Newer Than They Think / Food and Drink

• A common cause of Newer Than They Think is what The Other Wiki lists as the Pizza Effect, when a dish created by immigrants is back-adopted to their home country.
  • Named after the pizza, which was developed in the US by Italian immigrants as a variation of the pizza margherita, a simple flat bread known as focaccia, topped with olive oil, tomatoes, and cheese; which originated in Naples in the late 18th century, tomatoes having just been introduced from the New World. Prior to that, flatbread with olives and cheese was a common staple throughout the Mediterranean.
    • Modern pizza did not become popular in the US outside of Italian immigrant communities until after WWII, when American soldiers encountered the original Italian version.
    • Pepperoni, the most popular topping on American pizza, was invented in the US in 1919, as a variant of the traditional Italian salamino piccante using locally available meat and peppers, and cheaper artificial casings.
• Frangelico, a hazelnut liqueur marketed as being the invention of a medieval hermit, cannot definitively be said to have been first produced earlier than 1980.
• The National Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon. While done intermittently since Harry S. Truman in 1947 (including a 1987 incident where Ronald Reagan made his "pardon" as a joke during the height of the Iran-Contra scandal); it was George H. W. Bush that first made the pardon a regular event in 1989.
  • For that matter, the Thanksgiving feast itself looks like a tradition established by the Puritans, but it was neither a holiday nor a celebration of any sort until about 250 years later, when Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in honor of the critical Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and explained what people ought to do during that day.
• Many "traditional" British foods actually only date back to World War II, when rationing meant that people had to improvise new ways of cooking with only basic ingredients. Among the most enduring of these foods are carrot cake (with the bulk, moistness, and sweetness of the carrots helping reduce the need for expensive, rationed eggs, butter, flour and sugar), and apple crumble (a cheap substitute for apple pies).
  • Likewise, the "ploughman's lunch", supposedly the traditional midday meal of the hardy rustic English labourer, was invented in 1960 by the Milk Marketing Board in order to sell cheese.
    • That said, according to The Other Wiki, a similar meal is said to have existed prior to World War II. The Ploughman's Lunch, as it was, may not have been an invention so much as a revival of something that disappeared due to rationing. Or the Industrial Revolution, when a lot of links to the countryside were severed and forgotten in the rush to the factories.
  • Recipes for traditional British puddings involving sugar or its byproducts (treacle, molasses) are likely no older than the 18th century, when imports from the West Indies made it available to those other than the very wealthy.
  • Although roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and potatoes all have rather long histories in Britain (with the potatoes being the newest—no surprise, since potatoes only showed up in British cooking in the 18th century), the combination of the three for the Sunday roast was popularised in the late 19th century by Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII).
• The Shopska salad, which is today internationally the most well known "traditional" Bulgarian dish, was in fact only invented in the 1960s by the Bulgarian tourist board (along with several other salads named after geographical regions, though only the one named after the Shopluk region around Sofia survived). Salads as a whole didn't really exist in Bulgarian cuisine before they had been imported from Western Europe a few decades earlier. Even one of its principal components (the tomato) didn't become popular in Bulgaria until the early 20th century.
• Lager was first made during the 16th century, could only be produced in large quantities in the 19th century (lager requires cold temperatures, which were hard to get before refrigeration), and didn't displace ale as the most common beer style until the 20th century. India pale ale has a similar history.
• The reputation of crappy American beer is a very recent one. Until World War I, U.S. beer was typically very good, not surprisingly considering most major brewers were of German or Dutch origin. Wartime grain rationing and the Prohibition movement resulted in the Wartime Prohibition Act, limiting beverage alcohol to no more than 2.75% alcohol content. After WWI ended and Prohibition began, many brewers went out of business. Those that survived could only produce "near beer", with an alcohol content capped at one-half of one percent. Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Volstead Act legalizing 3.2% beer, which became the common American beer strength. And then World War II came around, and rationing of grains caused many breweries to switch to half rice formulas which remained after the war.
  • Budweiser only became the "King of Beers" in the late 1950s, when a prolonged strike at the major Milwaukee breweries (including Pabst and Schlitz) enabled St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch to gain crucial market share, which it has held ever since. Budweiser itself originated as a Prohibition-era "near beer".
  • The second-largest-selling U.S. brand, Miller Lite, didn't exist until 1973. And the biggest-selling U.S. brand, Bud Light, wasn't launched until 1982.
  • Until the late 1960s, only premium beers were marketed nationally. The biggest seller in most markets was typically a local brand. This changed with the development of continuous-flow brewing (replacing the old "batch" method), which enabled the nationals to produce light beer cheaply enough to offset the shipping costs.
