful luxury. The writer Athenaeus tells how Apicius once sailed all the way to Libya in search of especially large prawns. Unimpressed by the ones brought out to his ship, he sailed back to Italy without ever going ashore. Rome's famous cookbook still carries his name, but its recipes were compiled in the late fourth or early fifth century, long after his death, and drawn from several sources.
Ziryab, whose nickname means blackbird, was a star musician from Baghdad who reached Spain in 822 and joined the court of Córdoba. Tradition gives him a second career as a tastemaker. Palace dinners, the story goes, began following his fixed order: soups first, then fish, fowl or meat, and finally fruit, sweets and nuts. He is also credited with leather table coverings, crystal goblets in place of gold and silver ones, and making asparagus a dinner vegetable. Much of this comes from later Arab historians, one writing in the 1600s, so enjoy it as tradition.
Until the early 1800s, sushi in Edo, today's Tokyo, was made by pressing vinegared rice and toppings into a box. The chef Hanaya Yohei is credited with inventing the hand-shaped style now called nigiri. He started out selling sushi topped with vinegar-cured gizzard shad from wooden carrying boxes on the night streets, then ran a food stall, and in 1824 opened a full shop in the Ryogoku district. At Edo's sushi stalls customers ate standing up and picked their toppings from a display, which Nippon.com compares to today's conveyor-belt restaurants.
Hannah Glasse is famous for a line she never wrote. "First catch your hare" does not appear in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, her popular book of 1747. The recipe behind the saying actually begins, "Take your Hare when it is cas'd." The book was published anonymously, "By a Lady," though by 1751 it opened with an advertisement for "Hannah Glasse, habit-maker." It also holds the first known curry recipe printed in English. Success did not last: deep in debt, Glasse sold the copyright and later went to debtors' prison.
Marie-Antoine Carême was born into a poor Paris family in 1784 and started work at 15 as a kitchen helper. At a fashionable pastry shop whose customers included Talleyrand, his elaborately sculptured confections reached the table of Napoleon himself. Talleyrand then employed him for 12 years. Next came Britain's prince regent, the future George IV, a brief stint with Tsar Alexander I of Russia and seven years with Baron de Rothschild. His books treated cooking as both an art and a science, and he is often called the founder of French gastronomy.
Auguste Escoffier's most lasting creation may be a chain of command. Running the kitchens of London's Savoy Hotel, managed by César Ritz, he set up the brigade de cuisine, a hierarchy inspired by his military service in which each cook had a specialty. It streamlined communication and let restaurants serve more complex dishes faster. Escoffier was called "the king of chefs and the chef of kings," and Emperor William II of Germany reportedly called him the emperor of chefs. In 1920 he became the first chef to receive France's Legion of Honor.
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson brought James Hemings, a young man he enslaved, to Paris to learn what Jefferson called "the art of cookery." Hemings studied with a caterer, pastry chefs and a cook to the Prince de Condé, then became head chef at Jefferson's Paris residence. Back in America, a 1793 agreement promised him freedom once he trained a replacement. Hemings taught his brother Peter, and in 1796 Jefferson signed the document that freed him. Monticello counts him among the early African American chefs who helped define American cuisine.
Hercules Posey, a cook enslaved by George Washington, won renown in Philadelphia in the 1790s for elaborate multi-course dinners served to the president and his guests. He enjoyed fine clothes and earned money selling kitchen leftovers. When Washington came to suspect an escape plan, he kept Hercules at Mount Vernon. On February 22, 1797, Washington's own birthday, Hercules freed himself. Washington never found him. He was later seen in New York City, where he worked as a laborer and a cook until his death in 1812.
When cookbook collector Jan Longone unwrapped a 39-page pamphlet from 1866, she knew she was holding the earliest cookbook by an African American woman yet to come to light. Its author, Malinda Russell, grew up in eastern Tennessee in one of the first families freed by a Mr. Noddie of Virginia. She wrote that she set out for Liberia but was robbed and stayed in Lynchburg, Virginia, working as a cook. Later she ran a pastry shop in Tennessee. Her recipes, from puff pastry and rose cake to catfish fricassee, were surprisingly cosmopolitan.
