FOOD HISTORY

History of aquaculture

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It was first practiced in China thousands of years ago. It is credited to early Chinese society that flourished well before 1000 BC. That country still has the most extensive aquaculture in the world.

Yu the Great, founder and first emperor of the Xia Dynasty in 2070 BC wrote about laws that regulated the periods during which fish spawn could be harvested.

Fan Lin in 475 BC wrote a record describing aquaculture and it benefits in Chinese and by that time it is likely that aquaculture had already become well established.

He describe how to spawn fish including how to select ripe brooders.

It was reported that Japanese began farming oyster intertidally about 3000 years ago. In the Indo-Pacific region laws were passed almost 3500 years ago to protect the fish-farmers from thieves.

Egyptians also appeared to have developed aquaculture system between 2357 and 1786 BC.

In the United States, fish were farmed during the nineteenth century, but aquaculture did not became an important commercial activity until the 1960s and 1970s.

American government documents from Congress during the 1850s reported the recent progresses in fish culture practices to trout in artificial ponds.

It was not until the late 1950s that large-scale commercial production of aquatic organisms as a food source began.

By 2004, almost 40 percent of all shrimp production in the world came from aquaculture, mainly in developing country.

History of aquaculture

Basmati rice

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Basmati meaning fragrant is India’s best quality rice, yielding long, thin, fluffy grains with a delicate aroma.

Rice originated in Southeast Asia and southern China, but it quickly spread throughout the world as invaders brought the precious grain with them.

Archeological and historical evidence indicate basmati rice to have evolved in northern India around 8000 years before the present time.

The origin of basmati has been traced back to the Kalar tract of Punjab, Pakistan, where it has been grown for centuries.

The history has also been documented in ancient texts such Atharva-Veda and passed through folklore. The other text mentions of basmati rice is in the epic Heer Ranjha, composed in 1766.

In 2000, the Indian government protest the issue of Rice Tech Inc patent at the World Trade Organization. Indian authorities challenged the US Patent Office’ 1997 RiceTec patent, fearing the impact of its specialty, climate–specific export.

In 2001 the Patent Office rejected the patent because the new variety was ‘substantially identical’ to the old one.

The most widely used rice variety – basmati 370 was selected from local collections and released for commercial cultivation in 1933 at the Rice Research Station Kalashah Kaku.

Basmati rice

The history of spray drying

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The history of spray drying is traceable to a United States patent issued in 1872. The patent no 125,406 entitled ‘Improvement in Drying and Concentrating Liquid Substances by Atomizing.’

Samuel Percy was first described the principle of spray drying and he is considered to be the inventor of spray drying technology.

It took nearly 50 years for the first commercially successful spray dryer design to be developed and operated on so-called heat sensitive products.

Since that time, the spray drying process has been developed for use in a wide range of industrial applications including the manufacture of powdered soaps and detergents, powdered milk, instant coffee, corn starch, fertilizer production, powdered polymer resins and the production of mineral ores and clays.

It has also been employed as a process technology to impart unique functional attributes into excipients such as lactose, mannitol and micro-crystalline.

The big step forward in spray drying technology was the invention of instantization by Peebles.

Further innovations were the development of membrane methods for concentrating and fractionating prior to spray drying and the introduction of three stage drying procedure.

The history of spray drying

History of Dutching Cocoa Processing

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Before 1800s, people enjoyed hot chocolate with pools of grease floating on top. At that time chocolate drinks had a gritty texture and a greasy appearance.

The cocoa butter or fat of the cacao beans, left on oily substance on the surface.

The along came the Dutch chemist, who figured out how to press out the cocoa butter from the coca beans. Coenraad van Houten had been experimenting in his factory to find a better way to make chocolate rather than boiling and skimming off the cocoa butter.

In 1828, Van Houten patented a press that removed two thirds of the cocoa butter form chocolate liquor , or paste ground of roasted beans. He used a technique of using a large hydraulic press to separate the coca butter from the chocolate liquor.

This new process recued the fat content of cacao to 27% from 50-55% and primed it to become ground into powder.