• Likewise, up until World War II, Americans consumed more pork than beef. Pork prices were heavily subsidized by industrial use of lard. When vegetable oils became popular due to wartime rationing, pig farmers were forced to switch to leaner "bacon" breeds of pig. This is also why modern "cooked until well-done" pork has the consistency of shoe leather; there isn't enough fat to keep the meat moist.
  • Until the 19th century, the staple meat of Britain was actually bacon. Unlike cattle, pigs needed relatively little land (so, before the Industrial Revolution, more homes than not had room for one), and unlike hens, goats and cows they didn't contribute much (other than waste disposal) to the household while still alive, so most males would be slaughtered in the autumn when food started to run out. As for bacon, in the chilly climate of Britain (and before botulism evolved) it was quite easy to make (just bury your meat in salt for 5 days) and had a shelf-life of months.
• Chicken was less common than pork or beef until World War II shortages in the US.
  • In Iceland, chicken wasn't considered fit for human consumption until the 1960s.
  • Actually, chicken was a luxury in most of the Western world until the introduction of intensive farming in the mid-20th century. The birds were kept for their eggs (in fact chickens seem to have been kept for centuries before anyone is known to have cooked and eaten one), and would only be slaughtered if they stopped laying- even a fairly wealthy farming family would eat chicken maybe once or twice a year (actually, typically they would eat one at Christmas and pay another to their land-lord as an agreed part of the rent), and it would probably be an old chicken to be stewed. Roasted or fried chickens need tender young birds. Nobility would eat capons and poulards, sterilized roosters and hens who would fatten easily. Modern fattening techniques made the practice obsolete.
• Speaking of chicken, Buffalo wings date from no earlier than the mid-1960s; before then, chicken wings were seen as offal, fit only to feed to dogs or to use for broth. There are a few different claims as to who was the first to serve them in Buffalo, but none of them claim to have done so any earlier than 1964. They did not become a nationwide phenomenon until the 1990s.
• Gummi bears weren't widely available in America until the 1960s. (They were invented in Germany in the 1920s.) Gummi worms are even more recent, having only been invented in 1981.
• Fast food chains did not offer bacon cheeseburgers until 1992. Hardee's Frisco Burger was the first, and other chains quickly followed suit.
• Rice Krispies Treats had been a popular homemade confection since the recipe was first published as a Kellogg's promotion for the cereal in 1939, but the company didn't start selling them as a separate pre-made item until 1995.
  • Similarly, Chex Mix (originally called Chex Party Mix) began as a promotional recipe using Chex Cereal for homemade use in 1952, but the pre-made version didn't debut until 1985 (and the different flavors beyond "traditional" are younger still).
  • Gardetto's snack mix was invented in 1981, and only started getting sold in grocery stores in 1987 (before then it was sold directly to bars and restaurants).
• Many fruits and vegetables have only existed in their modern forms for a few centuries.
  • The banana as we know it today was first grown in 1836; earlier bananas were tougher and starchier (essentially plantains), full of seeds◊ and unappetizing when eaten raw. Even then, bananas were almost unheard of in Europe until the late nineteenth century, to the point that Jules Verne, in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), goes out of his way to introduce the banana to the reader in meticulous detail. The "Cavendish" banana, which comprises most bananas eaten today, only dates to the 1950s, when the then-prevalent Gros Michel banana became nearly extinct due to Panama disease, and may give way to "Goldfinger" bananas in the near future if the same blight ends up devastating Cavendish crops, as recent studies have indicated may happen.
    • Amusingly, the banana is neither an American or African crop, but actually comes from Southeast Asia. It was likely introduced in Africa by the Malays and cultivated limitedly by the Muslims on the Mediterranean coast before being introduced in the Canary Islands by the end of the Middle Ages. From there, the Spanish introduced it in the Caribbean in the early 16th century. It wasn't until the late 1800s when the Canarian banana became an export industry with its main market in Europe.
  • The modern-day strawberry was cross-bred in the early 18th century from varieties that would be unrecognizable to grocery shoppers today.
  • The cranberry was imported to Western Europe from America in the early modern age, and its commercial cultivation only began in the 19th century. The wild species had been known and consumed in Eastern Europe long before though.
  • Carrots were white, pink, red, purple, and yellow historically; orange carrots were deliberately bred in the Netherlands only in the 17th century, in honor of the Dutch royal family, which started with William I, Prince of Orange.
