The Origins of Breakfast Foods

mind boggling. And many thanks or in order, first of all, to Jill Hurley, our Minister of Stats, for pointing this out because we would have never known, right, yeah, definitely. We got to thank Jerry of course, and also Dave, Max Matt know, all the producers who've helped us along the way, right yeah. Uh. And of course Ed and Livia and Dave Bruce are intrepid writers. Is that the right word. They're intrepid for sure, they have no trepidation,

that's right. And we're acknowledging the stuff you should know Army as well, and all the listeners, because there's no way we would have gotten episode fire let alone five hundred had no one ever listened to begin with. And uh, you know, we're super lucky to have this job that we continue to be able to do, you know, yeah, for sure. Of course, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere without you guys listening out there, and of course Chuck. Last, but not least, we've got to thank our families like you,

me and Emily Momo Ruby. Yeah, of course, everyone provides us a lot of support, and uh, it's just pretty amazing. The number is a weird number to look at, and we're not going anywhere anytime soon, so don't think this is a sign off, but we just wanted to acknowledge it and and say big thanks to everybody. Yeah, so thanks everybody, and we'll just stop now and start the episode. How about that. That sounds great. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and

welcome to the podcast, or should I say paancast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. It's just the two of us. But I'm excited about this one enough that I've basically birth to Jerry. I'm thinking, sure what that means, Just don't think about it, okay. Uh yeah, we're talking about breakfast, and uh, I mean I could name about I feel like about a third of the websites on the internet for this, because if you want to learn about breakfast, there are a lot of websites that want to teach you about it. It's

Taylor made for the internet. You know, there's nostalgia, there's tastiness, um, there's history. It's got everything it does. But how stuff works are old colleagues. Of course, we're involved in Smithsonian mag and the Kitchen Project and the breakfast shop in Chicago Waffles great website by the way, the Daily Meal. There were a bunch of websites where were rated this wonderful. And this is just probably a part one. Like, there are so many breakfast items with rich histories that we're

not going over today. So I feel like we could do another one of these later. Have we ever done one on breakfast cereals specifically, because that seems like something we could spend an hour saying, like, oh you remember do you remember Frank and Berry? We haven't, but we should. That sounds fun. Um. So yeah, we're just gonna do kind of just a select few today, maybe some that you're not going to be very surprised at, and as a matter of fact, I'll be surprised if anybody's surprised

at any of these selections. But they're still good. Nonetheless, But before we get to that we should probably talk about where the idea of breakfast comes from, because it's just such an integral part or it once was such an integral part of people's lives that you just kind of took it for granted, right, Yeah, And it's really interesting.

The House Stuff Works article points out that like what we consider breakfast foods, like there's so many different things that go into what made that happen, and that none of them are the same. Like sometimes it's religion, sometimes it's technology, sometimes it's just what was available. Sometimes it's cultural like regional norms, uh, immigration plays apart. It's just super interesting, I think. But breakfast as a whole, uh is you know, it's something that people have always eaten,

sure that first meal of the day. Depending on where we are in the world and where we are in history, Um, the importance of breakfast is a little bit different. It's like it's not quite the same thing as it was, you know, hundreds or thousands of years ago. Though, no, not at all. And you can make a really strong case that at least in the States, it's not what it was thirty or forty years ago. You know, good point.

But um, the idea of breakfast if you hadn't figured it out by now at this point in your life. It's um break and fast, like you're breaking your fast put together. And I always thought it just had to do with you know, you you woke up, you hadn't eaten since the day before. Just makes sense you've been fasting whether you wanted to or not, because you can't really eat while you sleep. I've tried, and so you're

breaking that fast. But apparently it's much more religious than that, because people used to fast until church when they would get the Eucharist or the communion wafer, and after that they could you know, go whole hog on some on some meals and that was their breakfast, but it would come later in the morning, if not in in the afternoon. Yeah, And I think um, as far as seeing that word written down, they trace it to UH fifteenth century UH.

And that's in the English language. But the same word apparently can mean different things, or used to mean different things in different countries, anything from a a sort of a smallish lunch if you're in France to a lighter supper in Italian and they, you know, like I said, depending on where you were and when you were there would be different and we'll see as we go on.

You would eat like things that you would consider really weird now, like unless you're going to a Sunday brunch or a Saturday brunch and having like a bloody Mary or something. The idea of drinking for breakfast alcohol seems really weird. But that used to happen. They used to drink you know, hard ciders and and sort of low A BV. Beers all the way up until like the mid nineteenth century. I saw it can be anywhere between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, but that, yes, but

that went on for millennia. That's just what people did at breakfast. They love that. They drank booste every day. I think kids did as well, if I'm not mistaken. I saw somewhere. But then in addition to like drinking booze, there would also be stuff that you'd be like fish for breakfast, super breakfast, And it seems odd to those of us in the West, who are you know, customers that specific Western kind of breakfast, But that's still the case in some places today, especially Asia, like in Japan.

