The story of almond (Prunus dulcis)

The story of almond (Prunus dulcis)
Almonds are native of Middle East and were probably abundant in ancient times, since they are mentioned several times in the bible.

The Hebrew name for the almond, shakud, means “hasty awakening,” which probably derives from its prolific and fragrant bloom in late winter, ahead of most other orchard species.

Aaron’s rod was made of almond wood, and Jewish people often carry blooming almond branches to synagogues for festivals.

Ancient pagans thought almonds symbolized virginity. Some even used almonds as an emblem of the Virgin Mary.

While symbolizing virginity, almonds were also used as fertility charms and marriage blessings.

Italians used to distribute almonds at wedding as tokens of fruitfulness.

The almond was referred to as the “womb of the world,” suggestive of its supposed both birth-bringing powers.

Reference to the flowering almond in older poetry often meant “hope” according to “the language of flowers.”

However, almond trees have a somewhat conflicting symbolism: giddiness, heedlessness, stupidity, indiscretion, and thoughtlessness.

Almonds were left in King Tutankhamen’s tomb to provide nourishment in his afterlife.

Almonds branches were used as divining rods in Tuscany, Italy.

Almonds have been used as a folk remedy for cancers, tumors, ulcers, corns and calluses. Almonds were thought to prevent intoxication from drinking too much alcohol.

As with other members of Prunus, bitter almonds contain cyanogenic glycosides in seeds, bark and leaves; of eaten in large quantities, they can cease convulsions and death. About 50 to 70 bitter almonds cause death in adults; seven to ten can cause death in children, while three can cause severe poisoning. The sweet almonds of commerce do not contain these compounds.

Phloretin is an antibiotic-like compound found in bark and root extracts; in concentrate form, phloretin can kill certain bacteria.

The major nonfood usage of almond is for oil. Almond oil is highly valued for used in cosmetics and creams, and bitter almond oil is used as an essential oil. The oil is sued to treat various forms of dermatitis.
The story of almond (Prunus dulcis)

History of Allspice (Pimento dioica)

History of Allspice (Pimento dioica)
Allspice acquired it s name in the early seventeenth century when someone noticed that its flavour and scent resemble of mixture of cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon – obviously these three do not encompass all 250 spices in existence, but close enough.

It was used as a seasoning and to embalm the dead in before fifteenth century by Mayas of Latin America.

Allspice is derived from a tall tree native to Latin America and the Caribbean. It was discovered by Columbus in his first voyage, in 1492, undertaken to bring back spices for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.

The Aztecs employed allspice to sweeten and flavour their favored chocolate drink.

The spice was exported to Europe from 1601 onward as a substitute for cardamom.

At the end of nineteenth century, it became fashionable to have umbrellas and walking sticks made of pimento.

It has always been an important spice and condiment and was added to mulled wine and curry, among other dishes.

It has also been used to improve the favor of commercial medicines.
History of Allspice (Pimento dioica)

History of Noodles II

History of Noodles II
The art of noodlemaking developed further in the Tang dynasty (618-907) AD) when the noodles were first cut into long strips.

The age-old custom od eating noodles to signify long life is believed to have originated in this era.
During the period of the Song Dynasty (960-1179 AD) the variety of different styles of noodles gradually increased local tastes were developed and a great variety of popular noodles dishes inclusion of meat and vegetables came into being.

The technique of making dried noodles was learned in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) and in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) noodles were given the name of mian, and since then have continued until the present.

With increased travel and trade and widespread Chinese migration and emigration, noodles were taken across the country and gradually gained popularity in other countries.

Noodles spread from China to Korea, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Burma and Vietnam with the many Chinese traders, seafarers and emigrants who moved into these areas.

The similarities of some of the generic words for noodles (mian, mein or mi – China. men – Japan, mie (Indonesia, and mee – Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore), support this common origin.

In Japan. Udon noodle were created in the 15th century and most of the types of noodles today were available by the 16th century.
History of Noodles II

Fast Food Advertisement

Fast Food Advertisement
During the 1920s, White Castle, the first fast food advertised in newspapers. It was slow to value radio advertising but did have promotions on radio during the 1930s.