    • In that vein, the Dutch monarchy has only existed since 1815. The Netherlands were a republic from independence in the 16th century to Napoleon's granting its successor state, the Batavian republic, as a kingdom to his brother Louis. The princes of Orange were governors of Holland and Frisia and even then only semi-hereditarily.
  • The blueberry was first cultivated c. 1915 in Whitesbog, New Jersey, as an offshoot of the (often bitter) swamp huckleberry.
• Chocolate chip cookies, possibly the most popular cookie worldwide and the first thing most people think of when they hear the word "cookie", were invented in 1933 at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts by chef Ruth Wakefield. There are conflicting reports as to whether she deliberately invented them, or she was trying to make chocolate cookies, but ran out of powdered chocolate, put small bits of chocolate which failed to melt into a uniform whole, and thus created the cookies by accident. To put into how perspective just how recent this iconic treat is, William Shatner is older than the chocolate chip cookie.
  • Speaking of chocolate, solid chocolate was formulated in 1847, before that it was only available as a drink. And before the invention of the conche in 1879, the solid stuff was generally sandy and hard, because there was no way to distribute the cocoa butter evenly throughout the mass.
• Chicken Tikka Masala, widely thought of as the quintessential Indian dish and often assumed to be traditional, was invented in a curry restaurant somewhere in Britain around 1970. It was specifically tailored to British tastes, being milder and creamier than most other food from the Indian subcontinent — one story goes that it was improvised by a chef serving chicken 'tikka' — grilled chicken pieces, a more-or-less authentic Indian food — in a restaurant in Glasgow when a punter asked for some 'gravy' on them.
  • In fact most curries — the kormas and rogan joshes — that make up the staple restaurant menu are not generally served in Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani households. Most did at least originate in India, but were either (a) court food developed for the Indian aristocracy or (b) developed by local cooks to be served to European colonial functionaries. Curry in Asia doesn't tend to conform to these names or recipes, as it just means any dish served in a sauce.
  • The iconic vindaloo curry originated in Goa, as a localized version of a dish adopted from Portuguese traders. It originally was not even a curry; it was originally a Goan interpretation of carne de vinha d'alhos, a Portuguese dish of pork marinated in wine or wine vinegar with garlic, herbs, and spices (related to Spanish and Latin American adobo). The Goan variation consistently used vinegar (and also didn't insist on using vinegar made from wine), and adjusted the seasoning (using more Indian spices and less European herbs), but is otherwise relatively recognizable as a relative of Iberian adobo (down to the selection of pork as the meat, though other meats are also common in modern Goa for a variety of reasons). What is commonly called vindaloo in the UK or US bears little resemblance to the original Goan version.
  • The idea that curries are meant to be hot spicy rather than "mix of flavours" spicy (with the British vindaloo generally being the hottest) is another relatively recent innovation which doesn't seem to predate the aforementioned Portuguese traders introducing chili peppers from the Americas.
• Fortune cookies, far from being a Chinese tradition, are based loosely on Japanese omikuji senbei (rice crackers with fortunes inside), and are thought to have been introduced at the San Francisco Exposition's Japanese Tea Garden (which still sells them today) around 1890. The cookies were thus originally associated with Japanese restaurants in California until World War II, when the Japanese Americans of California were rounded up and sent to internment camps, leaving the Asian restaurant field open to the Chinese and shutting down all of the fortune-cookie factories save one — one that happened to have a Chinese-American owner. Fortune cookies were never made or sold in China until the 1990s. Even today, it is pretty unusual to find them at a restaurant in China, and they're usually sold as a novelty.
• Most of the Chinese cuisine available in US restaurants was either invented in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or are heavily altered from their original recipes to use local ingredients and suit western tastes. Indeed, American Chinese has evolved to become its own unique cuisine, distinct from any original Chinese styles or the various American influences.
  • Chop Suey was never seen in China prior to the 20th century, and is unknown there. It may have evolved from other dishes in different regions, but bears almost no resemblance to them.
  • While there are certainly Chinese dishes made with ginger and beef, the ginger beef served at Chinese restaurants in the West was invented in Calgary in the mid-1970s.
  • One of the most popular modern American Chinese dishes is General Tso's Chicken. There was a General Tso, who was a Qing Dynasty military leader born in Hunan province, and was reported to be fond of chicken. However, the first version of General Tso's Chicken originated in Taiwan, invented by Hunanese chef Peng Chang-kuei as a tangy stir-fried dish in the late 1960s. He moved to New York in 1973, and others adopted and modified his recipe. The original used plain chicken with skin, the skinless verions with crispy breading is typically credited to another Hunan chef, T. T. Wang, who worked in New York at the same time (his version was originally known as General Ching's chicken).