Um they eat like fish and soup and ramen and stuff like that. For breakfast, like their breakfast looks just like their lunch or their dinner. Yeah. So the idea of breakfast as we understand it isn't like global um by stretch of the imagination. Yeah, so we're taking this from sort of a North American eurocentric point of view. Yeah, you could almost title this like how the Western breakfast evolved. You know, maybe I will Okay, I dare you game on? Uh so this is a little bit of a rehash.

But um, I just noticed we're saying breakfast words all over the place, like hash. See that's when we could put on the next one, corned beef hash, just breakfast hash. We're not going to cover omelets. We're not gonna cover muffins like I think there's a whole part two in them in the making. Okay, I love it. But bacon and eggs. It seems like eggs have been eaten sort of since time in Memorium for breakfast. I didn't see

anywhere exactly why. My hunch is that, uh, you get that egg out of the chicken in the morning, and maybe it just goes right onto the plate. You pick it up by its neck and shake it until the egg falls out. I think I think they like eggs in the morning, right, I don't know. I don't remember doubting myself because I'm kind of going off the dome here. I don't remember if there's like a specific time or not.

But but maybe if they laid it overnight or something like that, when you got up in the morning there was an egg. Who knows that's true? That makes good sense. But the whole bacon thing we talked about in our h if I do say so myself are great? Uh maybe our greatest live episode of all time on Edward Burnet's The Nephew of Sigmund Freud and pr Mastermind, a really good episode if he hadn't listened to that one.

But um, the bacon and like a big, huge hearty breakfast wasn't really the thing in America at the time. And this was in you know, the like whaties and nineteen thirties. Yeah, and and even before then, and from what I can tell, um, breakfast more resembled breakfast today. Like if you ate anything, it was really quick, convenient.

You had to be out the door. Um, And that was a big result of industrialization and urbanization, Like you didn't go work in the fields and then come in and have a big spread for breakfast a couple hours after you woke up and started working, like you were away from your house and you had to be out

of your house fairly quickly. So breakfast I think just kind of went the way of disco before disco, right, But the beech Nut Packaging Company in the nineteen twenties, they sold a lot of stuff, but one of the things they sold was bacon, and bacon just wasn't something that UH was selling as much. It wasn't sort of the staple item you would think of today. People certainly

ate it, but it wasn't a breakfast item. So they got Burnet's on board and they mounted a whole campaign, a big pr campaign to basically say, hey, it's first thing in the morning, you need to really just load up on tons of food and bacon should be a part of your stable diet and it goes great with eggs, and they're correct. Yeah, they advertise that you lose energy overnight, so you need to fill up on a big breakfast. And the idea of like breakfast being the most important

meal of the day comes from that advertising. And we'll see that a lot of the breakfast as we recognize it came from advertising in a company who said, we got a bunch of stuff we want to dump. Its just completely changed the way Americans live and think, what's your deal with breakfast? Do you like breakfast? Um? I have changed my eating habits in the last few months, and so I've started eating breakfast again. But there was a very long stretch where I didn't need anything until

eleven or noon. Yeah, um, And I I'm not quite sure. I've been told like that's not good at all for your body. Not that like breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but just going hours when you're hungry and not giving your body food might not be the best thing for it. Um. So I've started to kind of eat earlier and earlier. Interesting because that reminds me I want to do one on Oh, what's the fasting trend called now these days? The intermit intermittent fasting,

which um, is all about not eating breakfast. Well, we did a whole one on fasting, and there's no way we didn't talk about internet emitten fasting is there? I don't know, it seems I don't. I think there's there's something there for a full one. But my deal with breakfast is I love breakfast, I just don't ever eat breakfast. Like breakfast is a sort of a treat meal. And when I think of like a big breakfast, it's like an out to eat thing on vacation kind of thing.

And but I love everything about breakfast, Like maybe my favorite meal as far as like a plate of hash browns and eggs and bacon and sausage and waffles and pancakes and muffins and bagels and all that delicious is I love all of that stuff. But you can't. You can't eat like that. No, That's why it does seem to be a vacation thing, you know. And that's why they have breakfast puffase and you go on vacation for

that very reason. But we are about to talk about one of my favorite breakfast items, especially obviously when I go to New York City and I get my uh, I bring my extra large ziplocks, and I come home with a dozen bagels from s A bagel my favorite one. They're huge. There's no way you can need a full one. Oh yeah, yeah, you split it in half like a half a bagel. I mean, they're like they're enormous. That sounds like a wager to me. I mean you could, but it's just that's a lot of a lot of bread.

