PowerPoint Show by Andrew

It’s common knowledge that the hamburger was named after the city of Hamburg, Germany. The word hamburger was actually coined by restaurant owners in New York, in order to lure in recent German immigrants looking for a taste of home. 

HAMBURGER

There’s no debate that it began in Belgium. Belgian cuisine was assimilated into that of neighboring France, and soon enough “french fried potatoes” became popular in the U.S., first appearing in English in 1856. The U.S. is one of the only countries that calls them French fries; they’re chips in England, frites in France, and patatas fritas in Spain.

FRENCH FRIES

The word pizza has the same origins as the word pita; they both date back to the Greek word pitta, meaning “solid,” and the later Latin verb pìnsere, meaning “to press.” When you look at the way that dough is pressed down and flattened, it makes a lot of sense. 

PIZZA

The word “bacon” actually has a fairly lengthy back story, but the word itself has the same Old French origin as the word “back,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Back bacon is commonly found in England and is comprised of the loin with a small amount of belly attached.

BACON

Pasta is obviously an Italian word, and its origins date back to the ancient Greeks, who used the word pastos to refer to anything salted. The word morphed into pasta and came to mean barley porridge, and then the Romans took the word and used it to refer to any type of dough. The noodles that we refer to as pasta today didn’t make their way to Italy until the Arabs introduced it to Sicily in the ninth century. 

PASTA

The earliest form of cheesemaking dates back more than 5,000 years, but the earliest known word for cheese is the Latin caseus. As the years went on and the Romans began to make hard cheese (as opposed to soft, fresh cheese), they added a second word to describe it, formatus, meaning “formed.” Hence the Italian word for cheese, formaggio. 

CHEESE

Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods known to man, and the word bread itself is an Old English word. It dates back to the earliest Germanic languages, with a root that originally meant either brew (as in letting the dough ferment like beer before baking), or break (as in broken pieces of bread). 

BREAD

John Montagu, the fourth  Earl of Sandwich, is largely credited with being this food’s namesake. While this type of food was originally just called “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese,” the Earl’s friends took a shine to his regular requests for one in order to play cards one-handed, and began to ask the butler for “the same as Sandwich!” And a legend was born. 

SANDWICH

By the late 1600s, bagels were one of the most popular foods in the Polish city of Krakow, where they were first invented. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, the spelling at the time was bajgiel, from the Yiddish beygl, from the Middle High German böugel, from the Old High German bouc, which meant, not surprisingly, “ring.”

BAGELS

The earliest word for butter was the Greek bouturon, meaning “cow cheese.” From there the Romans picked it up and started calling it butyrum, and it’s not too difficult to see how that word became butter. 

BUTTER

From the French for "twice cooked," biscuits in their original meaning referred to flat, thin cookies or crackers. British cooks used this baking method to keep their cookies, or sea biscuits, crisp while on a long voyages.

BISCUIT

The first official documentation of this sweet treat dates back to an 1892. Ithaca Daily Journal advertisement for a pharmacy's new ice cream specialty known as the Cherry Sunday. Legend has it, the pharmacist topped a scoop of vanilla ice cream with cherry syrup and a candied cherry to please a reverend who stopped in for his weekly post-church treat, hence, Sunday! The spelling was changed so as not to offend church going people.

SUNDAE