  • Egg rolls in approximately their modern form seem to date to the 1930s United States. They're derived from spring rolls, which are mainland Chinese.
• Tiramisù, often considered the quintessential traditional Italian dessert, was purportedly invented around 1970, and first appeared in dictionaries and recipe books around 1980. Tiramisù really couldn't have been invented any earlier than the mid-20th century because its ingredients like coffee, mascarpone and raw eggs couldn't be found in the same regions of Italy or be safely used in a dessert until the widespread use of refrigeration, pasteurization and automobiles.
• While it is true that whale meat has been consumed in Japan for centuries, it was generally regarded as a low-class, minority food, the preserve of coastal peasants. It only became prevalent across the country during WWII, when the government was forced to turn to whaling as a general food supply. And it was only much later, after many years of post-war shortages, that the people acquired a taste for it and made it popular.
  • However, whale meat is expensive and not sold as much, hence it's not really popular as a food in Japan anymore.
• Like whale meat, the Japanese fixation with bluefin tuna is very recent. It was only in 1960s that the Japanese developed a serious taste for the big fish, after some businessmen had some in Canada.
  • Similarly, salmon didn't become a popular sushi ingredient until the 1990s, following a decade-long PR campaign by Norwegian salmon distributors. (Salmon was known in Japan before then of course, but it was considered a relatively cheap day-to-day fish, and was always eaten cooked because Pacific salmon tends to have nasty parasites that make it ill-suited for eating raw. The Norwegian success in Japan was in part because Atlantic salmon doesn’t carry parasites that can cause human disease.)
• Americans for the longest time simply did not eat lobster. In fact it was actively looked down upon, as they saw it as eating a bug (in fairness, lobsters are arthropods, so they're more closely related to grasshoppers than they are to any fish). Indentured servants in New England generally had contractual protection against being served lobster more than once a month. The only people that regularly ate them were prisoners, because people thought they deserved it. Having lobster shells outside your house was a sign of poverty. It only became acceptable and "trendy" to eat them in the 1880s with the advent of the railroads.
• Baileys Irish Cream. Ancient booze of the Celts, begorrah... invented in 1974 to get rid of a cream surplus.
• Mongolian Barbecue isn't even Mongolian. It was created in Taiwan in the 1970s and is more a stir-fry than a barbecue anyway.
• The Greek dishes most widely known to tourists (e.g. Moussaka, Tzatziki and Souvlaki) are actually not exactly traditionally Greek—and also not exactly not traditionally Greek, either. You see, these dishes were not widely known in what is now Greece until the early 20th century. However, they were widely prepared by ethnic Greeks living in Asia Minor, which was widely known to be a culinary melting pot, with a unique multiethnic cuisine formed out of it; the Greeks of Asia Minor tended to see the Greeks of Greece as being a bit backwoods and unsophisticated, as the land that is now modern Greece is in fact rather rough and was thoroughly outside the main sphere of Greek civilization for a surprisingly long period of time (since at least the time of the Byzantine Empire). This cuisine was brought to Greece by these ethnic Greeks in the "population exchanges" with Turkey ^note In which by mutual agreement, Greece deported most of its ethnic Turkish and other Muslim population to Turkey and Turkey deported most of its ethnic Greek population to Greece. in the 1920s. These dishes—which are the culinary equivalents of mutts, possibly with partial Greek ancestry—were mostly popularised by Nikolaos Tselementes, a renowned Greek chef of the same period.
• Although wines have been produced in the Champagne region of France since Roman times, the sparkling version only became popular in the 1700s, due to British influence (partly because the British loved them, also because the British had developed the glass technology to make the specialised bottles that don't explode [often- Champagne houses still lose up to 5% of their stock in transit this way] from the pressure of the champagne fizzing inside them). The bubbles were initially considered a wine fault (due to the lower temperatures relative to the Burgundy region, where their styles of grapes and production methods came from). Dom Pérignon (yes, he's a real person) spent most of his life actually trying to get rid of the famous bubbles.
• Similarly, while wine has been cultivated in the upper Ebro basin in Spain since Roman times, the production and exportation industry of the infamous Rioja wine brand as we know it was developed by French planters fleeing a plague that decimated the vineyards of Bordeaux in the mid-19th century. The bulk of Spanish wine production had always been further to the south, in places like Jerez, Valdepeñas or Málaga.
• Banoffee pie, an English dessert, wasn't invented until 1972.
