Useless Facts Regarding Food And Drinks
As many as 50 gallons of maple sap are needed to make a single gallon of maple sugar.
Dairy products account for 29 percent of all food consumed in the United States.
The swedes drink more coffee than any other people in the world.
Potato chips were invented by a black chef in Louisiana in 1865.
Goat's milk is used more widely throughout the world than cow's milk.
Wine tasters never drink the wine they taste. They sip it, swish it about, gargle it, and then spit it out. Swallowing wine is believed to dull the palate, not to mention the brain.
Diamond Jim Brady's average breakfast as recorded by a New York restauranteur; a gallon of orange juice, three eggs, a quarter of a loaf of corn bread, sirloin steak with fried potatoes, hominy grits and bacon, two muffins, and several pancakes. For dinner Diamond Jim might eat three dozen oysters, two bowls of turtle soup, and six crabs as an appetizer. Restaurant owners referred to him as the best twenty-five customers they ever had.
A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continually from the the bottom of the glass to the top.
In medieval England, beer was often served with breakfast.
The United States Department of Agriculture reports that the average American eats 8 and a half pounds of pickles a year. Dill pickles are twice as popular as sweet.
Cabbage is 91 percent water.
Lettuce is the world's most popular green.
Wadakin and Matsuzuka beef, raised in Japan, are considered the two most tender kinds of beef in the world. The steers from which this meat is taken are isolated in totally dark stalls, fed on beer and beer mash, and hand-massaged by specially trained beef masseurs three times a day.
Wine will spoil if exposed to light; hence tinted bottles.
Chop suey was invented in the United States. Its creator was a Chinese dignitary visiting America in the nineteenth century. Requested by American friends to prepare an authentic Chinese meal and not having the proper ingredients, the Chinese gentleman ordered his cook to collect all available foods, pour them into a large pot, and flavor the whole thing with soy sauce, which was still relatively new and exotic to the western palate. Asked the name of this delicious concoction, the dignitary, spotting a pair of chopsticks lying near the bottle of soy sauce, replied, “Chop-soy”. Through his heavy Chinese accent this became “Chop Suey,” and so it has remained ever since.
The term “cocktail” was invented in Elmsford, New York. A barmaid named Betsy Flanagan decorated her establishment with the tail feathers of cocks. One day a patron asked for “one of those cock tails.” She served him a drink with a feather in it.
Milk is heavier than cream.
According to the Nutritional Sciences Department of Cornell University, the best temperature at which to preserve frozen foods is 0° F (-18° C).
The purpose of the indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle is to strengthen the structure of the bottle and to trap the sediments in the wine.
Vintage port takes forty years to reach maturity.
Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.
Haggis, a traditional Scottish dish, is made from lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep, chopped with onions, seasonings, suet, and oatmeal, and then boiled in a bag made from the sheep's stomach.
More than one-third of the world's commercial supply of pineapples comes from Hawaii.
The strongest any liquor can be is 190 proof. This means the beverage is a little more than 97 percent alcohol.
The average person ingests about a ton of food and drink each year.
The age recorded on whiskey bottle refers to the number of years it is aged prior to being botted. Once in the bottle, whiskey does not improve.
Argentinians eat more meat than any other nation in the world—an average of 10 ounces per person per day.
The herring is the most widely eaten fish in the world. Nutritionally its fuel value is equal to that of a beefsteak.
The custom of serving a slice of lemon with fish dates back to the Middle Ages; the lemon was originally intended for remedial purposes rather than to flavor the fish. It was believed that if a person accidentally swallowed a fish bone, the lemon juice would dissolve it.
Americans spend more than $600 million a year on hot dogs. They consume enough of them each year to form a chain stretching from the Earth to the Moon and back again. The average American eats forty hot dogs a year. But the hot dog is not an American invention; it was the first produced in Germany in 1852 by a group of butchers in Frankfurt.
A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not.
There are professional tea tasters as well as wine tasters.
In Wilton, Maine, there is a cannery that imports and cans only dandelion greens.