FRANK'S FACTS

🥫 Food Facts

Frank's kitchen shelf holds two things: a jar of honey and a deep respect for that jar of honey. Because here's the thing about food — it's older, stranger, and more well-traveled than any of us. Empires rose and fell over nutmeg. A Supreme Court case decided what a tomato is. And the banana in your fruit bowl is, botanically speaking, a berry with a lot of nerve.

Everything below has been checked against the botany books and the history books alike. Napkins optional.

The Honey Files

• FACT #400 Honey essentially never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs, thousands of years old and still perfectly edible.
• FACT #401 The secret to honey's immortality is chemistry: it's low in moisture and naturally acidic, an environment where bacteria simply cannot get a foothold.
• FACT #402 A single worker bee produces only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. (according to the National Honey Board)
• FACT #403 To make one pound of honey, a hive's bees collectively visit about two million flowers. (according to the National Honey Board)
• FACT #404 Honey has been used to dress wounds since ancient Egypt — and sterilized medical-grade honey dressings are still used in hospitals today.
• FACT #405 Honey's color and flavor depend on which flowers the bees visited. There are more than 300 recognized honey varietals in the United States alone, according to the National Honey Board.

Botanical Surprises

• FACT #406 Botanically, a banana is a berry — and a strawberry isn't. Botanists have rules about these things, and the rules do not care about your feelings.
• FACT #407 The banana "tree" is not a tree at all. It's the world's largest herbaceous flowering plant — a giant herb with a stem made of tightly packed leaves.
• FACT #408 The "seeds" dotting a strawberry's skin are actually individual fruits, called achenes — each one containing its own seed.
• FACT #409 Peanuts aren't nuts. They're legumes, cousins of peas and lentils, and they grow underground.
• FACT #410 Almonds are close relatives of peaches. Both belong to the genus Prunus, and an almond is the seed of a fruit that looks like a small, leathery peach.
• FACT #411 Cashews grow dangling from the bottom of a fruit called a cashew apple — and their shells contain irritating oils related to the ones in poison ivy, which is why you'll never see cashews sold in the shell.
• FACT #412 An avocado is, botanically, a berry with a single enormous seed.
• FACT #413 Each kernel of corn is technically a whole fruit — a dry type botanists call a caryopsis. A cob is hundreds of fruits standing in formation.
• FACT #414 Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that breaks down protein — it's why fresh pineapple keeps gelatin from setting, and why your tongue can feel tingly after a big helping.
• FACT #415 Nearly every banana sold for export is the same variety — the Cavendish — and they're all genetically identical clones. The Cavendish took over after disease devastated the previous favorite, the Gros Michel, in the mid-1900s.
• FACT #416 The earliest cultivated carrots weren't orange — they were mostly purple and yellow. Orange carrots rose to dominance in the Netherlands around the 17th century.
• FACT #417 Watermelon is about 92 percent water. The name was not a marketing stretch.
• FACT #418 Cucumbers do even better: they're roughly 95 percent water — basically crunchy hydration.
• FACT #419 Bananas are very slightly radioactive, thanks to their potassium — like many potassium-rich foods. The dose is so tiny that physicists jokingly measure trivial radiation exposure in "banana equivalents."

