Episode 252: Five Surprising Food Origins [1]
Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and
wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alastair Budge and I hope you're not listening with an
empty stomach because today, we are going to talk about food.
And specifically, we are going to talk about the unusual stories of 5 different,
everyday foods, foods that you have probably eaten, or at least heard of,
but perhaps you don't know where they were invented, how, when and by who.
On this culinary journey we'll talk about the sandwich, tomato
ketchup, fish & chips, chicken tikka masala, and the humble tea bag.
It is going to be quite the food extravaganza, and I hope you'll enjoy it.
Now, let's roll up our sleeves, sit down at the table
and tuck in to our first unusual food origin story.
And it's one of a food we all know and probably love.
The sandwich.
Now, before you cry out that “nobody invented the sandwich”, it's just
bread and something in the middle, let me add a little disclaimer here.
Yes, people have eaten bread with meat or vegetables on
top, or between two pieces of bread for thousands of years.
One of the earliest known sandwich lovers was a Babylonian Rabbi named Hillel
the Elder who was a prominent figure in Jerusalem in the first century BC.
His love of lamb and herbs spread between matzah bread, an unleavened flatbread,
is recorded in The Haggadah, a Jewish text typically read during Passover.
According to the text, the fillings in this sandwich were meant to represent
the Jews' suffering, especially the crushed nuts which symbolised the
mortar that Jews used when they were forced to build Egyptian buildings.
And this idea of bread with fillings was enjoyed
throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East for centuries.
But history, or at least English-language history, has a particular date for the invention
of the modern sandwich, and a particular person who is credited with the invention of
this dish that is enjoyed by a whopping 56% of the British population every single day.
And that date was 1762, and the man, a man named Sir John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich.
If you are a particularly dedicated listener to this show you will
remember that one of the first episodes we ever made, episode number
19 in fact, was on this story, but here is a reminder of how it went.
This man, the Earl of Sandwich, was a voracious gambler.
He loved playing cards, and would sit for hours at a time at the card table.
But he was also a human being, and like any of us, he got hungry.
So, one day, so the legend goes, he signalled to a nearby servant to bring him some meat between
two slices of bread, a meal he could hold in one hand while he kept his cards in the other.
No knife and fork were needed, and he could continue to take bites out of this
little parcel of food while he presumably lost more and more money at the card table.
Before long people in fashionable clubs of London started saying “I'll
have what Sandwich is having”, and this was shortened just to “sandwich”.
It turns out that sandwiches are quite nice even if you
aren't sitting at a card table, but the name remained.
So, there you go, the British might not have invented the concept of the sandwich,
but a British man is now forever associated with its name and popularisation.
While we're on the subject of sandwiches, this leads us
nicely on to talk about a sauce that you might find in one.
If you open any fridge in the UK, you'll likely see a bottle of this lurking on the shelf.
Some might say it's the superhero of condiments: tomato ketchup, or simply “ketchup”.
This famous red sauce is both savoury and sweet, but it actually didn't start out that way.
The name ‘ketchup' actually comes from the Hokkien Chinese word ‘kê-tsiap',
a type of fermented fish which the Vietnamese used to make the sauce.
It was later brought to China by traders who popularised it in the region.
It's believed that the British first encountered the mysterious
sauce in the late 17th century on a trip to southeast Asia.
After falling in love with it, they tried to recreate
it using anchovies, mushrooms, oysters and walnuts.
It doesn't sound that nice to me, but it was certainly loved by some people.
It's said to have been a favourite of Jane Austen, the author of novels
such as Pride and Prejudice, who often added it to her meat and fish.
But it was still missing a vital ingredient: the tomato.
In 1812 an American horticulturist named James Mease took some tomatoes, and mixed
their pulp with brandy and spices to create the first published tomato ketchup recipe.
Although this bore very little resemblance to the original Asian ‘ke-tsiap', it was delicious.
This tomato ketchup was also significantly easier to store
than its mushroom ancestor but it was by no means perfect.
The tomato season was short.
Storing tomato pulp proved difficult, and some producers
stored it so poorly that it grew bacteria, yeast or mould.
Of course, there were plenty of attempts to preserve
the sauce, including using the preservative benzoate.
And by 1837, it had started to be put into bottles and sold across America.
Finally, tomato sauce seemed to keep for a long time, meaning
it could be bought and kept in the cupboard without going bad.
Remember, we're still 100 years before mass adoption of fridges here.
So, it was quite the triumph when it seemed that ketchup could finally be kept for a long time.
Indeed, Heinz, a company that would later become famous for its tomato ketchup, ran an advertising
campaign with the slogan: "Blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household!"