You'd just be suffering towards the end. But a bagel, if you don't know, is a um. They describe it as a kind of role um. But it's a it's a bakery item. It's yeast risen. It's dough that shape my hand and in the form of a ring. Uh. The very key part about being a real bagel as you boil it before you bake it, and it's very chewy in the middle. But if you do it right,

it's uh, you shouldn't even need to toast it. I do like my toasted like the inside, trustee, but uh, very crispy and browned on the outside after you boil and bacon. How do you eat your bagels? Well, I used to just eat butter before I knew anything about life. But still good though, that's still good. It's like that kind of plain simple. Yeah, taste can be really good. No, I like it. I like nothing but everything bagels. It's my only bagel for me. But um, now I do

sour cream. Um, I prefer not whipped. I prefer just the regular sour cream, but I will have it whipped. And then I really love the smoked salmon on top. Now yeah, okay, you finally got to the important part and everything bagel shake, I add that on top as well. Wow. So let me ask you this, do you ever treat yourself and get a red onion, carve up a few like ultra thin slices and put some capers on top. I'm not into capers an onion. Oh well, then definitely

avoid that. But if you were into capers an onion, I was strongly recommend doing that. Yeah. I mean, that's that's a very classic bagel about say recipe, but it you know, what would you call that an assembledge? I think it's perfect for it. But then one last thing about that, chuck. So I'm glad you said smoked salmon because that's my preference too. And for a very long

time that's all I ate. Um. And I wasn't aware that there was a difference between locks and smoked salmon until I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and locks out and ate it, and I was like, poo, poo, what is wrong with this salmon? And it turns out locks is different locks is entirely salt cured, so it's one of the saltiest things you'll ever eat in your life, whereas smoked salmon is also salt cured, but they go lighter on the salt and it's heavier on the smoke flavor.

It's way better in my opinion. Yeah, and the everything bagel is already pretty salty, so um that yeah, that would be what Emily would call a salt lick. Right. So we don't even know actually where the word bagel came from. It's kind of a weird word if you think about it, but there's some pretty good contenders. Um. Yiddish has one called bacon, which means to bend. Makes sense. Um,

The German Germans are friends. In Germany, they have a word for bracelet that sounds familiar braceletter ring google not bad. That's awfully close if you asked me. The one that I always thought it was because I learned it from Uncle John's bathroom reader, is that it's an Austrian term for stirrup bugle, because the stirrup is supposedly what the bagel was originally shaped after, at least according to Gordon Jovna. I'm gonna go with that one too. That one spoke

to me. Yeah, so that's what when we're gonna go with. That's the official s y s K choice for where the where the word bagel came from? Uh, that's right. And if you want to know where the printed word be a g e l came from first, they've tracked it down to the year sixteen ten. Very impressive in the community relations I guess handbook for crack Owl Poland and this is pretty great. A bagel is on the list of official items that you can give a woman

on the occasion of her son's circumcision. Bam that So that's the first instance of bagel, you say, right as we understand it, b A G e l. So um, the that's fine and good. Like the people of krak how had been eating bagels for centuries by the time we got on board. But we can thank our friends who were part of the nineteenth century Jewish exodus to

the United States for bringing bagels to US. Uh. And at first it was like strictly considered an ethnic food and it was really pretty much relegated to um the Jewish community of New York in particular, and they set up bagel bakeries out the Yin Yang. There was at least seventy in the Lower East Side alone in the early twentieth century. And there's a bagel bagel Baker's Union that was formed there and they did their whole meetings

in Yiddish. So you can kind of understand if you put all that together that, yeah, it didn't really creep outside of that neighborhood for a little while. Yeah, but it Uh, this is one of the instances where I guess modern technology sort of came into play to take something wide, as is the case a lot of times. But uh, they you know, they got bagel factories. Basically, they got these machines that could mass produce bagels. In the mid to late nineteen fifties in the United States,

that was a big deal. And a man named Harry Lender of New Haven, Connecticut got ahold of these things and we're like, these are great, we can make tons of bagels now. And his son Murray Murray Lender obviously of Lender's bagels, uh, and then at a slicing machine, so they're pre sliced, which is always appreciated. But usually if you get a pre slice bagel, it's probably not the best bagel, but you can imagine that's when they really took off like a rocket. I don't have to

slice them, they're already mostly sliced for me. Sold. Yeah, and you can get those, but I don't have one. But the the little bagel slicer as you see in the shop that like the the guillotine. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, and think those work that well. They tend to smash the bagel down, um, and then they if they don't fit in there, right, It's just I get why they use them. But the coffee shop up the street from me uses those, and I'm always like, please

don't cut it. I'll cut it when I get home. Yeah, I mean, the best thing is just a serrated knife for a bread knife, which also was serrated. That's what you want exactly. And by the way, let me thank you publicly for the avocado really gig that you got me. You're very welcome. Have you used it yet? I did, And what I found out on the first use is that it's not great if it's a little softer, but

I bet if it's a good firm avocado, it works. Wonders, it really does, and I had no illusions whatsoever that you are going to just change your whole game. But I thought, you know, I'd give you the chance to if you wanted to know. I have to know because my daughter likes it, so oh okay wow, and she loves avocados nice, so that's perfect. So it was really for her. Then, I guess, yes, that's right. So she says, thank you, uncle Josh, you're very well share a birthday,

and happy birthday to mar to you by the way. Yeah, happy birthday to her tomorrow too. Yeah. I'm not sure people know that, but that's one of the very funny things about life, is that my daughter was born and I was looking up celebrity birthdays to see who shared her birthday with her. Your face spots up. That's awesome. It was very very funny day. Was that sad celebrity dot Com? Uh? No, it was. It was a legit celebrity birthday side. I wasn't on it. I was like,

how did you get on there? They reached out to me sometime and I was like, sure, I'll definitely lift a finger to be on this website. And it paid off an aces apparently. Yeah, it was a very very funny moment. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. So just one last thing. Let's put a punctuation mark on bagels and then take a break. How about that.

