50 Food History Facts That Are Equal Parts Disgusting And Impossible To Stop Reading

Gooey butter cake, a St. Louis staple, was invented in the 1930s when a baker put too much butter in a coffee cake by mistake and served it anyway. Sometimes getting the recipe wrong is the whole point.

America's first chocolate cake was called Mahogany Cake, dating back to the 1800s. It was frosted with ermine frosting, a whipped buttercream that was the standard American icing before cream cheese frosting took over. A founding father of dessert, largely forgotten.

It was vinegar-soaked cauliflower and red peppers suspended in lime jello. Someone invented this, someone approved it, someone photographed it for a national ad campaign, and apparently some people actually made it.

Chocolate chip cookies were invented by accident in 1930 when Ruth Wakefield added chocolate chunks to her cookie dough, expecting them to melt into the batter. They didn't. She sold the recipe to Nestlé, who put it on the back of every chocolate chip bag, ensuring she'd never get credit again.

Both come from the Latin recipere, and for most of history people said "receipt" when they meant what we now call a recipe. The meanings drifted apart somewhere along the way and now one is for cooking and one is for returns.

In the 1970s, Vogue published a diet that consisted entirely of eggs, white wine, steak, and black coffee for three days straight. Lose 5 pounds, gain a drinking problem.

On the Lewis and Clark Expedition, men would sometimes eat up to 9 pounds of meat in a single day. Clark recorded needing four deer or one entire buffalo to feed the group for 24 hours. They also packed 93 pounds of dried soup, just in case the buffalo situation didn't work out.

Medieval English chicken pies had the chicken's feet sticking out of the sides of the crust, serving as both a label and a handle. The crust was called a "coffyn." Customers grabbed their lunch by the claws. A very efficient, if unsettling, design.

Since the 1850s, rhubarb growers have been forcing stalks to grow faster by keeping them in complete darkness, starving them of light until the plant feeds on itself. The process works so well you can apparently hear the rhubarb growing. The catch is that harvesting has to be done by candlelight, because turning on the lights would ruin the whole operation. Some growers still do it this way today.

Before Chicken McNuggets, McDonald's tested Onion Nuggets in the late 1970s, battered, fried chunks of onion sold in nugget form. They didn't make it nationwide, and the world went a different direction. Probably for the best.