Most of its advertising was targeted at working class. This changed during the 1950s, when White Castle sponsored a children television show, The Cactus and Randy Show.

At that tine American spending in food continue to grow. The increase appears to have stemmed primarily from changes in foods purchased, including more food bought and eaten away from home.

During the second half of the century, consumers increasingly spent food dollars on meals outside the home.

McDonald’s did little national advertising in the 1950s. In 1959, Minneapolis McDonald’s operator, Jim Zein, began running radio advertisements and his sales skyrocketed.

Based on this success, Ray Kroc encouraged other franchises and managers to launch their own campaigns.

Following this directive, two Washington D.C., franchisees, John Gibson and Oscar Goldstein, began sponsoring a children’s television show, called Bozo’s Circus.

This resulted in the creation of Ronald MacDonald, the McDonald’s corporate clown icon who appeared in local Washington, DC television commercial beginning in 1963.

During the following year, he appeared in national television on Thanksgiving. The company has regularly used McDonald its advertising campaigns and like the Quaker Oats man, people dressed as Ronald MacDonald make personal appearances throughout the nation.

Ronald McDonald’s a household word with its “billion served” advertisement slogan serving as evidence of its leadership in this area of fast food.

The Happy Meal has been pleasing kids since 1979. The Ronald MacDonald Houses are noted for their continued good work with families and children suffering from incurable disease.

Through extensive advertising, McDonald’s became the nation’s largest fast food chain during the 1970s.

McDonald’s and other fast food restaurant don’t rely just on advertising to get young people hooked. McDonald’s operates more than 8,000 playgrounds at its US restaurants to lure children onto the premises.

While McDonald’s is re-finding its belief in beef as its core product, KFC is continuing to harry its competitors by promoting chicken as a lean and healthy product, confronting the obesity and food hygiene issue rather than shying away from it.

The new positioning by company is summed up used by company advertising and marketing: tasty and safe, balanced nutrition, high quality, and healthy living.

In 2000, the fast food industry spent $3 billion a year on television advertising, much of it targeted at children.
Fast Food Advertisement

History of Sugar Cane

History of Sugar Cane
Sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum) is a giant, thick, perennial grass of the plant family Graminae.

Raw sugar is derived from the sweet sap in the stems, which can grow up to 4.5 m (15 ft) tall and 2.5 – 5 cm (1 – 2 in) in diameter.

The plant needs a minimum of 1,250 mm (49 in) of rain annually and a short dry season to aid maturation. It is grown in moist of the world’s tropical regions; it can be planted and harvested by hand, so was suited to areas where labor was plentiful.

The cultivation of sugar cane probably originated in the South Pacific and spread from there to India and then to the Arabian countries and Europe.

Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506) is believed to have brought sugar cane to the New World on his second voyage west across the Atlantic in 1493, though it is possible that it had already introduced to the Arawak and Carib peoples of the Caribbean by a rout across the Pacific.

By the 17th century sugar plantations had been established throughout the West Indies, Islands such as Jamaica and Barbados were developed by British colonizers primarily for their ability to produce sugar for the home market, and were part of the notorious “Atlantic triangle” that linked Britain, West Africa and the West Indies in trading slaves and sugar.

Ships sailed from British port to collect slaves from West Africa to work on the sugar plantations. They then return to their home port laden with cargoes of refined sugar, rum and molasses.

The colonial plantations were adversely affected in the 19th century by slave uprisings and the eventual emancipation of the slaves, which made labor more expensive, as well as by soil exhaustion, competition from Cuba and the other Hispanic islands, and by the growth of the European sugar beet industry and loss of monopoly access to the British market.

However, the modernization of plantation, made possible by more capital and land, more efficient management and more sophisticated technology, ensured the survival of a substantial sugar economy in the Caribbean.
History of Sugar Cane

History of Noodles I

History of Noodles I
Noodles are strips or strands cut from a sheet of dough made of flour, water and either common salt or a mixture of alkaline salts.

They are one of the main staple foods consumed in East and Southeast Asian countries, representing up to 40% of total flour consumption.