He eventually treated that the acid taste of the cocoa nibs could be neutralized by adding an alkali –carbonate of potash – prior to the roasting process. No only did the bitter taste disappear, but the powder became more miscible.

This type of cocoa called: Dutch processed cocoa powder. This make chocolate darker and milder.

Due to this, chocolate drinks become a lot smoother and easier to digest.

This processing of chocolate became known as “Dutching.”
History of Dutching Cocoa Processing

History of blackcurrant

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Botanical name for blackcurrant is Ribes nigrum. The blackcurrants are natives of Sweden and northern parts of Russia, as well as the northern counties of England.

Ancient herbalists’ belief that blackcurrants benefit human health. Normally herbalists interested in their medicinal qualities originally harvested blackcurrants from the wild.

The use of blackcurrants fruit as a herbal medicine emerged in the Middle Ages. In the 16th century, European herbalists started to recommend Ribes berries or their syrup for the treatment of several illnesses, including bladder stones and liver disorders, cough and lung ailments.

In England blackcurrants were once called ‘squinancy berries’ because they were used to treat quinsy.

These small berries don’t appear to have been cultivated until around 1500. During 1700s , blackcurrants were domesticated in eastern Europe and sold to farmer’s markets in Russia.

During the Second World War blackcurrant cultivation was encouraged by British government due to in part the fruit’s suitability to the UK weather and the berries’ high content of vitamin C.

Nowadays blackcurrants are the leaders Ribes crop worldwide and are still mainly processed rather than used fresh, due to their strong flavor.

History of blackcurrant

Modern history of papaya

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Papaya most probably originated along the Caribbean coast of Central America. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it quickly became favored by Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

The species was probably widely cultivated by Indians in Mexico and Central America, prior to 1492.

The fruit was first described by the Spaniard Oviedo in 1526. Papayas are consumed year-round in the tropics and subtropics. The numerous seeds, when dried, remain viable for several years, and this facilitated their movement from Caribbean region to Malacca and to India in the 1600s.

Papaya was grown in Uganda in 1874. When Europeans first saw papaya, they called the fruit ‘tree melon’ because of the similarity of the flavors of papaya and melon.

Papayas were brought to United States in the twentieth century and have been cultivated in Hawaii.

The fruit is widely renowned for its medicinal purposes. The hundreds of little black seeds found inside the fruit are used in the treatment of parasites and tapeworms.

In England the name papaya commonly named pawpaw, but in United States it is apt to be confused with pawpaw as applied to the Asimina tribola, a very different fruit.

The name papaya derived from Indian word papayana, which means ‘hammering’, probably referring to the quality of some papaya components to tenderize meat.

Modern history of papaya

Vitamin E discovery

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Vitamin E was discovered by Dr Herbert Evans and Katherine Bishop of Berkeley University in California after appearance of an unrecognized substance necessary for reproduction in female rats. It was published in a paper that appear in 1922 in Science.

Evans and Bishop were feeding rats a semi-purified diet when they noticed that the female rats were unable to produce offspring because the pups died in the womb.

They then fed the female rats lettuce and wheat germ, and observed that healthy offspring were produced.

Vitamin E was isolated as α-tocopherol. The name tocopherol is derived from the Greek tokos meaning childbirth or offspring, the Greek pherein meaning to bring forth and ol to designated an alcohol.

The compound with vitamin E activity was first purified from wheat germ oil in 1936 and given the name α tocopherol.

However Agnes Fay Morgan and her colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley are credited with the 1937 discovery of vitamin E’s special role in the body.

In 1940s, a team of Canadian physicians discovered that vitamin E could protect from coronary heart disease.

Research in 2001, discovered that vitamin E from food and supplements may help slow mental decline and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In one study, those with the highest intake of vitamin E had nearly a 40 percent reduction in the rate of mental decline.

Vitamin E discovery

History of potato chips

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Potato chips have a United states origin dating back to 1853 in a hotel kitchen at Saratoga Springs, New York.

One of the guest of Moon Lake Lodge, suggested slicing the potatoes thin.

