History of peanuts in USA

The scientific name of the peanut is Arachis hypogaea. Plants in the genus Arachis originated in the Gran Pantanal, occupying between 50,000 and 75,000 square miles in parts of tropical Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay.

They were taken from there to Africa by early explorers and missionaries. They were bought to North America from Africa by slave traders in the early colonial days and used as food for slaves while on shipboard.

In America, peanuts were not extensively used until after the Civil War in 1865. The first unequivocal reference to the peanut in America was made in 1769 by a Dr. Brownrigg, who pressed oil from peanuts in Edento, North Carolina. Commercial production of peanuts in USA began in about 1876.

With other food scarce, it became recognized as a cheap form protein and an important food source during the Civil War. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers dined on ‘peanut porridge’. Peanuts did not become an important commercial crop in the United States until after 1917.
History of peanuts in USA

History of Wheaties

Wheaties was discovered when in 1921, a health clinician, in Minneapolis was mixing a batch of bran gruel for his patients while he spilled some of the mix on a hot stove.

The gruel crackled and sizzled turned into a crisp flake. The Washburn Crosby Company (later changed name to General Mills) bought the rights to the cereal.  The company spent three years developing the product and introduced Wheaties breakfast cereal in 1924.

In 1924 General Mills first advertised Wheaties as the Breakfast of Champions, thereby tying cold cereal to star athletes.

Wheaties made advertising history as the first product to feature a singing commercial on network radio. Its first airing took place on Christmas Eve 1926. Sales increased in areas where the people heard the commercial.

At the 1939 Major League All-Star Game, forty sox of the events fifty-one players endorsed the cereal. Wheaties was marketed as an accompaniment to physical exercise leading to the goal of physical fitness. Most early Wheaties champions were men, with the swimmer Esther Williams a notable exception in 1959.
History of Wheaties

History of Ice Cream

History of Ice Cream
It’s all come a long way since Nero snacked on snow mixed with fruit pulp and honey – around 62 A.D. No one’s quite sure where ice cream originated although credit is usually given to Arabs. They are said to have developed techniques for freezing fruit juices and to have made the first sorbets. In fact, the word sorbet probably derives from the Arabs word ‘scherbet’, meaning sweet snow or from ‘sharber’, meaning ‘to sip’. When Arabs invaded Sicily they brought their food with them and the fame of their frozen drink began to spread.

Fast forward to the Renaissance and 16th-century Florence where two cooks made ice cream history. The first, Ruggeri was a chicken farmer who made it to the culinary big time thanks to a sorbet he made for Catherine Medici; the second, Bernardo Buontalenti, was well known architect who stunned the gastronomic establishment by producing a frozen dessert based on zabaglione and fruit.

In the 17th century, a French ice cream maker in the employ of King Charles 1 of England was paid to keep his recipe a royal secret. In 1769, the first known recipe for ice cream was printed in ‘The Experienced English Housekeeper’.

The first record of ice cream in America dates from 1700 when Governor Bladen of Maryland served it to some of his guests attending a dinner party. Philip Lenzi, a confectioner from London, made ice cream and advertised it for sale in New York beginning in 1774. Ice cream remained an expensive delicacy, available only in confectionaries and café’s, for many years.

In 1848 the first U.S patent was granted for a revolving hand crank freezer with a dasher, one of the first to be made commercially in the United States.

It was not until 1851 that ice cream became available on the wholesale market. Jacob Fussell of Baltimore added ice cream, to his line of wholesale dairy products, built the first ice cream manufacturing plant in Baltimore, and later expanded his business to Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.
History of Ice Cream

History of Black Mustard

History of Black Mustard
Black mustard or Brassica nigra is native to the Mediterranean region, where it is reported as a fossil from prehuman Pleistocene time. The species probably joined Neolithic agriculture as a volunteer in wheat and barley fields, spreading with those crops through Eurasia and North Africa.

Millennia later, Brassica nigra went with those crops oversea, its seeds often carried accidentally with the cereal grain. In California, for example, it was a weed during the Spanish period and remains are common in adobe bricks of the early mission.

Like other mustards Brassica nigra is used as a green vegetable and as a source of mild tasting nonvolatile oil expressed from the seed. However, its main use has been as a spice. Use of mustard seed as a spice dates from the beginning of written history in Babylonia and India and is abundantly recorded in classical Greek, Roman, and biblical sources. Although other species of Brassica were also used, it seems likely that Brassica nigra was the main source in ancient history as it has been in modern history.

Traditionally, mustard is prepared by mixing a small amount of seed of white mustard Sinapis alba, other spices, and a lot of Brassica nigra seed. In ancient times, volunteer plants wee probably more than adequate without deliberate planting. Cultivation of Brassica nigra as a field crop came after Medieval times, along with commercial production in Düsseldorf, Dijon and a few other European towns.
History of Black Mustard