Food and drink
The origins of what we eat and drink, which are often named after a place, a person, or what someone thought it looked like.
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- Ambrosia
In Greek mythology, "ambrosia" was the food of the gods, said to grant eternal life to anyone who ate it — fittingly, since the word literally translates to "not mortal," combining a Greek negative prefix with the root for "mortal." The same ancient root…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Apricot
The Romans called it "praecoquum," early-ripening, because it fruited before the peach. Greek borrowed that, Arabic borrowed the Greek as "al-barquq," Spanish and Portuguese borrowed the Arabic, and English got "abrecock" in the 1550s. The modern spelling…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Automat
The waiterless "Automat", rows of little glass-fronted compartments you could unlock with a coin, wasn't an American invention. Berlin businessman Max Sielaff patented the vending system first; Philadelphia's Horn & Hardart just imported it, opening the first…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Avocado
The avocado's name traces to a Nahuatl word for the fruit that, thanks to its shape (and the way they tend to hang in pairs), also doubled as slang for a part of male anatomy in the language of the Aztecs. That's a real linguistic footnote — but it's often…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Banana split
The banana split was invented over Christmas break in 1904 by 23-year-old David "Doc" Strickler, a pharmacy student moonlighting as a soda jerk at Tassell Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. A crowd of students from nearby Saint Vincent College kept pestering…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Banoffee pie
Banoffee pie — banana + toffee — was invented in 1971 at the Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, England, by owner Nigel Mackenzie and chef Ian Dowding, who coined the portmanteau name themselves. It wasn't entirely original: the pair had been trying to…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - California roll
The origin of the California roll is genuinely contested. Most food historians credit Los Angeles chef Ichiro Mashita at the former Tokyo Kaikan restaurant, who swapped fatty tuna for avocado during a toro shortage in the late 1960s or early '70s. But…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Candy
Trace candy back far enough and you land in Sanskrit: khanda, "a piece of sugar," rooted in a verb meaning "to break into pieces." That became Persian qand, then Arabic qandi, then Old French sucre candi, before English clipped it down to just "candy" — a…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Cappuccino
The milky, foam-capped espresso drink takes its name from the Capuchin friars, a Franciscan order whose brown hooded robes were reportedly the exact shade Viennese coffeehouse patrons were reminded of when they saw the drink. The friars themselves had nothing…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Carnival
The most linguistically supported theory traces carnival to medieval Latin carnem levare — "to remove meat" — describing the last permitted indulgence before Lent's 40 days of fasting and meat abstinence. The phrase contracted through Old Italian…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Chartreuse
The Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble have made their herbal liqueur, from a recipe of some 130 plants that only two monks know at any time, since 1737, with the green version arriving in 1764. The color came second…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Chopsticks
The tidy explanation for "chopsticks" is that it comes from Chinese Pidgin English chop chop, meaning "quick, quick." There's a timing problem with that story: the English word "chopstick" shows up in print by 1699, in an account of a 1688 voyage, apparently…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Confetti
The small paper scraps thrown at parades and celebrations get their name from the Italian word for "confections" — because the original "confetti" really were sugar-coated almonds, thrown during Carnival festivities for centuries. An 1875 Milan businessman…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Croissant
The romantic version of the "croissant" story has Viennese bakers shaping the pastry into a crescent to mock a failed 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. That story doesn't show up in print until 1938, some 250 years after it supposedly happened, in a French…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Earl Grey
Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, was British prime minister from 1830 to 1834 and pushed through the Great Reform Act and the abolition of slavery in the empire. The bergamot-scented tea that carries his name is a different matter: he never wrote a word about…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Eggnog
This creamy holiday drink of eggs, milk, and spirits descends from posset, a medieval English concoction of hot, curdled, spiced milk. Nobody agrees on where the second half of its own name came from: one theory traces "nog" to "noggin," the small wooden mug…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Eggplant
The varieties Europeans first grew in the 1700s bore small, whitish fruits about the size and shape of a goose egg, and "eggplant" was a literal description when it was recorded in the mid-1700s. The large purple kind took over the market later, leaving…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Eggs Benedict
According to a story Lemuel Benedict told a New Yorker reporter decades later, the Wall Street broker stumbled into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 nursing a hangover and ordered his own improvised combination of poached eggs, bacon, toast, and hollandaise sauce…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Enzyme
Brewers had known for centuries that yeast turned sugar into alcohol, but by the 1870s it was clear that something inside the yeast, not the living cell itself, was doing the work. In 1877, German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne coined "enzyme" from Greek words…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Espresso
"Espresso" takes its name from the Italian word for "pressed out" or "expressed," describing how hot water is forced through tightly packed, finely ground coffee under pressure — a method Italian café owners perfected in the early 1900s specifically to serve…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Grapefruit