• Vana Tallinn (Estonian for "Old Tallinn") is a liqueur that is frequently believed to be a traditional or even ancient Estonian product, but it has only been produced since the 1960s.
• A great deal of traditional European food is based on potatoes — a New World vegetable. While known in Europe since the early 16th century, it didn't become a common food source for humans there until the 18th. Similarly, tomato, a New World vegetable/fruit, is commonly associated with Italian cuisine. The first recipe for pasta with tomatoes was printed in 1852.
  • Similar for paprika in Hungarian cuisine, which doesn't go back much more than 100 years, but without which Hungarian goulash is practically unthinkable nowadays.
• McDonald's didn't have the Big Mac until 1968, the Quarter Pounder until 1972, nor Chicken McNuggets until 1983. Even the Filet-O-Fish is older than their most famous sandwich!^note We should note that the Filet-O-Fish was a solution to a very specific problem: observant Catholics not coming in on Fridays (because everything substantial at Mickey D's back then involved what the Church considers "meat"). Since there are a lot of Catholics in America, and American Catholics in the '50s and '60s tended to actually observe the Church's official rules every Friday instead of just during Lent, not having a fish option took a serious bite out of McDonald's profits. (By comparison, Burger King has had its similarly iconic Whopper since 1957.)
  • Also on the same note, McDonald's did not use drive-through windows until 1975. The first one was installed out of necessity near a military base in Arizona, as it allowed service to soldiers who were not allowed to exit their cars while in fatigues. (Drive-in fast food, however, dates from at least the 1950s, and McDonalds having customers walk up to a counter was seen as an anomaly then.)
  • The Happy Meal was introduced in 1977. The now-defunct Burger Chef was the first chain to offer a kids' meal with a toy four years prior.
  • The Super Size option was introduced in 1987.
  • McDonald's didn't have a breakfast menu until 1977; its signature item, the Egg McMuffin, debuted nationally at the same time. The character of Birdie was introduced to promote the breakfast menu to kids in the early '80s, and was the last new McDonaldland character to be introduced, sticking around even as '70s mainstays like Mayor McCheese and the Fry Kids were retired.
• Dairy Queen did not sell the Blizzard (soft-serve ice cream with toppings blended in) until 1985.
• Microwave ovens were invented in the late 1940s, but they were very large (i.e. refrigerator-sized) and only really used for commercial purposes. Microwaves small enough to be used in a household kitchen were only introduced in 1967. And even then, they were prohibitively expensive for most people throughout the '70s and only really became a common household appliance in the first half of the '80s.
• The Caesar salad is thought by many people to have been invented as far back as Ancient Rome during the time of either Julius' or Augustus' reigns, but in fact, it was invented by an Italian entrepreneur named Cesare (Cesare being the Italian form of Caesar) Cardini during a shortage of kitchen supplies in a 1924 Fourth of July feast taking place in San Diego while working at Tijuana, Mexico, according to his daughter Rosa.
• Nachos, often thought of as a traditional Mexican food, have their origins in WWII when a restaurant owner in Piedras Negras named Nacho Anaya ^note "Nacho" is a common diminutive for "Ignacio" found himself needing to serve a group of American military wives (whose husbands were stationed at a base in Texas) but didn't have much to work with thanks to war rationing and it being late. He created something he called "Nacho's especiales", and eventually the apostrophe disappeared and the name "nachos" stuck. Nachos were for decades made with solid cheese and nacho cheese as we know it today dates back only to 1976.
• Many in Philadelphia will insist that Cheez Whiz is the "traditional" form of cheese for that city's famous cheesesteak (for the uninitiated, that's a sandwich with thin-sliced chopped grilled steak on a long roll with cheese and, usually, onion). However, the cheesesteak is uniformly accepted among food historians to have been invented in the 1930s, while "wiz" (as it's called in Philly) only appeared in 1952, and the earliest record of its application to a cheesesteak comes from 1953. While not disputing that "wiz" is the most common cheese for a cheesesteak today, the original cheese was almost certainly provolone. To this day, wiz advocates and provolone advocates get into interminable arguments about this; common consensus is that while "wiz" is all right, "aficionados" go for the provolone (especially a locally-made sharp provolone^note There's a solid number of cheesemakers around Philly that stick to old-school techniques for making provolone that visiting current-day Italians (who are notoriously critical of Italian-derived food products made outside Italy) have admitted it’s as good as the stuff you get back in Italy. if it's available). In towns near Philly, processed American cheese is common.
