Food – Page 3

Dum Dums Mystery Flavor

The mystery flavor solves a logistical problem

In manufacturing you want as little machine downtime as possible. When the machines aren’t running they aren’t making your product, and you aren’t as profitable as you could be. It’s all about efficiency. The Akron Candy Company of Bellevue, Ohio created Dum Dums lollipops in 1924, eventually selling the product to the Spangler Candy Company in 1953. There were originally seven flavors but they broadened out to 16 flavors. To maintain flavor integrity the machines must be cleaned between flavors – this removes any remnants of the previous flavor and prepares the machines for a pure new flavor. This also creates machine downtime.

The solution: the mystery flavor. To maintain machine efficiency you want to start the next flavor right as you finish the previous flavor. Instead of shutting down the machines, the mystery flavor is created in this liminal time when two flavors are moving through the same machine at the same time. The end of the one flavor and the beginning of the next mix together in different amounts creating ever-changing new flavors. The Dum Dums’ mystery flavor isn’t just one flavor. The mystery flavor is always an unpredictable mix of flavors. It’s a fun game to guess which two flavors are making your version of the mystery flavor, and it’s a clever production solution.

Added info: In 2015 Spangler ran a limited time campaign and produced three specific flavors, outside of the normal flavors, to be the mystery flavor. These were pizza, popcorn, and bacon flavored Dum Dums. Also the name Dum Dums was chosen because a sales manager felt it was a name children could both say and remember.

Thai Restaurants & Culinary Diplomacy

The dramatic increase in the number of Thai restaurants is driven by a culinary diplomacy program of the Thai government

Between 2001 and 2019 the number of Thai restaurants worldwide tripled. In the United States the number of Thai restaurants went from around 2,000 to over 5,000. Meanwhile at around 300,000 people Thai Americans only make up around 0.09% of the 330 million Americans. By comparison there are around 37 million Mexican Americans and around 54,000 Mexican restaurants around the US. That’s one Mexican restaurant for every 650 Mexican Americans but one Thai restaurant for every 55 Thai Americans. That’s a lot of Thai restaurants compared to so few Thai Americans. So other than tasting great, what has driven this explosion in Thai restaurants?

Culinary Diplomacy

In 2001 the Thai government formed the Global Thai Restaurant Company, Ltd. whose goal has been to spread Thai food and Thai culture around the world. This government-supported program offers generous loans to Thai nationals living abroad to open restaurants. They offer training in the cooking of standardized Thai dishes, they award “Thai Select” certificates for restaurants that are of high quality, and they have created A Manual for Thai Chefs Going Abroad to help train new Thai restaurateurs. They also offer predesigned restaurant packages to create Thai restaurants at different price points.

Thai predesigned restaurant packages include:

• Elephant Jump: the lower-priced experience aimed at $5 to $15 per customer
• Cool Basil: the mid-tier offering at $15 to $25 per person
• Golden Leaf: the higher-end culinary experience at $25 to $30 per person

Some Thai restaurants are even named after these packages – they didn’t even bother to come up with their own names. These Thai restaurant packages are like a government sponsored version of the “Irish pub in a box”.

thai basil — Thai Basil restaurant in Manchester, Vermont didn’t even come up with an original name, keeping instead one of the predesigned restaurant package names.

The Thai government’s efforts fall under what is known as culinary diplomacy, or gastrodiplomacy – it’s soft diplomacy. Through food you can introduce your culture to other countries, winning hearts and minds through stomachs. As a result of Thailand’s success other countries are creating similar programs including Peru, South Korea, and Taiwan among others. Culinary diplomacy can generate revenue through increases in exports and tourism. Indirectly, these programs can create favorable impressions of a country, its culture, and its people.

Culinary diplomacy can also improve the relations of people within a country. Mustafa Nuur is a Somali refugee living in Lancaster, PA who runs the Bridge program. Bridge is a cross-cultural experience which allows you to book a meal with a local immigrant family to share stories and eat the food from their home country. This helps create bonds between new immigrants and their neighbors, all through sharing a meal.

Girl Scout Cookies

Most Girl Scout cookies go by two names because the cookies are made by two different bakeries.

The Girl Scouts of the USA were formed in 1912 as an organization for young girls to learn skills and build friendships. As a fundraiser in 1917 the Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, Oklahoma began selling homemade cookies. Selling cookies was so successful troops nationwide began to do the same. In 1936 the Girl Scouts organization began to use commercial bakeries to produce the cookies more efficiently that the scouts would then sell, which is how it’s still done today.

