Food Trivia You Might Enjoy

It is very interesting that there are so many things about foods that consumers overlook. However, once they find out the trivia, they will surely begin to pay attention to the different foods they eat.

Most people love the Boston cream pie. However, they might not think about the Boston cream pie not being a pie at all. It is a cake. So, why is it known as a pie?

At the time the dessert was invented by M. Sanzian in Boston in 1856, the oven and pans were used to bake cakes and pies. When the cake was taken out of the oven, it was called a pie, and the name stuck. Boston cream pie is the official dessert of Boston, Massachusetts.

Most people do not know that peanuts are not nuts because of the name. They are not nuts because nuts grow on trees and peanuts are grown underground. Therefore, they are legumes.

Ketchup, also spelled catsup, is recognized as a table sauce. Did you know it used to be sold as a medicine in the 1830s to treat diarrhea and other illnesses? At that time, tomatoes were not used to make ketchup. It was made with berries, grapes, mushrooms, and other foods.

Today, the condiment is used on French fries, hamburgers, hot sandwiches, hot dogs, meats and cooked eggs.

Why are animal crackers called crackers when they are really cookies?

They are made with dough like crackers, but they are sweet like cookies, but technically they are crackers.

Although animal crackers are made with a layered dough like crackers, they tend to be sweet in flavor, but technically they are crackers and not cookies.

Graham crackers, like animal crackers, taste more like cookies than crackers.

Graham crackers are so named after Sylvester Graham who preached that bread made from wheat coarsely ground was better for people.

Buffalo wings do not come from the buffalo animal. The first wings were introduced in 1964 at a family-owned establishment in Buffalo, New York called the Anchor Bar that Teressa Bellissimo owned with her husband.

Late one night their son, Dominic, arrived from college with a group of his friends. Teressa needed a fast and easy snack to serve them. It was then that she came up with the idea of deep frying chicken wings which were normally thrown away or reserved for stock. She tossed them in cayenne hot sauce and served them with blue cheese dressing and celery because that's all she had available on such short notice. Now Buffalo wings are a favorite appetizer at most restaurants.

There are no eggs in eggplants. So, why are they called eggplants?

Eggplants are closely related to tomatoes and potatoes. Although they are cooked in many dishes like a vegetable, eggplants are technically considered berries.

It is called an eggplant because it looks somewhat like a goose or a hen's egg.

Have you ever wondered why one of American's favorite burger is called a hamburger when it contains no ham?

The hamburger's name has nothing to do with ham. The name came from Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany.

In the late 1700s, when sailors were in Hamburg, Germany they often ate hard slabs of salted minced beef. They called the meat “Hamburg steak" because of the place they were in.

When Germans moved to America, they brought some of their foods with them. Today, we call it hamburger instead of a Hamburg steak as the sailors once did.

A pineapple is a fruit that contains no pines, and it contains no apples. So, why is it called a pineapple?

On his voyage to the Caribbean, Columbus found the fruit on the island of Guadaloupe in 1493. The new fruit looked like a combination of several fruits on the outside. It resembled a pinecone and inside the fruit had a firm interior pulp like an apple. So combining how it looked on the outside and the taste on the inside, it was called a "pineapple."

Did you know that a watermelon is a vegetable?

It is hard to believe that a watermelon really is a vegetable because it is grown like a vegetable even though it is eaten as a fruit. It might be easy to understand when you know that the watermelon is a member of the cucumber family because no doubt you know a cucumber is a vegetable.

Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit? It depends on if you are asking a scientist or a cook. A tomato is definitely a fruit, according to scientists. It is definitely a vegetable, according to a cook.

A tomato is technically the fruit of the tomato plant, but it's used as a vegetable in cooking.