Food in Airplane

Food in Airplane
United Airlines, a pioneer in the industry was the only airline to serve meals on trays from the beginning of commercial aviation.

While other airlines had copilots passing out sandwiches to passengers United employed uniform stewardess to serve cold chicken.

Many airplane travelers in the early days of the aviation industry’s food service complained of how often chicken was served; American Airlines was even nicknamed “the fried chicken airline.”

Passengers derided chicken as a cheap food option; industry professionals found that chicken’s versatility responded well to the demands of in-flight food service.

By 1936 American Airline stewardesses were filling service trays with food from very large thermoses containing hot food prepared in advance usually by the airport café and offering real dishware and flatware to boot.

Food would stay hot in the containers for about one to two hours, with no need for reheating.

The thermos approach was succeeded by a system of using large casseroles, which provided the advantage of loading meals, already plated and hot.

Food often stayed heated for many hours with this system, however and food quality suffered along with menu choices.

Then around 1945 Pan American worked together with Clarence Birdseye and the Maxson Company to create the convection oven, which would allow frozen foods to be heated on board the aircraft.

Soon afterward the microwave oven was developed; it has since become the industry standards in aircraft food service preparation.

As the twentieth century progressed, two elements affected the continuing development of airplane food.

America became more tolerant of a diversity of a eating habits, and a greater diversity of people began using airplanes as a means of travels.

To respond to these trends airlines began offering a greater variety of types of meals that responded to religious, ethnic or health requirements with respect to food.
Food in Airplane

Invention of Beer

Invention of Beer
The first alcoholic beverage was either wine or beer. Although wine apparently originated in Babylonia, it seems that beer or “wine made from barley” was also known at the same period, as early as 6000 to 5000 BC.

One early method was replaced barley in a pottery vessel and then bury it in the ground until it began to germinate.

Then it was milled, made into dough and baked. The cake could then be taken as a lightweight item on travels and when stopping at an oasis for water it would be soaked until fermentation began.

The very acid tasting beer was known in the 20th century AD as “boozah,” apparently the origin of the English word with a similar meaning.

Records of beer being served have been found in Babylonia as early as 2225 BC and both the Egyptians and the Babylonians used beer as a medicine.

The Greeks imported the concept of barley beverages from Egypt.

Since few physical remains or artifacts survive from the beer making process, very little is known the diffusion of beermaking. Scattered literary references help document the fact that beer of different varieties was widespread throughout the ancient world, including frontier regions and among peoples generally regarded as beyond the fringes of civilization.

By the end of the classical period, in the fourth century AD beer was known throughout northern Europe. Varieties included mead, which involved a fermented mixture of honey and water in Britain.

Another type was metheglin, mead with herbs added to it. A dark beer, similar to modern porter, was in use in Britain even before the Roman invasion, and in the 1st century AD the Irish had developed a local beverage similar to ale.
Invention of Beer

History of Rice in the West

History of Rice in the West
For along time, western Europe regarded rice as another kind of spice. It was certainly reaching England before the middle of the thirteenth century; the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the word is from the household accounts of King Henry III in 1234, and we know that between Christmas 1264 and the following Easter the Countess of Leicester’s household got through 110 pounds of rice, costing 1.5 pence a pound, a high price which explained the careful book keeping and the fact that the rice was locked in the spice cupboard.

At about same time, the accounts of the Duke of Savoy that rice ‘for sweets’ cost 13 imperials a pound, whereas honey was only 8 imperials.

In Milan rice was heavily taxed as ‘spice brought through Greece from Asia’.

The black death , which ravaged Italy from 1348 to 1352, and then recurred at irregular intervals as bubonic plague, has been credited with the introduction of rice to the northern Mediterranean.

The workforce had been reduced by perhaps one third, and the low yields of wheat and barley were hardly enough to keep people alive.

Rice was a high-yielding, energy giving crop that required far less labor per sack of grain harvested.

Gian Gleazzo Sforza sent a sack of rice to the Duke d’Este of Ferrara in 1475, with a letter telling him that one sack of seed would produce twelve sacks of food grain.

According to present day Italian writers, however large tracts of the Piedmont and Lombardy plains had been turned into paddy fields several decades before this famous letter, with the export of seed grain already strictly prohibited as a state secret.

In England, in 1585, rice stepped in cow’s milk with white breadcrumbs, powdered fennel seed and a little sugar was thought good for increasing the flow of milk in a nursing mother’s breasts. But by the seventeenth century rice was no longer a magical luxury.

A century or so later, it was being imported to Britain in large enough quantities to be considered quite an ordinary item of diet – usually milk puddings.

Then the availability of cheap rice from new possessions overseas drove this former luxury food further and further down the British market.

Rice was being taken to countries very remote from where it grew. Far, workers in nineteenth century Norway ate porridge of water and barley on working days, milk and barley on Sundays, but milk and rice for feats and celebrations.

In Finland, rice porridge was served as dessert in Christmas Eve, and Christmas lunch began with the leftover sliced thick and fried.
History of Rice in the West