Depending on where you are in the United States, your cookies are made by one of two commercial bakeries:

ABC Bakers (a division of the Canadian corporation George Weston Limited), or
Little Brownie Bakers (a division of the Italian Ferrero Group)

Because of the two bakeries the cookies have different recipes and different names. As a result, what some know as Samoas, others know as Caramel deLites. What some know as Tagalongs, others know as Peanut Butter Patties. The newer cookies retain the same name regardless of bakery, as does the classic Thin Mint. As for the most popular Girl Scout cookie, at 25% of sales, it’s Thin Mint.

A comparison of just some of the cookie names between the two bakeries

Also: The Girl Scout logo is framed in a shape known as a trefoil (basically three overlapping circles) but with an additional stylized tail at the bottom to emulate the look of clover. The Little Brownie Bakers have labeled their version of shortbread cookies Trefoils as a nod to this branding. In the ABC Bakers version of the cookie, named Shortbread, the cookies’ form is less trefoil and more quatrefoil as it is basically four overlapping circles.

Cinnamon

From a mythical origin story, to common kitchen spice, cinnamon has a long strange history.

To start, cinnamon is a spice (which means it’s not leaves, which is what herbs are). It comes from the bark of trees in the Cinnamomum family. It’s been used for thousands of years but where it grew was intentionally shrouded in mystery for much of that time. During the spice trade cinnamon was harvested in southern Asia, brought to the Middle East along the Maritime Silk Road, and then resold by spice merchants around the Mediterranean and onward. To maintain control over the Western market, the Asian origins of cinnamon were kept secret by its Arabian merchants.

This cinnamon subterfuge begins with an incredible origin story. Westerners were told that there was a species of Arabian bird called the Cinnamologus (ie. “cinnamon birds”) which made their nests with pieces of cinnamon that they collected from an unknown land. These nests were either high on cliff faces or at the tops of very tall trees depending on who was telling the story. The key was that the nests were inaccessible. So the cinnamon was harvested by either leaving heavy pieces of meat out for the birds, who would carry the meat back to their nests but the weight would topple the nest to the ground, or the nests were shot with projectiles which would do about the same thing.

Medieval manuscript depictions of the harvesting of cinnamon

This exotic & daring method of harvesting cinnamon only made it more desirable, much more so than if people found out you just had to peel the bark off of a tree and let it dry. Not everyone believed these stories, but either way the market supply was cornered by Arabian merchants and so cinnamon remained an expensive spice & Western status symbol for hundreds of years.

Two kinds of cinnamon

Today southern Asia still produces most of the world’s cinnamon. There are several kinds but the two you will find the most are Cassia Cinnamon (aka Chinese Cinnamon) and Ceylon Cinnamon (aka “True” Cinnamon). Cassia Cinnamon originates in China but is now grown all around southeast Asia. It has a bold flavor and is the version of cinnamon most commonly found in the United States. Ceylon Cinnamon comes almost exclusively from Sri Lanka (Ceylon being the old name for Sri Lanka). It has a subtler taste but in the culinary world it is considered the superior cinnamon (hence, “True” Cinnamon). One other difference is that Cassia Cinnamon contains higher concentrations of the chemical compound coumarin, which in large amounts can cause liver and kidney damage.

In general, other than just tasting nice, cinnamon has a variety of potential health benefits and it’s proven to be antimicrobial. Cinnamon can kill E. coli along with other harmful bacteria and as such was used for thousands of years to preserve meat (including during the embalming process of Egyptian mummies, which is just preserving meat of a different kind).

Carats, Karats, Carets, & Carrots

A crash-course on Carats (measures gems & pearls), Karats (measures gold purity), Carets (a symbol), and Carrots (popular with humans & rabbits)

Carat

The carat is a unit of measurement for the mass of gemstones and pearls. Each carat is equal to 200mg of mass. So the more carats, the larger the stone / pearl (basically the more it weighs). The word carat comes from the Italian “carato”, which comes from the Arabic “qirat” which means “fruit of the carob tree” and also “weight of 4 grains”, which also comes from the Greek “keration” for both the carob bean and a small weight.

Karat

Karat with a “k” is a measurement of gold purity. It comes from the same root word as Carat with a “c”, from the Greek “keration”. Gold products are frequently alloys, different blends of gold and one or more other metals. The karat measuring system is a 24 part system and tells you what the ratio is of gold to other metals. So 1 karat gold is 1 part gold mixed with 23 parts other metal(s). Pure gold is 24 karat and contains no other metals.

Interestingly, pure 24 karat gold is fairly soft and not very resilient for jewelry or coins. Silver, copper, and zinc have been popular metals to pair with gold. These other metals strengthen the gold to make it harder. This is not true of lead, which was sometimes used to make fake gold coins. This is where the idea of biting a gold coin comes from. Most real gold coins were hardened alloys and would not leave a tooth mark when bit, but fake gold coins used lead which would be soft and leave a mark.

