A history of snacking
Episode fifty-two
It has come to my attention that I’ve not wallowed in my favourite topic for a while - Food History.
I’ve previously waffled on about scones :
I’ve nutted out the origins of brownies:
I’ve cut into the crusty history of pies:
And even researched the history of Mr Whippy:
And this fortnight, I’d like to put aside my own life-murmurings, and take us down into the bowels of history to discover where some of our favourite snacks come from.
I always used to buy some chewy lollies if I was heading off to the cinema (purchased from the supermarket - $2 instead of $53 from the cinema) but am actually just as happy with my bottle of water these days. I don’t understand the tradition of buying a thirty-five litre container of Extra Salty Buttery Fresh Salty Popcorn - would you like extra salt with that? Paired with an equally humungous 10 litre cup of fizzy sugar water, folks wonder why their bodies are simultaneously getting preserved from the inside out, and their bloodstream is being filled with sugar.
Popcorn wasn’t invented for the cinema, however. Ancient Aztec folks used to wear popcorn during important ceremonies. Young women would apparently prance about in the town square wearing garlands of popped corn on their heads. Try that next time you wander through your local cinema foyer. The granddaddy of the corn plant, and the one the Meso-Americans were using, teosinte, is so hard, it couldn’t even be ground up to eat. The outer kernel was rock hard and contained water and starch, so as they heated it up (and not in an electric popcorn maker, either), pressure inside would build up, and it would burst. A favourite of their diet, it was called momochitl and they even had a name for the sound it makes when it’s popping - totopoca.
Colonial Americans ate popcorn for breakfast, popped in lard (ew), and no doubt enjoyed with a cup of gritty coffee. It wasn’t until a bloke from Chicago named Charles Cretors swapped out peanuts for corn in his little roasting machine, and took it to the Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893, where its popularity exploded (pun intended). It seemed a natural transition then to sell it to movie-goers, and it remained an affordable snack during the Great Depression.
How about snacking on marshmallows?
I actually tried marshmallows on an open fire for (I think) the first time in my life a few weekends ago. It’s strange mouth feel. The marshmallow loses all its firmness, and the outside of the blob kind of goes crispy (and black if you’re not careful), while the middle turns to slop. Then you attempt to eat it, to not burn your mouth while you do so, and to not get the mozzarella-like strings of melted mallow goo all over yourself. Somehow it enhances the sweetness as well, and I found it rather sickly.
Marshmallows began as a health food - but not those little fluffy white or pink cylinders we know today. The Marshmallow is actually a plant…
…and in ancient times, the mucilaginous (having a viscous or gelatinous consistency) sap from this plant was pretty much a cure-all for anything and everything. It grows in swampy habitats, hence the ‘marsh’ part of its name, and all parts of the plant are edible. The leaves and roots were favoured because there lies the sap, which was squeezed, crushed, and otherwise extracted, and used to treat such varied ailments as sore throats, constipation, upset tummies, chest colds, and insomnia.
Apparently apothecaries of the day would boil this snotty sap with honey, and mix in nuts and seeds - sounds a bit like a granola/muesli bar to me - and it was evidently not dissimilar to halva.
The tradition was continued for generations, the nuts and seeds were omitted, and machinery made the process a lot simpler. But to make things easier (and a lot less healthy) the plant part of the recipe was abandoned in the late 1800’s and replaced with gelatine, which was easier to work with and cheaper. Voila! Now we eat little puffs of sugar nothingness, which are rather excellent atop a good hot chocolate, by the way.
In the US, hotdogs are considered a snack, and they have the most fascinating history, so I just have to end this post chatting about them.
Sausages have been around for thousands of years. People have been salting and stuffing animal intestines with dodgy I’d-rather-not-say parts of the animal since time immemorial. In Roman times, the sausage or salsus (which interestingly is Latin for ‘salted’), was a popular snack during the pagan festival of Lupercalia. While two blokes in their birthday suits pranced around town ‘playfully’ whipping women with strips of goat skin (WHAT?), onlookers munched on snags made (possibly) from ground pork and pine nuts. The early church saw this lewd festival and its sausage-sizzle so closely connected, that the festival and its food were banned for years.
Bootleg sausages, anyone?
Of course, sausage making continued regardless of its banning, and over the centuries regional specialities were created. Legend has it that frankfurters, which had been consumed in Germany since the 13th century, were taken to the US by a German settler. With no food bio-hazard checks at the port, in 1904 he presented his creation to the St Louis’ World Fair (possibly) where people queued up to eat these delicious, hot, greasy things.
This is where the story gets a bit fuzzy and vague. Some researchers reckon the sausage-seller used to give people a cotton glove with which to hold the slippery, hot snag. When said gloves were not returned, the vendors got miffed, and looked around for another way to serve the sausage. Some people reckon it was the bloke’s brother who recommended the bread roll, other sources say it was his wife. Other sources say it was someone completely different. Whoever it was that thought of serving a sausage made from meat of dubious origins in a long, puffy bun, started a long-standing food staple which is still incredibly popular in the US.
Here in Australia, we put our own spin on the hot dog. Being the laid-back gastronomes that we are, we just slap raw sausages of even more dubious animal origins on a smoking-hot barbie, burn the heck out of the casing and leave the ‘mince’ quite pink inside (shudder), then slide the cremated singed offering onto a slice of ‘bread’ (term used loosely), drown the entire thing with tomato sauce, and wander back to our cars through the Bunnings carpark enraptured with the feast dribbling onto our shirts.
By the way, did you know that tomato sauce, or ketchup of you must, began life in Asia, and was a much-used condiment made with pickled fish, shellfish and spices. British explorers brought back this sauce and asked their chefs to copy the recipe. Mushrooms, cucumber and walnuts mysteriously didn’t achieve a similar taste, however it was still very popular. It wasn’t until the 1700’s when culinary folk realised tomatoes actually weren’t poisonous, and they were added to the recipe (and the cucumber and walnuts omitted). Mass-produced tomato sauce appeared in 1876, just in time to be a household staple when our hot dog vendor appeared.
Nowadays in Australia, you can get a hot dog ‘with the lot’, including beetroot, pineapple, cheese, lettuce and a fried egg.
Just. No.
Do you like hotdogs? What’s your favourite topping? Please don’t tell me it’s pineapple.
Until next fortnight,
Maggie x
What a laugh Maggie, as always. Glad you've discovered toasted (or cremated) marshmallows! My favourite hotdog filling is caramelised onion, mustard, tomato sauce and cheese (melted of course)
So pleased/relieved you've discovered toasted marshmallows Maggie! I can take or leave most snack food... but don't take my marshmallows! Great post. Thx!