Don’t most of our lives revolve around food? I mean, let’s face it. We need to eat food, or we die. Here’s the skinny. And it would be. The body can survive for 8 to 21 days without food and water. We can make it up to two months if there’s an adequate water intake.
Trust me when I say this. I would never want to experience such a thing because I can’t really go much past two hours without eating something.
But let’s put those dismal thoughts aside because as far as I am concerned, food is a glorious, glorious thing. Heck. The street urchins even say so in the play “Oliver!”
Food comes to us in millions of varieties, shapes, and sizes. I think, as a kid, I figured out that food came from other countries when I thought about my favorite cake. Every birthday, without fail, I asked for a German Chocolate Cake with German Chocolate Icing. And lucky me. I got it.
Of course, there were other suspects I began to notice. Like Swedish Fish and French Fries.
I never put together that Frankfurters were from Frankfurt.
Or that Hamburgers hailed from Hamburg.
But those were two of my favorites too.
Never as a child did I realize that Yorkshire Pudding came from a place called Yorkshire, England. Or Edam Cheese, from Edam, Netherlands.
Brussel Sprouts from Brussels, Belgium. Nope. It didn’t connect.
But there was cake. Let’s get back to that German Chocolate Cake.
If you are not familiar with this delight, it is a layered chocolate cake filled and topped with a coconut-pecan frosting. Typically, coconut was not a go-to flavor for me, but there was something about this cake that made it amazing. Oh. Wait. Then there were Mounds bars and Almond Joys. Oh. And then were Zagnuts. Okay, maybe I liked coconut more than I realized.
Anyway. Back to the cake. I just learned it isn’t from Germany at all. Its origins can be traced back to 1852. A man, a baker, in fact, named Samuel German, developed a type of dark baking chocolate for the Baker’s Chocolate Company, right here in America. And for all his good work, the brand name of Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate was named in his honor.
More than one hundred years later, on June 3, 1957, a recipe for “German’s Chocolate Cake” appeared as the “Recipe of the Day.” This was printed in the Dallas Morning News.
It was created by Mrs. George Clay, a homemaker, in Dallas. Her nifty recipe used the baking chocolate introduced a century earlier. It caught on like wildfire. Those smarty people at General Foods, who owned the Baker’s brand at the time, found out about her good cake. They then distributed her recipe to other newspapers in the country.
The overall sales of Baker’s Chocolate increased by more than 70%. And the cake became a national favorite. There was no such thing as going “viral” back then. But sure enough. Mrs. Clay’s German Chocolate Cake went viral.
So no. German Chocolate Cake is not from Germany. But my other childhood favorite? Those Swedish Fish? They are truly from Sweden. It is a gummy kind of thing. But with magic mixed inside.
Those tasty fish first came to the United States shores in the late 1950s. They originated from the Swedish confectionery company Malaco. They were looking to expand their candies here in the United States and Canada. The fish became immediately popular and was a go-to in the 1960s and 70s. And I helped.
Also, I should add that French Fries aren’t really French. They originated in Belgium. Historians claim potatoes were being fried in the late-1600s there, in a sliced-up kind of way.
During WWI, American soldiers stationed in Belgium were first introduced to these potatoes. Since the official language of the Belgian army was French, soldiers nicknamed the delicious fried potatoes “French fries.” The name stuck, but we are really eating Belgium fries. And certainly not those Freedom Fries.
Thank goodness for our food. No matter where it comes from. It is something many of us take for granted. But so many people in the world go without having enough. And that is a sad truth.
We cannot live without it. I wish everyone would have enough. In all the places.
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“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
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“One billion people in the world are chronically hungry. One billion people are overweight.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters
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