The Indian cook named George Crum sharpened his knife razor sharp and sliced the potatoes as thin as pasteboard and fried them.

Crum eventually opened his own restaurant, featuring chips.

The first commercial production got underway in 1895. William Tappenden of Cleveland, Ohio, made chips for his restaurant and neighboring stores.

He converted a barn at the rear of his house into one of the first potato chip manufacturing plant. The invention of mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s paved the way for potato chips to soar from a small specialty item to top selling snack.

American style potato chips began to be manufactured in Great Britain in the 1920s. To avoid confusion with ‘chip potatoes’, British manufacturers called their product ‘potato crisps’ or simply ‘crisps.’

History of potato chips

History of date palms (Phoenix dactylifera L.)

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The earliest records of date palms cultivation date from about 7000 BC in Mesopotamia, but it is generally believed that date culture began thousands of years earlier.

Egyptian scribes drew a single feathery palm leaf to stand for ‘month’ and ‘year’ was signified by a symbol picturing a crown of palm leaves. Since the beginning of Egypt’s history, dates have been a regular source of food.

It is in Arab culture that the date palm achieves its greatest esteem.

It is believed that date palm trees were introduced to India after the victory over India by Alexander the Great around 327 BC.

The date palm was carried to China from Iran about 1,700 years ago. Date palms were widespread in North Africa, the Near and Middle East, and a few locations in southern Europe by the Europeans first arrived in the New World.

Date palms were first introduced to Andalusia by the Arabs during the 7th and 8th centuries and later spread throughout the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa by the Bedouin tribes of the Arab countries.

The earliest record of date palm in the New World is from 1513 in eastern Cuba, and the tree apparently grew form seeds the Spanish had brought.

The first date palms is what would eventually became the United States appear to have grown from seed planted at Spanish missions of the Franciscan and Jesuit orders in California and Arizona.

History of date palms (Phoenix dactylifera L.)

Ancient history of egg

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By definition the poultry egg is a shelled reproduction structure of a bird containing the ovum and all of the nutritive and protective materials surrounding it.

The egg was part of the early Phoenician diet as well as later Egyptian and Roman food culture.

The ancient Egyptians during first millennium BC incubated poultry eggs by placing them in dung heaps, where the heat would remain constant whatever the outside temperature, a method recorded by the Roman writer Pliny.

The invention of the incubator is attributed to the Romans, who hatched out eggs in quantity in chambers kept warn by hot vapor.

The classic cake offered as a sacrifice by the Romans, the libum, called for one egg to a pound of flour. In the Roman period pastrycooks made much use of eggs for desserts as well as cakes.

In 25 BC Apicius Roman chef invented baked custard: milk, honey and eggs beaten and cooked in an earthware.

In Phoenicia, one of the world earliest civilizations, the religious belief about creation was that all things came from the heavens in the form of an egg.

In 1883, Hearson invented a device which made possible to regulate the temperature in water jacket surrounding a container for the eggs.

Ancient history of egg

History of French fries

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Today potato is the world’s fourth largest crop, after corn, wheat and rice. About 10 million tons of frozen fries are consumed in the world each year.

The origin of French fries is nineteenth century Belgium, where patates frites were served on the street in paper cones.

In the 1840s pomme fries first appeared in Paris. They immediately popular and were sold on the streets of Paris by pushcart vendors.

The evolution of the fry certainly began much earlier as Spanish conquistadors returned from the New World with potato, which had been harvested for millennia in the regions around Peru.

Thomas Jefferson, ambassador to France, served French fries in Monticello in the early 1800s, but it was not until the early twentieth century, when American soldiers back from serving in Europe in World War I demanded them, that the fried potato became popular in the United States.

The name was shortened to French fries and was further reduced to fries in the late 1960s.

The advent for the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, particularly on the West Coast, began a new chapter in the life of the French fries.

Drive-inns and drive-thrus relied on the French fry as the sidecar to the burger.

The industrial production of French fries started in the USA after World War II. The invention of the industrial process of French fries production is generally attributed to Jack Simplot of the J.R Simplot Company in Idaho.

