50 Fun Facts About American Food

Buffalo wings were first fried up in 1964 at which Buffalo, New York bar?

Teressa Bellissimo, who ran the Anchor Bar with her husband Frank, is credited with first tossing the wings in hot sauce and butter in 1964.

What did Pat and Harry Olivieri sell from their stand before inventing the Philly cheesesteak?

The brothers sold hot dogs from a South Philadelphia cart in 1930 when Pat grilled chopped beef on a roll instead; a cab driver tasted it, asked for one, and the sandwich was born.

The Caesar salad, a fixture of American menus, was actually created on July 4, 1924 in which city?

Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini ran a restaurant in Tijuana serving Americans dodging Prohibition; his daughter Rosa insisted the original had Worcestershire sauce but no anchovies.

Which company introduced Spam on July 5, 1937?

Hormel Foods of Austin, Minnesota, launched Spam in 1937 as a canned pork shoulder and ham product; the company runs a Spam Museum in its hometown.

Which US state has the highest per-capita consumption of Spam, at around seven million cans a year?

Hawaii's Spam musubi, a slice of the meat on rice wrapped in nori, is a local staple; the taste dates to World War II, when Spam fed GIs stationed across the islands.

In which country did Ignacio Anaya invent nachos in 1943 for US military wives from Fort Duncan?

Anaya improvised the dish at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, just across the border from Fort Duncan, frying tortilla triangles with cheese and pickled jalapeños.

Deep-dish pizza was invented in 1943 at which Windy City restaurant?

Pizzeria Uno's founders Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo get the credit, though their chef Rudy Malnati Sr. may deserve it; the cheese goes under the chunky tomato sauce.

White Castle, credited as the first fast-food hamburger chain, opened in 1921 in which city?

Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson opened the first White Castle in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921 with $700, selling square sliders for five cents apiece.

Fortune cookies most likely originated with immigrants to America from which country?

Claimants include Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden and David Jung of Los Angeles. When the biggest US maker tried selling them in China in 1992 they were rejected as too American.

Which dessert did Florida designate its official state pie in 2006?

Key lime pie is pale yellow, not green, because ripe Key limes are yellow; a 1965 bill to fine anyone advertising a version made without Key limes failed.

The banana split was created in 1904 by a 23-year-old pharmacy apprentice in which Pennsylvania town?

David 'Doc' Strickler built the first one at Tassel Pharmacy in Latrobe; Wilmington, Ohio disputes the claim, but the National Ice Cream Retailers Association sided with Latrobe in 2004.

Per the Omaha origin story, the Reuben sandwich was invented for a poker game at which establishment?

Grocer Reuben Kulakofsky reportedly created it for his weekly poker game at the Blackstone Hotel in the 1920s, and owner Charles Schimmel put it on the hotel menu; New York's Arnold Reuben has a rival claim.

The Cobb salad is named after the owner of which Hollywood restaurant?

Robert Howard Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby, supposedly threw it together from kitchen leftovers late one night in 1937, and it went on the menu chopped in neat rows.

Roughly how many hot dogs do Americans eat each year?

The estimate is 20 billion a year, about 7 billion of them between Memorial Day and Labor Day; Charles Feltman began selling sausages from a Coney Island cart in 1867.

Which condiment is famously never put on a Chicago-style hot dog 'dragged through the garden'?

Ketchup is the banned one: the proper dog gets mustard, tomatoes, onions, sport peppers, bright green relish, a pickle spear and celery salt on a poppy-seed bun.

North of the US border, corn dogs are commonly known by which brand name?

Pogo is the brand name corn dogs go by north of the border, where the word doubles as the generic term; in the US, Cozy Dog Drive-In in Springfield, Illinois claims the first on a stick in 1946.

Which frozen-food company created Tater Tots in 1953 to use up leftover slivers of cut potato?