• While "vanilla bean" vanilla ice cream (vanilla with the "spent" beans sprinkled throughout, resulting in a "speckly" effect) isn't exactly popular on the mainstream level (though any sufficiently large supermarket will carry it), until the 1970s it was almost completely unknown in America outside the Mid-Atlantic states, having been created in Philadelphia's ice cream parlors. In fact, for decades prior to that tourists to Philadelphia from other cities would complain about being served "dirty" vanilla!
• The Frappuccino is a registered trademark of the Starbucks corporation, and didn't exist before 1995—but Starbucks made the drink so ubiquitous that several other coffee chains have tried to produce their own versions under different names, resulting in some people assuming that it's been around longer than it really has. The drink is also based on a few older drinks—most notably the French frappé, made from fruit juice and shaved or blended ice, from which it takes its name. ^note  The name is a portmanteau of the French frappé and the Italian cappuccino, presumably because it has the texture of a frappé and the creaminess and caffeination of a cappuccino. Amusingly, one of its many imitators is McDonalds' "frappé", which is essentially a Frappuccino in all but name, but uses the name of an older drink that only vaguely resembled it.
  • Similarly, the Pumpkin Spice Latte has only existed in the 21st Century. It was introduced by Starbucks in 2003 and immediately became ubiquitous among coffee sellers.
• While certain concepts leading up to the energy drink have been around for a while (many caffeinated drinks promoted themselves as energy boosters since the late 19th century, and Dr. Enuf has been infused with vitamins since 1949), the overall concept as we know it now did not take off until the Turn of the Millennium. Red Bull first hit the US markets in 1997, and Monster in 2002. Even their spiritual predecessor, Jolt Cola, only dates from 1985, and Pepsi's first foray into the field with the guarana-infused Josta was in 1995. Similarly, energy shots were largely unknown until 5 Hour Energy popularized the idea in 2003. However, energy drinks and shots had already been popular in Asia for decades, such as Thailand's Krating Daeng in 1975 (which would be adapted internationally as its translated name, Red Bull), Korea's Bacchus-F in 1963, and Japan's Lipovitan in 1962.
• Cane/Table Sugar, as with many spices, was an expensive luxury import in Europe well into the Early Modern Period (approximately 1500-1800 CE). The main (and largely only) used sweetener for cakes and other foods before then was honey and whatever natural sugars were in the ingredients (such as fruit).
• That most iconic of French breads, the baguette. Though long bread was common in France at least as far back as the reign of Louis XIV, neither the term baguette nor the specific form we see today were used until 1920. Before then, if you told a Frenchman you wanted to make a sandwich with a baguette, he would wonder what sandwiches had to do with batons, and perhaps ask if you were a wizard and could make something more fancy with your magic wand.
  • Nobody's quite sure how or why "baguette" came to describe the current form—a long bread, 65-100 cm long, 5-6 cm in diameter, made from a specific kind of lean dough, and baked in a deck oven—but suspicion is generally cast on a 1919 law banning bakeries from employing bakers between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. This law, as a practical matter, meant that a bread that could be baked in 2-3 hours or less—before the morning rush for breakfast bread at about 7 a.m.—was needed, and the thin, long-but-not-too shape worked well under these constraints if you baked it in a deck oven and became standard. Presumably, once people began noticing that all the bread now looked like this, they started making joke names about them, of which calling them "batons" or "wands" of bread (baguette in French) stuck.
  • Its "traditional" Italian counterpart, ciabatta bread, is even newer, dating to 1982.
• While popcorn has been known for millennia (archaeologists have found traces of popcorn in Mexican sites 5,600 years old), it didn't become a popular snack in the U.S. until the late 19th century. Even then, it didn't really take off until the 1940s, when World War II sugar rations forced Americans to find alternatives to candy. It was also during World War II that popcorn began to be sold in movie theatres.
• Americans love french fries, but they didn't catch on until the 1920s. Thomas Jefferson introduced them in 1802, but they didn't become an American staple until soldiers came back home from Europe after World War I. Many loved European french fries and began making the dish themselves. French fries also received a big popularity boost in the 1950s and 1960s with the introduction of both frozen fries and McDonald's.
  • Despite the name, they did not even originate in France, but in (French-speaking) Belgium; where they were known as pommes frites.
• Trdelník, sold in particularly touristy places in the Czech Republic, often under the name "staročeský trdelník" ("Old Czech"), is hardly Old Czech - it's actually a Hungarian dish called Kürtőskalács, which originates from Transylvania in modern-day Romania, and only started being sold widely in the Czech Republic around the turn of the millennium.