Caret

A caret is this ^ , which is a typographical mark used by proofreaders to show where something needs to be inserted into an area of text. Caret comes from Latin for “there is lacking” or “it lacks.”

Carrot

Finally, the carrot we are most familiar with is the vegetable, which originated in Persia. Its name also comes from Greek but from “karōtón” meaning horn, since the vegetable has a slightly horn-like shape. Carrots are a healthy vegetable full of beta-Carotene which is a red-orange colored organic pigment. When we eat beta-Carotene it synthesizes into Vitamin A which is good for you (… in moderation). Due to its color, storing extremely excessive amounts of beta-Carotene (eating way too many carrots) has the side-effect of turning a person’s skin orange through stored deposits in the skin cells.

Under normal circumstances however, beta-Carotene is converted into Vitamin A and can give us healthy skin, a better immune system, and good vision. This last part about better vision is the foundation of the myth that British WWII pilots were such good shots because they ate their carrots. In reality, they secretly had on-board radar and didn’t want the Germans to know about it, so they started a propaganda campaign saying their ace shooing was all due to carrots (which the British had an abundance of).

8 months of Oysters

Historically it has been safer to eat oysters in the colder months

There is an old adage that you should only eat oysters in months that have the letter “R” in their names. This adage is specifically for the names of months in English and French, and also specifically for the northern hemisphere where these would be the cooler months, September through April.

The reason is simple: before refrigeration oysters would spoil in transit during the warmer summer months (months without an “R” in their names). So, unless you lived near the water with the oysters, there was a greater chance that by the time the oysters got shipped to you they would have spoiled.

Blue Raspberry

At the confluence of food safety and marketing, blue raspberry was born.

In the natural world, no raspberry looks or tastes anywhere close to “blue raspberry.” The “raspberry” flavor of blue raspberry was created as a combination of banana, cherry, and pineapple. As for its shade of electric blue, most raspberries are red but there are some blue-ish raspberries. The white bark raspberry, native to western North America, is a very dark (nearly black) shade of blue. So why do we have the flavor and color of blue raspberry?

Red Number 2

In the 1950s there was a growing movement in the U.S. to ensure the safety of food and food additives. People had increasing doubts over the safety of Red No 2 (a food dye that, at the time, was made from coal tar). Food companies could capitalize off of this concern if another color was used.

It was during this time that the Gold Medal company of Cincinnati introduced a new flavor of blue raspberry cotton candy. Its popularity took off when Icee introduced their blue raspberry flavored frozen drink in the early 1970s. The competition between blue raspberry and red flavored candies/drinks was taken to a new level in 1976 when Red No 2 was banned in the United States because it was potentially carcinogenic. Simply put, at the time, Blue No 1 was safer than Red No 2.

Marketing

To mimic real life, food companies then and now use the color red for lots of flavors: cherry, apple, cinnamon, watermelon, cranberry, etc. It’s a crowded space. However, there are not many foods that are naturally blue, which as a marketing opportunity was very attractive. Blue was a way to set raspberry apart from the other flavors. This is similar to why pink lemonade exists: lemonade isn’t pink, but pink is a bright color that stands out from the crowd. Blue raspberry had the color all to itself for a long time which was marketing gold.

Elvis’s Fool’s Gold

One of Elvis’s favorite sandwiches was the 8,000 calorie Fool’s Gold Loaf.

On the evening of February 1st, 1976 Elvis and his buddies were in Memphis talking about this sandwich they loved from a restaurant called the Colorado Mine Company in Denver. Right there and then Elvis decided “we’re going”, had his jet readied, and the group flew from Memphis to Denver on a midnight run for sandwiches.

The sandwich is called the Fool’s Gold Loaf, it’s 8,000 calories, and if you would like to make your own you will need:

1 hollowed-out loaf of French bread
1 entire jar of smooth peanut butter
1 entire jar of grape jelly
1 pound of bacon

Elvis purchased 22 Fool’s Gold sandwiches for himself and his buddies, and the husband & wife owners of the Colorado Mine Company met them at the airport hanger with the sandwiches as well as Perrier and champagne.

Colonel Sanders … Not A Military Colonel

Colonel Sanders was a Kentucky Colonel, not a military one.

Colonel Harland Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, was not actually a military colonel (he never served in the military). Rather, he was given the honorary title of Colonel as part of the Kentucky Colonel program.

The governor of Kentucky bestows the title on individuals “… with strength of character, leadership and dedication to the welfare of others.”