Spice Roads & Ship Routes

• FACT #420 Black pepper was once so valuable in Europe that it was used to pay rents and dowries. English law still remembers: a token payment is called a "peppercorn rent" to this day.
• FACT #421 Saffron is the world's most expensive spice because each crocus flower yields just three delicate threads — it takes tens of thousands of hand-picked blossoms to make a single pound.
• FACT #422 In the Treaty of Breda in 1667, the Dutch kept Run — a tiny Indonesian island rich in nutmeg — while the English kept a modest island they'd taken from the Dutch: Manhattan.
• FACT #423 Vanilla comes from an orchid, and the hand-pollination technique that made vanilla farming possible outside Mexico was worked out in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on the island of Réunion.
• FACT #424 Before Columbus, there was not a single chili pepper in Asia. Chilies are native to the Americas — the fire in Thai, Indian, and Sichuan cooking is less than 500 years old.
• FACT #425 Black pepper and chili peppers aren't even related. Pepper is the berry of a vine from India; chilies are nightshades from the Americas. Blame confused European explorers for the shared name.
• FACT #426 Tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Ireland, chocolate in Switzerland — none existed in the Old World before the Columbian exchange. Whole national cuisines are built on imports.
• FACT #427 Birds are essentially immune to the burn of chili peppers — capsaicin doesn't trigger their heat receptors the way it does in mammals. Handy for the plant, since birds spread the seeds.
• FACT #428 Much of the "wasabi" served outside Japan is actually horseradish, mustard, and green coloring. Real wasabi is a famously fussy plant and famously expensive.
• FACT #429 Worcestershire sauce is a fermented product — and it contains anchovies. Frank apologizes to any vegetarians learning this today.

Named After Somebody

• FACT #430 The sandwich is named for John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich — by the famous account, so he could eat with one hand without leaving the gaming table.
• FACT #431 Caesar salad has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. It's credited to restaurateur Caesar Cardini, who by his family's account improvised it during a busy Fourth of July in 1924 — in Tijuana, Mexico.
• FACT #432 German chocolate cake isn't German. It's named for Sam German, who developed a sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's company in 1852.
• FACT #433 The croissant descends from the Austrian kipferl — the flaky French icon has Viennese roots.
• FACT #434 Fortune cookies are not a Chinese tradition. They trace back to Japanese-style crackers and were popularized in California; in China they're a curiosity, not a custom.
• FACT #435 The kiwifruit was long known as the Chinese gooseberry. New Zealand growers rebranded it after their national bird in the mid-1900s, and the new name stuck worldwide.

Kitchen Curiosities

• FACT #436 In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is legally a vegetable, not a fruit — for tariff purposes, in the case of Nix v. Hedden. Botany lost on a technicality.
• FACT #437 Ketchup began as a fermented fish sauce in Asia — the name traces to a Hokkien Chinese word. Early English "ketchups" were made from mushrooms or walnuts; tomatoes joined the party much later.
• FACT #438 In the 1830s, an American physician marketed concentrated tomato extract in pill form as a medicine. Ketchup's ancestors were, briefly, sold to cure your ailments.
• FACT #439 White chocolate contains no cocoa solids at all — only cocoa butter, sugar, and milk. Chocolate purists have been muttering about this for decades.
• FACT #440 The Aztecs used cacao beans as currency. Goods were priced in beans — and enterprising cheats even made counterfeit beans.
• FACT #441 In colonial New England, lobster was so plentiful it was considered humble, low-class food. The bug of the sea has since received quite the promotion.
• FACT #442 The Popsicle was invented by an 11-year-old. As Frank Epperson told it, he left a cup of soda powder and water outside with a stirring stick on a cold night in 1905 — and patented the result years later.
• FACT #443 Fresh cranberries bounce. Growers have long used bounce tests to sort good berries from bad ones — a firm, fresh cranberry springs like a tiny rubber ball.
• FACT #444 Apples float because a good portion of the fruit's volume — roughly a quarter — is air trapped between cells. That's the entire engineering basis of bobbing for apples.
• FACT #445 The holes in Swiss cheese — cheesemakers call them "eyes" — are bubbles of carbon dioxide released by bacteria during aging.
• FACT #446 Chewing gum is thousands of years old. Archaeologists have found lumps of chewed birch bark tar from the Stone Age — some still carrying ancient tooth marks.
• FACT #447 Coffee "beans" aren't beans. They're the seeds of a cherry-like fruit of the coffee plant.
• FACT #448 Pound cake earned its name honestly: the original recipe called for a pound each of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs.

That's 49 facts, and Frank is officially hungry. Wash them down with History Facts, chew on some Word Facts, or stroll back to the Library Front Desk »