When 18th-century botanists first described the citrus growing on Caribbean plantations, they noticed it hung from the branch in dense, heavy bunches, more like a vineyard than a typical citrus tree, and the resemblance is the entire reason "grapefruit"…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Grenade
Spanish "granada" is a pomegranate, from Latin "granatum," full of seeds. The early explosive of the 1500s was a hollow iron ball about the size of the fruit, packed with powder and fragments, and the resemblance was obvious enough that the "grenade" took the…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Hamburger
The "hamburger" is named after Hamburg, Germany, a city with a centuries-old reputation for high-quality beef prepared as seasoned, chopped patties — "Hamburg steak." The sandwich version, tucked between two slices of bread, appears to be an American…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Hot dog
The popular story behind "hot dog" doesn't hold up: it credits a cartoonist who supposedly couldn't spell "dachshund" at a 1901 baseball game and drew a dog in a bun instead. No copy of that cartoon has ever surfaced, and the cartoonist didn't even move to…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Kit Kat
Rowntree's launched the bar in 1935 as "Chocolate Crisp," renaming it "Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp" in 1937 before shortening it to just Kit Kat after World War II. The name itself is older than the candy by over two centuries: the Kit-Cat Club was an early-1700s…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Lager
Lager comes from the German word for "storage" or "warehouse," describing exactly how it was made: brewed with a slow, cold-fermenting yeast and then aged for weeks or months in cool cellars and caves, especially in Bavaria, before it was ready to drink. The…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Life Savers
In 1912, Cleveland candy maker Clarence Crane — father of the poet Hart Crane — was looking for a mint that could survive summer heat better than chocolate. He borrowed a pharmacist's pill-press machine to shape them, and the machine kept punching an unwanted…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Lobster
The Romans called the creature "locusta," the same word they used for the locust, apparently because a big armored crustacean looked to them like a giant insect. Old English speakers turned that into "loppestre," possibly under the influence of "loppe," their…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Lollipop
Nobody's entirely sure where "lollipop" comes from, but the leading theory blends an old English dialect word for the tongue with an imitative word for a smacking or popping sound, a pretty fitting etymology for a candy that all but requires making that exact…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Margarine
The story behind "margarine" runs through two different scientists. In 1813, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul isolated a fatty acid he named "margaric acid," from the Greek word for pearl, for its lustrous, pearly deposits. When Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Mayonnaise
The most popular story behind mayonnaise holds that in 1756, the Duke de Richelieu's chef, besieging Port Mahon on the Spanish island of Menorca during the opening battle of the Seven Years' War, needed a victory feast sauce but had no cream on hand. He…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Milk Duds
Milk Duds were invented in Chicago in 1928 by Edwin Holloway of F. Hoffman & Co., who set out to make a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel. He couldn't do it — the shape kept coming out lopsided — so instead of hiding the flaw, he named the candy after…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Moscow mule
The "Moscow mule" was born of two inventory problems. In the early 1940s, John Martin of the Heublein company had bought the Smirnoff brand and couldn't get Americans to drink vodka, while Jack Morgan, owner of the Cock 'n' Bull on Sunset Strip, had a house…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Nabisco
"Nabisco" started life in 1898 as an informal shorthand for the company's much longer original name, and stuck around as a popular nickname for decades before the company finally made it official. The syllable-by-syllable abbreviation had already won in…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Nacho
Nachos were invented in 1943 by Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya, a maître d' at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico. The story goes that a group of U.S. military wives crossed the border after the kitchen had closed, and Anaya improvised with what was…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Napkin
A napkin is literally a "little tablecloth": French nappe ("cloth" or "tablecloth," ultimately from Latin mappa) plus the Middle English diminutive suffix -kin, the same ending found in "lambkin" or "bumpkin." The word shrank a full tablecloth down to…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Napoleon
The delicate, many-layered French pastry known in English as a "Napoleon" is called mille-feuille ("thousand leaves") in its home country, where it has nothing to do with the emperor at all. Food historians trace the English name to Napolitain — French for "a…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Negroni
As the story goes, Count Camillo Negroni walked into a Florence bar in 1919 and asked the bartender to strengthen his usual cocktail by swapping the soda water for gin. The bartender obliged, marked the new drink with an orange garnish to distinguish it from…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Nougat
The chewy candy's name traces to a now-largely-forgotten language: Old Occitan, once spoken across southern France, had a word meaning roughly "nutty," itself descended from the Latin word for walnut. French absorbed and modernized it, and English borrowed…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Nutmeg
The warm, aromatic spice in your pumpkin pie was once worth going to war over: through the 1600s, it grew almost exclusively on a handful of tiny Indonesian islands, and in the 1667 Treaty of Breda, the Dutch agreed to let England keep the North American…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Oktoberfest
On October 12, 1810, Bavaria's Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to a public celebration on a meadow outside the city gates. The centerpiece, on October 17, was a horse race, and the…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Oregano
"Oregano" gets its name from two Greek words, oros ("mountain") and ganos ("joy" or "brightness") — roughly, "joy of the mountain," describing where the wild herb was traditionally gathered on Mediterranean hillsides.