The relief was because ketchup no longer needed to be made from scratch whenever
someone wanted to eat it - it could be pre-bought and it would keep for a long time.
But, these preservatives were dangerous, they were unsafe, and when benzoate was
finally banned in 1906 the ketchup producers needed to find another solution.
Luckily, the solution was right in front of them.
All that was required was ripe, red tomatoes, which have a higher level of
natural preservatives and were lower in a particular acid called pectin.
And the rest of the history of ketchup is, as they say, history.
Now, our next food is one that can be enjoyed with ketchup, but if
you are a real purist you will have it only with salt and vinegar.
Fish and chips.
Again, we did one very early episode on this, it's Episode
number 17, but here is the abridged, the concise, version.
A bit like the sandwich, the origin of fish and chips
is shared between the Jewish community and Britain.
It all started in the 15th century after Spain expelled its Jewish population,
sending thousands of Jews fleeing to neighbouring countries like Portugal.
In Jewish culture, it is forbidden to cook on the Jewish Sabbath or Shabat.
That means that from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the kitchen was off limits.
To follow this religious requirement, Jewish people needed to prepare food before the
sun went down on Friday, and this food needed to be good to eat for twenty four hours.
One of those foods was a white fish like cod or haddock, fried in flour.
The flour preserved the fish so that it could be eaten
cold the following day and still have some flavour.
When Portugal fell under Spanish rule, the Sephardic Jews fled to England,
bringing their culture and recipes with them, including the fried fish.
In order to fit in and behave more like the local, Christian, population,
which was not meant to eat meat on a Friday, and so tended to eat
fish, the new Jewish immigrants cooked this fried fish on a Friday.
As it was a dish that fitted both the Jewish and Christian requirements – and was
evidently pretty tasty – the Jewish immigrants would sell it to the local population.
Initially, it was sold on its own, without chips.
And the identity of the person who first had the
genius idea to serve it with chips is somewhat debated.
It's thought to have been a young, Jewish immigrant named Joseph
Malin, who opened up the first fish and chip shop in London in 1863.
However there is evidence of another fish and chip shop being opened at almost
exactly the same time by another man in Oldham, in the north of the country.
In any case, it was an instant hit, a surefire success, and fish
and chips became an unofficial national dish for Great Britain.
By 1910 there were over 20,000 fish and chip shops around the UK and
during WW1 the Prime Minister tried to boost morale by keeping shops open.
Fish and chips became such a part of British culture that when the British
soldiers stormed beaches in Normandy in World War II they reportedly called
out to each other by shouting “fish” and the other would respond with “chips”.
This helped them find each other in the chaos of battle.
And even today, when the country has been assaulted by American fast food outlets, the
fish and chip shop reigns supreme, with over 8 fish and chip shops for every one McDonald's
Now, in case you didn't realise it before, Britain is a big of a magpie when it comes to food.
A magpie is the black and white bird that steals shiny things to bring back and put in its nest.
And if you didn't believe it before, the next item on the menu is going
to be yet another example, albeit this time of a food that many British
people believe to be Indian, but is actually, so the story goes, Scottish.
And it too is a rival for the UK's national dish.
You might not have heard of it unless you have been to the UK, but it's called chicken tikka masala.
In case you don't know what I'm talking about, chicken tikka masala consists of a
boneless chicken cooked over a charcoal fire, and served with a tomato-cream sauce.
And the legend of where it comes from goes something like this.
In 1971, on a dark night in Glasgow, in Scotland, a bus driver, tired from his long
shift, came into an Indian restaurant with a Pakistani cook, and ordered a chicken curry.
After taking one bite, he sent it back to the kitchen complaining that the curry was too dry.
We Brits don't tend to eat much dry meat, our meat
normally comes smothered, covered, in gravy and sauce.
According to the cook's son, his father was suffering from an ulcer and had
a pan of tomato soup on the stove cooking that he was planning to eat later.
To try and please the customer, he improvised and put his tomato soup,
some yoghurt and some spices, on top of the supposedly “dry” curry.
When the dish returned to the table, the bus driver's eyes lit up.
He took his fork, lifted it up to his mouth, and instantly fell in love with the dish.
He kept coming back to the restaurant with friends to order
it again and eventually, the restaurant put it on the menu.
It has now become a favourite dish for many Brits, and
is something of a staple in Indian restaurants in the UK.
In 2001, it even achieved the high praise of the then British Foreign
Secretary, Robin Cook, who called it a symbol of multicultural Britain.
I should add that there are plenty of people who say that this story is
folklore, that there is nothing really British about chicken tikka masala.