Let's do it so um. Apparently, as far as how Stuff Works reports, the idea of spreading cream cheese and adding locks to bagels was, if not invented, at the very least widely popularized in America by Family Circle magazine. I love it, I mean too good stuff. That's a punctuation mark if I've ever heard one, right through that hole in the middle of the bagel. All right, let's take a break. You know something we should have mentioned

in the bagel segment be Ali's what? Bali is a sort of a cousin of a bagel b I a l y never heard of a bli? No, I think of the deal with a bali is there's no hole. I'm not sure what the other difference is. I didn't look this up, but I just thought we should shut out the bali because then I will get listener mail. It sounds suspiciously like an English muffin. I think it's just I gotta look it up because I don't want

to misspeak. But I think it's a bagel without a whole. Okay, I've I've genuinely never heard of that by name or by concept either. Interesting. All right, so let's let's talk oats then. Yeah, oats is one of those things that is maybe in the running for the oldest breakfast food because for centuries, in thousands of years, people have been eating growing oats and eating oats and some kind of

slobby porridge type thing. Yeah. What's crazy is the oat was actually domesticated relatively late compared to like wheat and barley, because the yields of the oat are much smaller. But eventually they were like, oh, we'll give this a try to so um as far as um, what about years ago we were we were domesticating them and eating them. But the way that they were eating oats before was they would take the husk off and then eat the

whole oat. And that that method, or that what you have after you just d husk and leave the hole is called a groat. Doesn't sound very good? No, well, prepare for this, um. Apparently there are fats in oats, specifically in groats um that can go rancid, So you could be eating rancid groats for breakfast, had it not been for a couple of geniuses named Henry Seymour and William Heston who developed a different process called rolled oats, which actually gets rid of those fats that can go ranted.

That's right, and then you have, I mean kind of exactly what we have today. I mean, there are obviously different kinds of oats, like steel cut in different varieties, but uh, rolled oats is what we're eating today. They founded Hested and Seymour founded Quaker Oats, and apparently one

of the they're not Quakers. Apparently one of the reasons is, at least as legend goes, that they named themselves Quaker Oats is because they wanted to seem like an upstanding, uh, non fraudulent company, because food fraud and the eight hundreds was a thing where they would water mill down and they would basically try and trick the customer into thinking they were eating a more pure product that was cut

with something else, like like bad cocaine. Yeah, it makes sense though, Yeah, if you're gonna sell cocaine, you should be like, this is Quaker brand cocaine, and people would be like, I can trust you, I don't need to test that first. That's funny. So the Quaker Man. I was looking to see who it was based on, because all those things were modeled on somebody. And I came across the very famous version of it that you and

I grew up with. It was painted by um Head and Son Blom, who painted the Coke Santa Okay, and once you know that, you can kind of see the different the the similarity. But anyway, um some people say it was based on William Penn of the famous comedy duo Penn and Teller, but apparently Quaker Oats says, now, I wasn't based on anybody. But if you go look at the old Quaker Oats, like the original ads, it

looks a lot like William Penn. Yeah, I agree, And I love that you sent me the uh that little nostalgic page on the old nineteen seventies and eighties, the little I mean he still make them, the those delicious sugary flavored packets of Quaker oatmeal. Yeah, you can see the progression of them from like unlike zero taste too, you know, adding raisins and then all this stuff. And then by the nineties there was like a blue raspberry

when did you see that? No, grody, I think that was on That was on click americana dot com, which is a great site for nostalgia like that. I do like the overnight oats thing. That's something I didn't know was the thing until a couple of years ago. Yeah, it seems to be very popular now. But those are those are tasty. All the kids these days are eating overnight Well, that's right, it's the It's the hipster version of hot oatmeal. So um, we got we have to

talk about coffee for a couple of reasons. I mean, we did an entire episode on coffee. We did an entire episode on caffeine. So we'll keep it short. Agreed, Yeah,

because we covered most of this. Um. But the very origin, the very origin, the origin of how supposedly, and it's a pretty good story even if it's not true, but the legend of the Ethiopian goat herder that saw goats eating what ended up being coffee beans or coffee berries, and those goats started jumping around and dancing and getting down and boogeing, and the goat herder was like, huh, let me see if I want to eat one of those, and they realized the stimulating effects right off the bat,

and caffeine and coffee beans became a thing. Yea that was coldly by the way the Ethiopian herder. So in the colonies. In America, everybody mostly drank tea, even though coffee had made its way to Europe by them, but everybody like tea, and then England began heavily text hea and so they adopted coffee widely. In America, it became

kind of a patriotic thing to drink coffee. But then round about this time, or maybe a century or so before, depending on who you ask, coffee started to replace beer and wine as like the breakfast drink because people noticed that you didn't like fall over on your scythe at eleven a m if you drank coffee for breakfast in you would if you drank a bunch of like hard cider insteady Drinking booze for breakfast is unless you're at sunny brunch. It's not a great way to start your

work today. No, not at all. So get this, chuck. Sixty of Americans drink coffee every day. Seems like a lot, right. Australia has just totally beat of people in Australia drink coffee every single day. That doesn't surprise me. They do. They do everything to the max. Okay, so so you you think that's pretty impressive, though, listen to this in the UK. Of people who live in the UK drink tea every day. Okay, I'll thought you about to say coffee.

I would have been blown away. Yeah, they don't do that. But of people drink you over there, and only six of Americans drink coffee. My I feel like I'm standing on my head right now. Uh should we do o J Yeah? Alright? What orange juice? It's such a staple item for breakfast, even though apparently it's over the past couple of decades, consumption of orange juice has been going down in the United States, but it's still a staple

breakfast item. And this is because again, people were drinking low alcohol booze at breakfast for you know, many hundreds of years, and then finally, uh, orange juice came along. But it was really expensive. Oranges were expensive. They you can't grow them everywhere obviously, so getting them, you know,

across America was an issue. But trains came along and all of a sudden you could get oranges around the country pretty speedily, and vitamin C became a thing in the nineteen twenties where scientists isolated and said, hey, this stuff is really good for you, and there's a lot of it in oranges and this this is also another breakfast food that came about because the company was like, we need to unload a bunch of these things, and there's a bumper crop of oranges in nineteen sixteen and

so orange producers kind of got together and started a campaign called Drinking Orange, uh, and it was like, you know, buy a bunch of oranges and make orange juice and drink that for breakfast. So that's another idea where it

came from. But they ran into a problem until the nineteen forties Chuck and that was that, yeah, you could get oranges across the country, and you could get orange juice kind of far, but there was a chance that was going to show up turned it was going to spoil along the way, and so the US government was like, our soldiers want orange juice, but we can't give it

to them. We're going to give a bunch of money to anybody who can come up with a way to get orange juice across the United States without it turning bad. That's right, And that's when frozen concentrate orange juice came into play thanks to the Minute Made Company. And I have haven't had that stuff since I was a kid, but I have a great nostalgia for it because that's how we drank orange juice in my house growing up. Yeah, I just realized that that's what's wrong with my freezer

as an adult. It's missing like that Minute Made can that was just kind of like a little blast of sunshine every time you open the freezer, you know. Yeah, And I will say this, even though there are many more ways to make a sophisticated cocktail, if you're hanging out in the summertime by the pool and you happen to have like a blender nearby, there are a lot worse things you can do than get some lime made or some of that strawberry frozen junk and make a

big thing of frozen dacories. Just cheap eat little frozen dachories. I remember that Baccardi Breezer's add from the eighties where the parson went inside. When they came out, her friends were like eighty years old, and they're like, what took you so long the weird thing, oh man, so Minute Made, by the way was founded by a guy named Richard Morse who invented that proce us of creating concentrate from

orange juice and shipping across the country. And for the first season they packaged for a company called snow Crop. It took off like a rocket, and Minim said, yeah, we're going to stop doing that inform our own company, and they did. Why did they spell it like that? Though? That's the one thing I've never understood minute made? Yeah, why is it? I mean, why is it spelled M A D E Like it's made in a minute? That's what it implies. Why is it spelled like a housemaid?

I'm going to make something up completely, But you can also call it hazardating a guess. Okay, sure, let's hear it. So it's it's made in a minute. So you get that just from the minute made together. But the fact that they spell it like that makes it seem like it's so easy to make you might as well have a domestic servant helping you. Yeah, you think that's my guess. That's my guess. Now I'm wondering what the actual definition of made is there may be something in there that

I don't know about. I don't think so, I think I'm right here. And of course A very quickly just googled made and the first thing that pops up is a bunch of sexy halloween Halloween goss. I'm sure of it. How bat Man, Uh, should we take another break and then finish up with a triplet of delicious pancakey waffle e French tosty things? Indeed, I do, Chuck, I think that's a great plan. Okay, so we're back and we're talking first about pan clocks. Have you ever seen fifty

First States? I've seen parts of it. I don't know if I ever saw at all. Adam Sandlers trying to um attract Drew barrymore so. He pretends like he's trying to order off the menu, but he can't read, so he's sounding it out. He says pan clocks and then he gets all frustrated. It's pretty cute, little seam. But anyway,

it's funny that was a reference to that. Instead, we're talking about pancakes, and you said that um oats are one of the oldest UH breakfasts, And actually it seems that pancakes are probably the oldest breakfast of all time because they found that, um ootsy, remember our friend outs the ice man, he had a breakfast of iron corn wheat in his stomach, and they think that he probably

ate it in the form of a cooked pancake. Oh interesting, Yeah, because you can make a batter out of some sort of grain and pour it on a hot rock and there's your grittle right there. Yeah, that's a good point. Um. There are all kinds of different pancakes throughout antiquity, uh that were made from all kinds of ingredients, depending on kind of what was readily available. Uh. You know, even consider like a potato pancake a pancake because the name

is right there. Um, if you're talking official recipes, Uh, it was a Dutch cook in the sixteenth century that I think has the first official pancake recipe. But that, like you said, that was way way later. You know, people had been eating some kind of pancakey thing for a long long time, right, and since it was around so long, different cultures kind of tinkered with it here or there and came up with like their favored version

of it. So that's why you have so many different pancakes. Today, you've got um the American pancake or flapjack, which I looked it up, same exact thing. It's apparently just just a regional difference in the name. If you're in Australia, you'll eat pancakes for dessert. Apparently Germans eat them as strips alongside soup. You have never heard of that? No, I haven't either, But the Swedish know what they're doing

because they just they topped there. They basically go the eye hoop route and they put whip cream on their pancakes and and like sweetened fruit too. I think that's the deal. It's the International House of Pancakes, right, Oh, I guess so, because they also have crapes, the French version. Yeah. I never really thought about it before or which is kind of dumb. I never really considered a crape like a French pancake, I guess. I mean, I know it's similar,

but I don't know. The taste is too different to me. It's more of a pan clock You like pancake. What's your favorite of pancake, waffle or French toast man? Why would you do this to me? I can actually tell you that French toast is my favorite. But I will eat pancakes any day of the week, any time of day,

any day of the week. I love pancakes, but the actual like delicacy, like the taste, or the delicate nous and just general like like mouth feel, if I can get weird and gross of French toast is like it's tough to beat that. Yeah, I see, I love all those two. But boy, a crispy waffle those the way those squares fill up with syrup as the little individual

cubicles just waiting for me to dive in. That's right, Oh god, that's why there's always a line at the holiday and Express the next morning around the always far too few waffle makers. I remember when we toured Australia, the Virgin Air lounge in the airport had waffle makers. And I've seen them in the uh you know hotel like you like the Hampton Inn do it yourself thing, but I've never seen him in a in an airport lounge. It was quite a little treat. Did it have the

Virgin logo emblazon Donna? No? But I mean, since we're there, I guess we should talk about that, because apparently waffles. Uh, in the early days of um, not early days of religion, but in medieval Europe at least, the Catholic Church actually had and I'm not sure how they did this, that's the one thing I couldn't figure out. But they had biblical scenes and things on the waffle. So they they

they made them using etched plates. Okay, so it was in the mold exactly, so it's exactly like what we do today, except they had theirs on like long handles and they held it over a fire and then turned

them over. Oh that makes sense. And so the original waffle apparently goes back or the predecessor of it's called the obelios, goes back to ancient Greece, and it was basically, you know, an extension of pancakes, but rather than cooking it on one flat surface and turning it over, they would cook it between two metal plates and then turn the whole thing over. Um. And that was the predecessor

of the waffle. And you know, give or take a thousand or so, maybe two thousand years yeah, yeah, about two thousand years the Catholic Church said waffles are so awesome, we're gonna basically make them. Plan b of the Communion wafer, that's right, and the little printed waffles that I was talking about. I think was they started out with like, oh hey, it's across or something a little you know,

less fancy. But as time went on they got really uh, they kind of went crazy with the stuff and they would have like landscapes and family crests, and they got way more elaborate. I'd like to see. I couldn't find a picture of any of those. Did you see any? No? I didn't, But I can imagine them. Okay, I can guess what they look like. I just I tie the waffle so closely to that grid spared grid pat pattern, it would just look strange. So I've got one on that.

They think that the word waffle came from a derivation of wafer, right, like the Communion wafer. But I saw another explanation too, that it might have come from waffle w f a l um or golf r g a U f r e, which is old French, and the old French golfer or waffle means a piece of a honey beehive. Oh well, so we got the honeycomb. Yes, I love it. Those old French knew what they were talking about. Yeah, and they were cooked back then, like you said, between these iron plates on like long handled

over a fire. I have these things at the camp now. They're not in the shape of a waffle. They're called pie irons. It's the same kind of thing. You just put bread in there, and you can make little pizzas or you can make a little apple pies or whatever, and you just like spray that the iron, put the bread in there, and I guess it was the same for the waffle, and then squeeze them together and then hold it over a fire and brown it up really nicely. I've got something for you to try then that you

might that might work with that. It's called a chaw fell. And instead of like a grain based or cereal based batter, you use um, eggs and cheese mixed together. Is the batter. But you do everything else the exact same. So what is it? Is? It just like a little old square gritted omelet, basically okay, and easily cooked, like you could very easily cook it in that pie iron. All right,

give it a shot and report back. Okay. So there's there's a guy named Cornelia swartout to love and he's actually the guy who's first ended a patent for a waffle iron back in eighteen sixty nine, like a real deal waffle iron. Yeah, And apparently on that day, August twenty four, the date that he was granted the patent, that is considered National waffle Day here in the United States. I love it. And as legend goes, who knows it

is true? But they credit Thomas Jefferson with bringing over those longhanded pie iron style waffle irons to America in the late seventeen hundreds. I guess he saw those things, were like these are fantastic. Yeah. And walking it back to pancakes for another second. Um, one of the reasons why they seemed to be so old is that so many different cultures came up with them on their own independently. Like, um, you can't really say that they were imported to America

because the Native Americans were already making their own. They just used corn meal. So like all of the different techniques kind of came together and in America we said we like this, this and this, and you've got the American pancake. But the reason I wanted to kind of walk it back is because we just talked about National

Waffle Day. There's National pancake Day to you, of course, but in certain countries, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday is also a national pancake Day, and that apparently dates back to medieval times, not the Dark Ages um where people would use up all of their fats, their eggs, their sugar stuff that they had to give up for Lent on the last day before Lent, which was Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday. Makes a lot of sense, It really does, chuck.

That brings us to French toast. I do love French toast because you can I love just the little cheap old slice bread version you can do at home. I like going to a fancy brunch restaurant and having the big, really delicious kind of like hola bread French toast and they're all kinds of different breads they can use, and like the vanilla, and it's this is all just making me so hungry. But uh, there's that's twice. Uh there's a legend that you know, I saw all over the internet.

Apparently everyone has seen this who looks into French toast history. But I just don't know if it's true because it's not documented and it may be one of those sort of Internet stories that there was a man named Joseph French who was an innkeeper in the seventeen hundreds that made this meal in the name. Uh, he didn't want to call it French's toast because supposedly he did not have to make it an apostrophe, and so it became

French toast. But that just seems dubious to me. It does because it's and it's contradicted by the historical record because the first use of the term French toast for a type of toast that is dipped in like an eggy batter um, and then fried um shows up in sixteen sixty, So what are they in the century before that? That guy in a book called The Accomplished. Um, I have to spell it a C C O M P L I S H T cook, Right, I love it? Like that should be backwards in there. Yeah, it totally

should be. So that's where the first use of French toast came from. And so people would say like, well, okay, so the French came up with this, there shouldn't be any really big mystery to it. That apparently is not the case, because the French call it pam perdue, which means lost bread, which means bread that's gone stale. And you didn't want to just throw out bread. You would use it. And one way you could use it was

for French toast. But it seemed like they were calling it lost bread after older English tradition, which they just called lost bread. So the French didn't call it French toast and they didn't lay any kind of claim to Um, French toast is like their national invention. There's some other really interesting ideas of where it possibly came from the name French toast. Right, Yeah, I mean the the whole idea of French like a French fry is not from

France either. That comes from the slicing technique. Old Irish word for to slice is French like French that potato, uh, And so that sort of falls in line with the same thing with French toast. It would be a sliced bread. Um. I do love the whole lost bread thing, and that all makes perfect sense that you would, you know, bread was a little stale if you dip it in something and fright in a band, you're still going to be able to enjoy that bread. It won't taste super stale.

And with French toasts in particular, that name, that's there's some food historians who say maybe that could be it, but they suspect that it's actually marketing among some people, especially in America, to call it French toast because it makes it sound fancier. Yeah, I totally buy that. And then get this dude. In Great Britain, specifically in Windsor, Um, that's called poor Knights of Windsor. That's what you You would order poor Knights of Windsor, and they would bring

you French toast. You have never heard of that? Um? Now are these competing explanations for that? That's what they call French toast and it has its own story, No, no, no,

I mean competing stories for where that came from. Because one I saw said that the attle of what is it c c R E c y in France in thirty six, Uh, there were knights who were captured by the French and they basically had to sell off their lands in order to pay their way out of that pay for their release, and Edward the third, as legend goes, gave them a place to stay in Windsor Castle in trade for their labor, so they were they would be the poor knights because nights, you know, it's not like

all the knights were rich or anything like that. And they stayed Windsor Castle, so they were the poor knights of Windsor. But I guess that they were fed that there. Maybe that's right. I don't know the connection. Well, I like the other explanation of the French connection. Right, So

the reason why you might call it poor knights. There's another explanation is that, so if you were a gentry landed gentry during the medieval era, you were expected to serve dessert at dinner, and knights were gentry, but not all knights were rich, as you said, and so to kind of like still serve dessert, they would serve this French toast with jam as a dessert because it was very cheap and easy to make, and so it would

be called poor night. Oh that's interesting because the what's that sandwich that we talked about before, the no, the one that's made like French toast but it has jam in it, the the mons. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if that's came from that too. I don't know, man, Maybe can we talk about can we finish with brunch? Oh man, there's no way we can't finish with brunch. We need

to do brunch in this one and part two. Yeah, I think so because brunch um, brunch is something that we had growing up occasionally, like very rarely, when we were allowed to skip church growing up, I think my mom would say, you know, we can have brunch at the house. Uh, And that was just the first time I've ever heard that word it. It didn't become like a um like out to eat at a restaurant kind of thing in my life until much much later. And of course now brunch is a very trendy like big

time Saturday and Sunday weekend meal. Uh. It's if you ever read the height of the New York brunch Heyday from the mid two thousand's, where uh, just things got so out of hand with like the all you can drink mimosas and bloody Mary's and people getting in fist fights and people waiting in line for hours and then angry and they're drunk. It's just like it gave brunch a bad name. But brunch is really one of the