Ore-Ida founders Nephi and Golden Grigg found the name in a thesaurus; in Minnesota the tots go on top of a ground-beef casserole known as hotdish.

Which state's pork barbecue splits between a vinegar-pepper sauce east and tomato-tinged 'dip' west?

North Carolina's eastern style is whole hog with vinegar and pepper; the Piedmont's Lexington style adds a little tomato to the dip and favors pork shoulder, and both sides agree it is all pork.

Which barbecue city is best known for pork ribs served either 'wet' or 'dry'?

Memphis ribs come dry, with a spice rub and no sauce, or wet, basted before and after cooking; Charlie Vergos' Rendezvous made the dry style famous.

In Cincinnati's famous parlors, what does ordering a 'three-way' get you?

A three-way is spaghetti, chili and cheese, in that order from the bottom up; add onions or beans for a four-way, both for a five-way, a system the Macedonian-born Kiradjieff brothers began in 1922.

Which Cincinnati chili chain did Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides found in 1949?

Skyline Chili takes its name from the view of downtown Cincinnati from its first restaurant in Price Hill, opened by Nicholas Lambrinides in 1949.

Which US president served 'a pie called macaroni' at a state dinner in 1802?

Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef James Hemings trained in France and may have brought the recipe back; Kraft's boxed version arrived in 1937 promising a meal for four in nine minutes.

Which country buys nearly a quarter of the Kraft macaroni and cheese sold worldwide?

In Canada it is called Kraft Dinner, or simply KD, and Canadians eat it at roughly half again the American per-capita rate, which is why it is half-jokingly called the national dish.

Green bean casserole was created in 1955 in whose corporate test kitchen?

Dorcas Reilly created it in the Campbell Soup test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, and donated the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.

Since 1989, what traditionally happens to the turkey presented to the president each November?

It is given a mock pardon, a ritual George H.W. Bush formalised in 1989; the pardoned birds go to live out their usually short natural lives at a farm or university.

What flavour was the original Twinkie filling when James Dewar invented the snack cake in 1930?

Dewar's original was banana cream; a wartime banana shortage forced the switch to vanilla that stuck. The name came from a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes.

The Oreo, launched by Nabisco in 1912, was an imitation of which earlier cream-filled sandwich cookie?

Hydrox, made by Sunshine from 1908, came first but lost the shelf-space war to the Oreo; Double Stuf arrived in 1974.

Cracker Jack was first shown to the public at a world's fair in which city in 1893?

Brothers Frederick and Louis Rueckheim sold the popcorn-peanut-molasses mix at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; the Cracker Jack name came in 1896.

In what year did Cracker Jack start putting a prize in every box?

Prizes went into every box from 1912; physical toys gave way to digital game codes in 2016, long after 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' (1908) immortalised the snack.

Which style of clam chowder is made with a clear broth, containing no milk, butter or tomatoes?

Rhode Island's clear chowder keeps the broth unthickened, unlike the cream-based Boston style or Manhattan's red tomato version; all usually come with oyster crackers.

Which dish did the Louisiana legislature name the state's official cuisine in 2004?

Gumbo takes its name from West African words for okra, one of its three possible thickeners along with roux and filé powder; Louisiana made it the official state cuisine in 2004.

What three vegetables make up the 'holy trinity' at the base of gumbo and Cajun cooking?

Celery, bell peppers and onions are the Louisiana answer to the French mirepoix of onion, carrot and celery, with bell pepper standing in for carrot.

The Hot Brown, an open-faced turkey sandwich in Mornay sauce, was created in 1926 in which city?

Fred K. Schmidt devised it at the Brown Hotel in Louisville as a late-night alternative to ham and eggs for the hotel's dance crowd.

General Tso's chicken is named after a statesman from which Chinese province, where the dish is unknown?

General Tso (Zuo Zongtang) was a 19th-century Hunan general; chef Peng Chang-kuei, himself Hunanese, created the dish in Taiwan and took it to New York around 1973.