For centuries, big British kitchens roasted meat with help from a small, sturdy dog. The turnspit ran inside a wooden wheel mounted high on the wall, and a chain from the wheel turned the spit over the fire. On Sundays, author Jan Bondeson told NPR, the dogs often went to church with the family, useful as foot warmers. Around 1750 turnspits were everywhere in Britain; by 1900 they had disappeared, replaced by cheap mechanical clock jacks. The last surviving specimen, a stuffed dog named Whiskey, is at the Abergavenny Museum in Wales.
In 1679 the French inventor Denis Papin showed the Royal Society in London a sealed cooking vessel he called a digester. Heat trapped inside built up high-pressure steam, strong enough to cook bones soft and draw the gelatin out of them. In 1681 he published a description in English under a wonderfully blunt title: A new digester or engine for softening bones. It was the ancestor of the modern pressure cooker. Papin, who worked closely with Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, also went on to work on steam engines and a paddle boat.
Josephine Cochrane loved to entertain, but her fine china kept getting chipped when it was scrubbed in the sink. Working in a shed behind her home, she built wire compartments shaped to hold plates, cups and saucers, fitted them into a wheel that lay flat inside a copper boiler, and let a motor turn the wheel while soapy water sprayed over the dishes. She patented the design in 1886. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, her machines worked in the fair's restaurants and won the judges' highest prize. Her company eventually became part of KitchenAid.
4Albert Einstein's refrigerator with no moving parts
On the tile: Einstein1930
In the 1920s, a faulty home refrigerator could leak toxic gases such as ammonia or sulfur dioxide, sometimes sickening or killing whole families in their sleep. Albert Einstein and his younger colleague Leo Szilard took on the problem in 1926. They designed a sealed pump with no moving parts, driven by an electromagnetic field, and received a U.S. patent on November 11, 1930. It never reached kitchens. The Great Depression dried up their funding in Germany, the rise of the Nazis endangered both men, and a new refrigerant, Freon, drew the industry away from redesigned compressors.
Corning Glass Works made a heat-resistant glass for railroad lanterns, which used to shatter when warm glass met cold air. Physicist Jesse Littleton was looking for new uses for it when his wife, Bessie, told him her ceramic casserole dish had shattered in the oven after only two uses. He brought home the sawed-off bottoms of two glass battery jars. Bessie baked a sponge cake in one, and it cooked evenly and came out easily. She kept testing and recording results, and in 1915 Corning launched Pyrex cookware.
In 1938 Roy Plunkett, a DuPont chemist researching refrigerants, opened a gas cylinder that released nothing yet weighed the same as before. Inside was a white powder that shrugged off heat and chemicals and that most substances would not stick to. It was the material later named Teflon. Its first job was in the Manhattan Project. When Plunkett received Philadelphia's Scott Medal in 1951, every banquet guest went home with a Teflon-coated muffin tin. Nonstick pans did not appear in the United States until 1960.
Today's fitted kitchen, with its built-in cabinets and continuous countertop, owes a great deal to Frankfurt in 1926. The city was building mass housing on tiny floor plans, and architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed a compact galley for it, the first mass-produced fitted kitchen. She drew on efficiency ideas descended from Frederick Winslow Taylor's studies of factory work. The spice rack sat beside the stove, work surfaces were at sitting height, and the dining table left the room. Late in life she said she had agreed to go to the Soviet Union only on the understanding that she would design no more kitchens.
Gustaf Dalén, whose automatic beacons let lighthouses run unattended for up to a year, won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physics. That same year an acetylene explosion during a safety test cost him his eyesight. Dalén, head of the Swedish gas company AGA, kept inventing. At home, he is said to have noticed how exhausting cooking was for his wife, and in 1922 he produced a heat-storing stove that held cooking heat for 24 hours on only eight pounds of coal. The AGA cooker reached Britain in 1929.
Percy Spencer was orphaned young and never graduated from grammar school, yet he rose to senior vice president at Raytheon and earned 150 patents. In the 1940s he redesigned the magnetron, a key part of radar, so production jumped from 17 a day to 2,600. In 1945 he created a device that cooked food with microwave radiation. The first microwave oven was called the Radarange, and sales took off after Raytheon bought Amana Refrigeration in 1965. The National Inventors Hall of Fame counts more than 200 million in use.