• Ramen didn't exist at all in Japan until the early 20th century, when Chinese immigrants introduced it, and it didn't gain wide popularity among Japanese until the 1950s. Furthermore, instant noodles only date to 1958.
  • Ramen was first introduced to America with the debut of the Nissin Cup O' Noodles in 1973.
• Similarly, takoyaki (balls of savoury pancake batter filled with a variety of fillings, most commonly minced octopus) is not a ancient Japanese snack, but was invented in 1935. Even then, the original variety was filled with braised beef, and the octopus-filled variety didn't appear until a year later.
• Sriracha sauce only dates back to the 1930s. The version of sriracha sauce that most Americans associate the flavor with was created in 1983 in Los Angeles.
• There was a major ad campaign in the UK in 1997 for Werther's Originals that had an old man reminiscing about being given them as a child by his grandfather. As a result, they instantly entered the UK lexicon of "old people things" and most British people now vaguely assume they've been around for at least fifty years, if not since the Edwardian era. That advert was the first time they'd been marketed in Britain, although they'd existed in their native Germany since the sixties.
• The earliest mention of carbonara was during the immediate post-World War II period, when it became popular among American soldiers stationed in Italy. It is probably an amalgamation of earlier dishes using bacon or ham, cheese, pasta, and eggs.
• Although adding cherry-flavored syrup to Coca-Cola had been common in diners and soda fountains for decades before, Cherry Coke was only sold in stores starring in 1985.
• Tim Hortons, that quintessential Canadian icon for generations... except not. The chain's presence outside Ontario was almost non-existent until the 1990s (over 75% of its current nationwide locations were built after 1995), and it's only been the most popular fast-food chain in Canada since the early 2000s (replacing McDonald's, which has had a presence in Canada since 1967). The first Tim Hortons in BC opened in 1994.
• Baby carrots were invented in 1986. They're not a separate cultivar, nor are they juvenile carrots, but rather just the cores cut out of carrots not suitable for store shelves.
• Oreo cookies weren't officially sold in the UK until 2008, where they are branded as Oreo biscuits. They were sold in China for longer than that, since 1996 to be exact.
  • And on that note, the Oreo was not the first vanilla-cream chocolate sandwich cookie. The Hydrox preceded it by four years.
• Hardtack is most often associated with the age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, but the term itself wasn't coined until c. 1830. Even then, it didn't catch on among sailors, but rather American soldiers during the American Civil War, for whom it was a standard ration. That said, the stuff was definitely well known among the mariners of the 16th-19th centuries; it’s just that it was known as "bisket" or "ship’s biscuit".
• The ubiquitous nutrition facts label on American foodstuffs was introduced in 1994, before which nutritional information was sparsely displayed, if at all. Their introduction in Europe came even later (surprisingly enough), with the first adopted being the UK in 1996.
• Grocers must have been selling fresh ready-to-drink orange juice for centuries, right? Nope. Frozen canned orange concentrate (invented in 1946) was the only orange juice on store shelves until the 1990s, when the now-ubiquitous not-from-concentrate (NFC) orange juice was invented.
• Dry dog food was first sold commercially in 1941; before then, the standard dog chow was table scraps and offal.
• The first tea bag was patented in 1903.
• While Subway was founded in 1965, it didn't start offering toasted sandwiches until 2005, in response to competing sandwich chain Quiznos. The toasted option replaced untoasted subs pretty much instantly.
• Triple-cooked chips (french fries) were first made in 1993 by English chef Heston Blumenthal. They're so ubiquitous now, it's hard to believe fries were ever cooked any other way.
• Margarine was invented in 1869, having been commissioned by French emperor Napoleon III as a butter substitute for the military and the poor.
• Caramel apples were first made in 1948, by American housewife Edna Kastrup, and weren't manufactured in large quantities until the first caramel apple machine was invented in 1960.
• Hamburgers weren't required to be cooked well done at fast food restaurants until 1993, when an E. coli outbreak at several Jack in the Box restaurants across four states sickened hundreds of patrons and killed at least four children. Before then, they were cooked medium (with a pink center) unless otherwise specified, as the sign in the background of this scene in the 1989 film UHF can attest to.
• Diet Coke is less than a half-century old, introduced in 1982 as the very first variety of Coca-Cola other than the classic drink itself, which has been around since 1886. That said, Coca-Cola had been producing diet soda since 1963, with the Tab brand, and Diet Coke was largely viewed as Tab's Spiritual Successor, with Tab's reputation having been damaged because of its use of the cancer-causing sweetener saccharin, while Diet Coke used the newer aspartame (though Tab was still produced up to 2020). Both Tab and Diet Pepsi were introduced in the 1963-64 period in response to Diet Rite, RC Cola's diet variety.