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Oreo
Nobody, including Nabisco, has ever definitively settled where Oreo got its name. Leading theories point to the French word "or" for gold, echoing the cookie's original gold-embossed packaging, or the Greek "oros" for mountain, describing an early hill-shaped…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Peach Melba
Chef Auguste Escoffier first served Peach Melba in 1892 at London's Savoy Hotel, in honor of Australian opera singer Nellie Melba (born Helen Porter Mitchell, stage name borrowed from her hometown of Melbourne), who'd just performed in Wagner's Lohengrin at…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Pretzel
The twisted, knotted "pretzel" has two competing origin stories, and nobody's fully settled the argument. One traces the name to a Latin word for a small reward, pretiola, supposedly given to children who'd memorized their prayers. The other says medieval…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Recipe
"Recipe" is the Latin imperative "take," and it was the first word of a physician's prescription: "take" so many grains of this, so many drops of that. The abbreviation Rx, with the stroke through the leg of the R, still marks prescriptions today. The word…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Restaurant
In 18th-century Paris, a "restaurant" was a thing you drank: a concentrated meat broth, from the French for "restoring," sold to the delicate as a health food. The story that a soup seller named Boulanger opened the first sit-down establishment in 1765, under…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Rhubarb
The Greeks called the plant "rha," after the Rha, their name for the Volga, along whose banks the root was traded, and later added "barbaron," foreign, to distinguish the imported kind. Medieval Latin fused the two as "rheubarbarum," and "rhubarb" was in…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Roquefort
"Roquefort" takes its name from Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, a village whose own name means "strong rock" in Occitan, fortified by shepherds after the barbarian invasions of the 4th century. The cheese has been aged in the village's limestone caves ever since…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Spam
Hormel introduced its canned pork product on July 5, 1937, and got the name from a contest: the winner was Ken Daigneau, a New York actor who happened to be the brother of a Hormel vice president, and he collected $100 for it. The company's official line is…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Subway
Seventeen-year-old Fred DeLuca opened his first sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1965 with a loan from family friend Peter Buck, calling it Pete's Super Submarines. Radio ads were the problem: announcers saying "Pete's Submarines" over the air…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Tabasco
Edmund McIlhenny started selling his pepper sauce in 1868 from Avery Island, a salt dome in the Louisiana bayou, and with glass scarce after the Civil War he bottled the first batches in discarded cologne bottles with sprinkler tops, which is why "Tabasco"…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Tangerine
The fruit itself is now believed to have originated in Southeast Asia, but English speakers never bothered learning that. "Tangerines" get their name from Tangier, the Moroccan port city through which the fruit was first shipped to Europe and Britain in the…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Toast
Raising a glass "in a toast" traces back to an old, very practical habit: dropping a piece of spiced, scorched bread into a cup of wine. Cheap or slightly off wine of past centuries was often too acidic or bland to enjoy on its own, and a piece of toast…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Treacle
The dark, sticky syrup the British call "treacle" has surprisingly violent roots: the word traces back through Old French and Latin to a Greek term, thēriakē, meaning "antidote against venom" — itself built from thērion, "wild beast." For centuries, "treacle"…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Umami
In 1908, Tokyo chemist Kikunae Ikeda set out to identify what gave kombu seaweed broth its distinctive savory depth, and isolated monosodium glutamate as the answer. He coined "umami" for the taste, from the Japanese "umai," delicious, and "mi," taste, and…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup →