The Origins of Breakfast Foods

Who doesn't love breakfast? But do you know where most of the typical breakfast foods come from? Well listen in to find out.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, before we get going today, we wanted to
uh acknowledge ourselves and you right right, de Luke Chuck,
what episode is this? This is episode number one thousand,
five hundreds. Nuts. It's nuts. Up to this moment, I've

(00:22):
just been thinking of episode. When you say it like that,
it just seems like a mind boggling number. It is
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,

(00:42):
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

(01:05):
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,

(01:25):
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

(01:46):
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,

(02:07):
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

(02:28):
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

(02:49):
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

(03:10):
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

(03:31):
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.

(03:53):
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

(04:17):
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,

(04:39):
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

(05:02):
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

(05:24):
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

(05:46):
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

(06:08):
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

(06:31):
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

(06:52):
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

(07:13):
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

(07:36):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:24):
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.

(08:44):
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.

(09:05):
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

(09:27):
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

(09:48):
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.

(10:10):
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

(10:31):
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

(10:53):
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

(11:13):
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.

(11:36):
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

(11:58):
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.

(12:19):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:03):
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

(13:27):
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.

(13:48):
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

(14:10):
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

(14:31):
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

(14:52):
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

(15:13):
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

(15:36):
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

(15:58):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:41):
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

(17:03):
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

(17:25):
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

(17:48):
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

(18:09):
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

(18:32):
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,

(18:54):
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.

(19:15):
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.

(19:37):
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.

(19:58):
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

(20:29):
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.

(20:50):
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

(21:12):
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,

(21:34):
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

(21:55):
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

(22:18):
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

(22:42):
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

(23:04):
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

(23:25):
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

(23:48):
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

(24:08):
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

(24:31):
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

(24:51):
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

(25:12):
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,

(25:35):
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

(25:56):
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

(26:17):
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

(26:39):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:23):
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,

(27:43):
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,

(28:05):
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

(28:25):
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

(28:45):
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

(29:06):
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

(29:27):
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

(29:49):
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,

(30:11):
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.

(30:34):
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

(30:55):
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

(31:16):
e French tosty things? Indeed, I do, Chuck, I think
that's a great plan. Okay, so we're back and we're

(31:41):
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

(32:02):
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

(32:23):
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

(32:45):
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,

(33:07):
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

(33:29):
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

(33:51):
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

(34:13):
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

(34:35):
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,

(34:56):
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

(35:18):
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,

(35:40):
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

(36:01):
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

(36:23):
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,

(36:47):
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

(37:08):
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

(37:32):
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

(37:53):
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

(38:15):
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.

(38:35):
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

(38:58):
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

(39:20):
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

(39:42):
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

(40:05):
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

(40:28):
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

(40:48):
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

(41:09):
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

(41:32):
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?

(41:54):
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

(42:14):
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

(42:35):
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,

(42:55):
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

(43:16):
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

(43:38):
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

(44:01):
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

(44:21):
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

(44:43):
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

(45:04):
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

(45:26):
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

(45:46):
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

(46:09):
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

(46:30):
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

(46:52):
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.

(47:18):
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

(47:38):
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

(48:00):
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,

(48:21):
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

(48:44):
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

(49:04):
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

(49:25):
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

(49:46):
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,

(50:07):
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.

(50:28):
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.

(50:48):
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

(51:08):
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

(51:28):
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

(51:49):
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.

(52:09):
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

(52:31):
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.

(52:52):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.