• Meat was banned in Japan from 675 AD to 1872, except for fish. Therefore, any Japanese dish made from beef, pork, or poultry dates to the Meiji Restoration or later. Dairy products were virtually non-existent in Japan up until the Meiji era, which is less surprising as the Japanese (like most East Asians) are generally lactose intolerant.
• Blue M&M's didn't make their appearance until late 1995^note After a promotion to "elect" a new color, Blue beat Pink and Purple in a rout, gaining more votes than the other 2 candidates combined. It replaced the tan color, which had been in the color lineup since the late '40s, which in turn replaced the violet color. The now ubiquitous half live action/half CGI TV advertisements with celebrities voicing the M&M's (Seth MacFarlane, J. K. Simmons, Vanessa Williams, and Billy West, among others) also made their debut around this time.
• The local food of South Korea only became commonly chili pepper spicy after the Korean War due to how chilli pepper sauces and flakes can mask the bad tastes in rancid meat and vegetables during South Korea's era of poverty between the 1950s and 1970s. This legacy passed on as a national trait in food to seek spicy food among South Koreans.
• Similarly, chili pepper itself isn't traditionally native to anywhere in Asia, it actually originated in modern-day Peru & Bolivia, and was introduced by the Spanish and Portuguese traders in the 16th century.
• White chocolate was first sold in 1937, being the basis of Nestle's Galak bar (aka Milkybar).
• Bubble gum first went on sale in 1928, the first brand available being Dubble Bubble.
• Beignets, the beloved powdered sugar-topped fried pastry squares of New Orleans, have existed for a long time, but only started getting called "beignets" in The '60s. Before then, they were always called "French doughnuts". Beignet is just a generic French word for "fritter", but the sophistication of the Gratuitous French terminology apparently led New Orleans restaurateurs to start using it, and it caught on quickly.
• Odds are you think chili is a Mexican dish made since time immemorial. Instead, its origins are very clearly in Texas, and the basic recipe doesn't seem to have been codified until after the American Civil War. Beyond that, there's plenty of debate about where chili came from, with the most popular current theory being that it evolved from dishes brought over by Canary Islanders who'd been recruited by the Spanish government to settle in the San Antonio area around 1718, with a likely influence from North African cuisine.
• Kiwifruit are native to China; they were introduced to New Zealand in the early 20th century, and became known to the wider world from British and American servicemen stationed there during World War II.
• Skittles debuted in 1974 in the UK, and were first sold in the US in 1979.
• The grapefruit is not known to have existed before 1692, having arisen around that time in the West Indies as a hybrid of the sweet orange and the pomelo.
• Fried green tomatoes, today seen as a quintessential Southern American dish found at restaurants running the gamut from the greasiest spoon all the way to the most genteel fine dining, were not widely available in nor particularly associated with the South prior to the release of Fried Green Tomatoes in 1991 (adapted from a book published in 1987). And it makes sense: green tomatoes are unripe, and would generally be harvested in climes with growing seasons short enough that they wouldn't have time to ripen on the vine before the frost set in. As most of the South is in the subtropics and enjoys long growing seasons and mild winters, this is very much not the case there. Indeed, fried green tomatoes were generally associated with the Midwest prior to The '90s, to the extent they were associated with any particular region at all.
• Similarly, the association of Jell-O with Mormons (and hence, geographically, the "Mormon Belt" of the United States, which has even been called "the Jell-O Belt", with Salt Lake City being the highest per-capita consumer of the product), only crystallized in The '80s, though it had long been a staple of church get-togethers (since it's easy to make, appeals to a wide age range, and can be made in large batches). In 1983 a "Jello Salad Fest" was held in a Salt Lake City park, sponsored by a local magazine (Utah Holiday) that was noted for having a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor about the state. An ad campaign later in that decade touting Jell-O as an ideal food for young families, complete with "America's Dad", Bill Cosby (who was quite popular in Utah), as pitchman, may have helped seal the connection.
• While Pizza Hut started in 1958, it didn't start delivering pizzas until 1985, in response to rival chain Domino's.
• Pad thai, Thailand's national dish, was invented in the 1930s.
• A popular and recognizable Xinjiang dish, "dapanji" (literally "big plate chicken", a spicy stew made of chicken, chili peppers, and potatoes), was in fact invented in the late 1980s, likely by a migrant to Xinjiang province from either Sichuan or Hunan (the exact origin is uncertain), and the dish only started taking off in popularity in the mid-late 1990s.

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