It is believed that noodles originated in the north of China as early as 5000 BC, but their essential modern day form has developed over the last 2000 years.

Present day noodles were a unique contribution by the Han Dynasty (206 B to 220 AD) to Chinese culinary art.

The development of noodle foods in the Han period seemingly can be explained by the fact that techniques for large scale flour milling were introduced to China from the West during the latter part of the earlier Han Dynasty as a result of the Han expansion.

Han ingenuity in experimenting with such common food materials, combined with the willingness to incorporate technology from other cultures, led to the emergence of an eventually dominant new product in Chinese culinary history.

The writer Shu Hsi in the Western Jin Dynasty (late third and early fourth centuries) noted that the various kinds of noodles “were mainly the invention of the common people, whole some of the cooking methods come from foreign lands.”
History of Noodles I

Salt: The White Gold

One of the most valuable trade items from earliest times was salt. It is not a condiment like pepper or mustard or ketchup, but a mineral, NaCl, sodium chloride.

Salt is found almost everywhere, although this has been known only as a result of scientific advance in the past two hundred years.

Salt, called “white gold” could be found in the ground, the product of elaborate salt mines.

The Chinese were the first to discover that salt could be found deep under the earth’s surface at depths of several hundred meters or more.

The Chinese government in 2000 BC was the first to use salt to increase its revenue. In 645 BC, the Chinese state of Ch’i monopolized the salt industry and became prosperous.

By 300 BC, its monopoly had extended over both domestically produced and imported salt.

As long as 500 AD, the Chinese began to drill for brine a technique that was only discovered in Europe in the eighteenth century and was not known in Africa until the twentieth century.

The other oldest ways of obtaining salt was by boiling or evaporating sea water. This was done in ancient Egypt; in ancient Gaul (the Romans’ name for France): in France in the eighteenth century, to avoid paying the salt tax; and in India in the twentieth century as a way to gain independence from England and the British salt monopoly.

People of the ancient world, ate very salty food, particularly the Romans. Salt was also one of other reason for the Roman conquest of Gaul.

The prosperity of the Phoenician trading posts of the western Mediterranean had already been built on salt.

The Phoenicians were great producers of pickles food and garum and Rome could not ignore such prosperity once she was powerful enough to make it her own.

This is a very expensive and labor intensive way to get salt compared to mining rock salt.

Currently in the United States, between two and three million tons of salt are mined each year from mine that runs under the center of the United States, from Detroit and Cleveland south to Louisiana.
Salt: The White Gold

Apple Pie

The typical American pie made from uncooked apples, fat, sugar and sweet spices mixed together and baked inside a closed pie shell descends from fifteenth century.

English apple pies, which, while not quite the same, are similar enough that the relationship is unmistakably.

By the end of the sixteenth century in England, apple pie were being made that are virtually identical to those made in America in the early twenty first century.

Fourteenth century English often enjoyed meat pies. Fruits such as apples were substitute in traditional meat pies and served as dessert.

Apple pie was a favorite dessert during the reign of Elizabeth I.

The earliest record of the actual term apple pie does not occur until the late sixteenth century: ‘Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes,’ Robert Greene (English poet) in Arcadia – 1589.

Apple pies came to America quite early. There are recipes for apple pie on both manuscript recipes and eighteenth century English cookery imported into the colonies.

It was only in the twentieth century, apparently in 1960s, apple pies rapidly became an iconic part of the American culture witnessed by the cliché “as American as apple pie.”

In Colonial times the taste of a dish was emphasized more than appearance and presentation. Pies were often baked with a “take-off crust.”

The process allowed sugar and spices to be added after the apples had baked in the bottom pastry shell.

In 1930s a mock apple pie recipe, which used Ritz crackers instead of apples, was printed on Ritz cracker boxes.

In 1968 Mc Donald’s added an apple pie dessert to its menu.

In the nineteenth century, apple pie was also a common breakfast food among Yankees and people in rural communities. However, the use of pie as a breakfast food had declined by the end of the nineteenth century.

Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828 suggests a difference between British and American versions, the American having more curt: “a pie made of apples stewed or baked inclosed in paste, or covered with paste, as in England.”
Apple Pie