Long before anyone wrote a recipe, human ancestors had fire. In Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, a team led by archaeologist Francesco Berna identified microscopic plant ash and burned bits of bone about a million years old, in soil that also held stone tools. Nothing suggested wind, water or wildfire had carried them in, and the bone had been heated to about 500 degrees Celsius. The team called it the oldest secure evidence of controlled fire, made by an early human, perhaps Homo erectus, and said it fits the idea that Homo erectus cooked food. Other archaeologists note that no hearth was found there.
Pottery is often linked with farming villages, but some of the earliest known pots were made by people who hunted and gathered. In Xianrendong Cave in China's Jiangxi Province, researchers dated the layers holding the oldest pottery fragments to 20,000 to 19,000 years ago, near the coldest part of the last ice age. That is 2,000 to 3,000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere, and 10 millennia or more before agriculture. The researchers suggest the vessels may have been used for cooking.
3The Incas freeze-dried potatoes without a machine
On the tile: ChuñoInca Empire
Centuries before NASA looked for ways to feed astronauts, the Incas had a freeze-dried food. Chuño is potato preserved by the mountain climate. In the high plains of Bolivia and Peru, villagers still make it as the Incas did: they let potatoes freeze and thaw again and again through the frosty nights and warm days of June, and stomp on them barefoot to remove the skins and liquid. The shrunken result keeps for about a decade. "It was the food that sustained Inca armies," author Charles C. Mann told The New York Times.
A restaurant was first something you ate. In 18th-century Paris the word meant a rich broth believed to restore your health. Larousse Gastronomique says a soup seller named Boulanger opened the first modern restaurant around 1765, under a sign promising restoratives fit for the gods, and the story goes that he won a court fight over a dish of sheep's feet in sauce. But historian Rebecca Spang searched police reports, guild records and legal papers and found no trace of Boulanger. Her research points instead to Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau.
Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner, began experimenting with ways to preserve food in 1795 and kept at it for 14 years. His method was to seal food in corked glass jars and boil them. In about 1806 the French Navy tried it on meat, vegetables, fruit and even milk. In 1810 he received a 12,000-franc government award on condition that he publish his process, and his book appeared that year. That same year Englishman Peter Durand patented the tin can. Neither man could explain why canning worked. Louis Pasteur's research on microorganisms came decades later.
The first cookbook by an American published in the United States was only 47 pages long. American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons, who called herself an orphan, appeared in 1796. Next to English-style roasts and pies, it offered the food of a new country. It was the first cookbook to include cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, Indian slapjacks and custard-style pumpkin pie. Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald see it as part of a push by Connecticut's social and political elites to make Yankee culture and good taste a model for American life.
Nineteenth-century recipes called for a handful of rice or a goodly amount of molasses, assuming the cook already knew what that meant. Fannie Merritt Farmer, who taught at the Boston Cooking School, insisted on level teaspoons, cups and ounces, and she is widely credited with inventing the modern recipe. "Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to ensure the best results," she wrote. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared under her name in 1896 and has sold more than seven million copies. Julia Child said it was the main reference in her mother's kitchen.
Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University suspected that familiar tastes like sweet, sour and salty did not explain the flavor of kombu, a type of seaweed. He set out to find its source. The answer was glutamate, and in 1908 he invented a way to produce crystalline monosodium glutamate. At his request, Saburosuke Suzuki, founder of Ajinomoto, began making it commercially, and it sold worldwide under the Ajinomoto name. The taste Ikeda chased is now called umami and is counted as the fifth basic taste.
9Ice fishing in Labrador taught him to freeze fast
On the tile: Birdseye1912
Frozen food once had a dreadful reputation, because it thawed into mush. Clarence Birdseye found a better way in Labrador, where he moved in 1912 and spent years in the fur business. The Inuit taught him to fish through holes in the ice, where at 30 degrees below zero the trout froze almost instantly and later tasted fresh. Birdseye noticed that quick freezing made smaller ice crystals, which did less damage. Back home he froze food in cartons pressed between super-cooled plates, and in 1929 Postum bought his company, creating Birds Eye Frosted Foods.