great meals if you can indulge a bit. Man, one of the best brunch drinks I've ever had, or one of the best drinks I've ever had, was called a breakfast Negroni, and it was made with apple all so it was much sweeter and I can't remember what else they put it in, but oh man, it was so good. And that was in a New York brunch place, for sure. Where does brunch come from though, they don't know, but the earliest we've ever found, and obviously it's breakfast in lunch,

so probably a million people came up with it. But first guy to write it down in print was a guy named Guy Barringer who was a British author, and he published an essay in in the the magazine I Guess Hunter's Weekly, and it was called Brunch colon a Plea. And in this he basically says, Hey, we all, like um have Sunday brunch and it's like a huge meat filled affair that people eat after church. And it's too much.

It's too much because not all of us go to church, and some of us really drink too much the night before. So we need something else that is going to replace that midday meal. Let's call it brunch, and it's meant to basically get over a hangover. Yeah, and that makes sense. They also trace its roots as a meal. I don't know if they called it brunch. In fact, they didn't.

They called it a hunt breakfast in England, I guess before they went out on the fox Hunt, they would have these really big multi course meals and it sounds a lot like brunch. They would have sweet pastries and fruit and meat and eggs and sort of like a big smorgus board. Uh. And for the same reasons, because they had to have something large to eat. And this was before they ate big breakfast, I guess. And in the nineteen thirties is when it seems to have caught

on in the US, right. Yeah. Apparently it was Hollywood movie stars who started to brunch and everybody said, oh, I've got to start doing that because that sounds pretty awesome and it is awesome. Um. And apparently one of the reasons why it took off was because, um, people stopped going to church as much after World War Two, but they still wanted to do something, you know, socially on Sunday mornings to replace it. So brunch kind of filled that vacuum. I'm trying to picture the The news

Wire reports on that attendance down. Yeah, Rock Hudson sits down at ten thirty am for a meal. What right? Uh, it is a great meal, though, you know, church attendance is down. Another thing that happens, supposedly post World War two is when women started joining the workforce more, they were like, hey, I like to do a little something fun on the weekend too, right, So can I go out and eat Sunday brunch as well? And I wondered, because you know, that same working mom was still like

expected to cook at home. I'm sure, so going to Sunday brunch was a way to give her a break exactly. And it may be wonder if that's where the origin of Mother's Day brunch came from. Oh maybe so, because I think people who don't normally do brunch still do brunch on Mother's Day. You know. Yeah. My brunch thing is I still always get almost exclusively breakfast things along with like a bloody Mary. But I would never have understood the lunch side of brunch. It's more of a

the time that you eat it. But you know, people do go in there and get like a shrimp cocktail or a or a sandwich like a lunch sandwich. And I think some people see that as the beauty of brunch is that it's sort of that one time of the day you can order from both sides of the menu. But I'm I still just do my breakfast stuff. So I saw the year after Guy Barringer um said, you know, he introduced brunch, that somebody said, well, if you eat it closer to lunch, you have to call it blunch.

And it didn't catch on for a very obvious reasons. Hey, you want to go get some blunch, right, Yeah, if you were hungover, it just make you vomit on the spot. Yeah, good, you got anything else? For now? I have nothing else. I think we should do a breakfast part too at some point, I agree, um. And since I agreed to what Chuck just said, that means listener mail is unlocked. Yeah, and maybe people can send in their unusual breakfast traditions and maybe we can kind of incorporate that in. Yeah.

It's a great idea, all right. So I thought this email was really cool. This ties into our Mangroves episode. Uh, this is from Caleb Vicari. I can't help wonder if you guys knew just how relevant you're episode on mangrove trees is to the gaming community right now. The game Minecraft just recently got a large update that added mangrove swamps to the game, specifically featuring red mangroves. They're very unique compared to all the other trees in the game,

and you guys have just clarified exactly why. Because of the addition of mangrove trees, we now have also have root blocks upon which the new trees are elevated off the ground, just like in real life. Replanting them is also very different from the other trees in the game. Typically, you would need to break the leaf blocks on other trees, each of which has a chance to drop a sapling, which you can then plant and wait for it to

grow into a tree. The mangrove trees, however, instead have propagules. Am I saying that right? It sounds like propagules growing on them, which I believe are the living birth trees you were talking about. You can take these and plant them either on the ground or in water, which is also unique to mangroves in the game. Point is, the game brought a lot of interest in mangros into me and now you guys have amplified that. So thank you keep being awesome. And again that is from Caleb Vicari.

Great name. Thanks Caleb. Yeah totally, And that was in World of Warcraft. You said, no, are you making a joke? Yeah, it's in the Game of Thrones. Thanks a lot, Caleb. That's pretty cool because I don't know that we would have ever known that, you know, or heard about that. So thank you for lettingraft. You told us something we should know some stuff. Uh, if you want to be like Caleb and tell us some stuff we should know, we are wide open for that. It would be pretty

hypocritical if we weren't. You can send it in an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.