Which was the only apple native to North America when European colonists arrived?

The crabapple was the only native: species such as Malus coronaria grew wild, while the sweet domestic apple came over with colonists, its ancestor the Central Asian Malus sieversii.

New Orleans po' boys reportedly got their name in 1929 when the Martin brothers fed strikers from which trade for free?

Bennie and Clovis Martin, former streetcar conductors themselves, fed striking streetcar workers free sandwiches in 1929; order one 'dressed' and it comes with lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayonnaise.

Chili con carne became the official state dish of which state in 1977?

Texas legislators made chili the state dish in 1977; San Antonio's 'chili queens' had sold it from open-air stands since the 1880s, and competition chili in the state is made without beans.

By the most repeated origin story, the ice cream cone went mainstream at the 1904 World's Fair in which city?

Syrian concessionaire Ernest Hamwi supposedly rolled a waffle into a cup at the St. Louis fair when a neighbouring ice cream seller ran out of dishes; Agnes Marshall had printed a cornet recipe in 1888.

The earliest known recipe for potato chips appeared in 1817 in a cookbook published in which country?

William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle, published in England in 1817, predates the tale of George Crum inventing chips at Saratoga Springs in 1853, which historians regard as a myth.

The first written recipe for s'mores appeared in a 1927 handbook published by which organisation?

The recipe appeared as 'Some More' in the Girl Scouts' 1927 handbook Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts; August 10 is National S'mores Day.

Ruth Wakefield created the Toll House cookie in the 1930s at an inn in which state?

Wakefield ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, and sold Nestlé the recipe for a dollar and, by some accounts, free morsels for life; Massachusetts made it the official state cookie in 1997.

Louis' Lunch in New Haven says its first hamburger came from the ground trimmings of what?

Lassen ground the trimmings from his steaks, grilled the patty and served it between two slices of toast in 1900, which Louis' Lunch counts as the first hamburger sandwich.

In which state did Charlie Nagreen, a claimant to inventing the hamburger, first sell it at a fair in 1885?

Nagreen was 15 when he flattened a meatball between bread so Seymour Fair customers could eat while walking; Seymour, Wisconsin, bills itself the Home of the Hamburger.

How much did Ken Daigneau win in 1937 for coming up with the name Spam?

Daigneau, the brother of a company executive, took home $100 in the naming contest; the maker has never confirmed the name means 'spiced ham', and the Monty Python sketch later gave the word its email meaning.

Which Hostess snack cake returned to US shelves in July 2013, eight months after its maker's bankruptcy?

Twinkies came back on July 15, 2013, after Hostess shut down in November 2012 and was bought out of bankruptcy; the 'Twinkie defense' lives on as slang for an implausible excuse.

The first published mention of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, in 1901, appeared in which periodical?

Julia Davis Chandler suggested it as a tea sandwich in the Boston Cooking School Magazine in 1901; it became a Depression staple and a WWII soldiers' meal.

Which state named grits its official prepared food in 2002?

Georgia's legislature made grits the official prepared food in 2002; South Carolina had already declared grits its official state food back in 1976.

Which dessert did Texas legislators name the state's pie in 2013?

Pecan pie's oldest known recipe is an 1886 Harper's Bazaar pecan custard pie; Karo syrup's makers popularised the modern corn-syrup version in the 1920s and 1930s.

The soul-food version of chicken and waffles took off after which Harlem venue opened in 1938?

Wells Supper Club, opened by Joseph Wells in 1938, fed the fried-chicken-and-waffle combination to late-night jazz crowds caught between dinner and breakfast; a plain-waffle Pennsylvania Dutch version predates it.

The lobster roll is commonly credited to a restaurant called Perry's in which Connecticut town, as early as 1929?

Harry Perry's restaurant in Milford served hot buttered lobster rolls from about 1929; Maine's cold version swaps the butter for mayonnaise.