History of French fries

Ancient Egypt storage of grain

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Storage is the intermediate stage between cereal production and processing and its distribution and consumption.

By ancient Egypt times grain storage and progress from the simple family store to large state-run systems.

The dry climate of Egypt would have indeed allowed farmers to bulk process their harvest communally to the clean grain stage prior storage.

Even without the sophisticated equipment that is available today, grain storage proved remarkably non-problematical in ancient Egypt, although infestation was always a potential problem.

Some of these have been excavated: they were made of dried clay bricks or baked bricks and had domed roofs.

It was the system that was almost certainly used by Joseph, he gathered in the grain of the seven good years before the seven famine years and thus with careful rationing, prevented starvation.

At that time the system was highly organized, hierarchal system of grain storage, which for the most part was successful in feeding population, even during the lean years.

Grain was stored at national, regional, local and household levels.

The state would have to collect and manage surpluses and meet local as well as central needs in case of any difficulty.

Archeological evidence indicates that large storage facilities were attached to temples and palaces.
Ancient Egypt storage of grain

History of Apiculture

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Modern apiculture in based on the ancient Greek techniques of creating a so-called bee space.

Beekeeping or apiculture goes back to ancient civilizations as sugar was scarce in those days, the people used honey instead. This is one of the first activities of man to produce honey.

Evidence for the bee honey on the Nile River survives from Thebes 1380-1130 BC. It is reported that the Egyptians kept hives of bees on their boats in the Nile and that as different flowering plants bloomed along the river banks the Egyptians moved their boats to them.

Egypt’s fascinating with bee from the earliest of epoch is reinforced by the fact that King Menes, founder of the first Egyptian Dynasty was bestowed with office of ‘Beekeeper’; a title ascribed to all subsequent Pharaohs, and the King’s administration has a special position created called the ‘Sealer of the Honey’.

The practice continued through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods and beyond.

In Mesopotamia, beekeeping has become a practice by the 8th BC. During the Achaemenian Empire (559-330 BC), apiculture for honey production, instead of sugar, was already a common practice among the Persians.

Swammerdam (1637-1680)and Ferchault de Reaumur (1683-1757), were among the first to use the microscope and dissection to understand the internal biology of the honey bee.

Reaumur was among the first to construct a glass walled observation hive to better observe activities within the hive. In the United States, a beehive based on this ancient principle was developed by Lorenza Lorraine Langstroth in 1851.

History of Apiculture

History of food menu

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Physical menu and food list are some of the most important in-house marketing and sales tool. The menu is the production plan governing almost every phase of the establishment and becomes the backbone of a food service or hospitality operation.

The first coffee houses and restaurants did not use written menu.

Eventually, some restaurants in Paris began the custom of writing a list of foods in a small board. The waiter hung this from his belt to refresh his memory.

The first restaurant in France where customers could choose from a selection of items presented on a menu was opened in 1765 by A. Boulanger. He placed a sign scripted in Latin over his establishment.

The word ‘menu’ comes from the French and means ‘a detail list.’ The term is derived from the Latin word ‘minutus’, meaning ‘diminished; from which the word ‘minute’ come.

It became definitive when Antoine Beauvilliers opened La Grande Taverne de Londres in 1804, since it also brought a la carte menu to the table and waiters to serve the individual wishes of the customer.

History of food menu

History of Gooseberry

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Gooseberries has been used for centuries as food and medicine. Red currants were also known as ‘red gooseberries’, and the English name was ‘beyond the sea gooseberries.’

Some people say that the origin of the name gooseberry stems from the fact that it is often served with goose.

Another belief is that got to its name from the Dutch ‘kruisbes,’ meaning ‘crossberry.’

The earliest notice of it appears to be in the Commentaries of Matthiolus, who states that it is a wild fruit which may be used medicinally.

Among British authors, it is first mentioned by Turner in 1573, and afterwards by Parkinson and Gerard; the last noticing it not only for its medicinal properties but for its use in cookery.

Parkinson in 1640, mentions eight varieties, but the varieties increased so rapidly in the next hundred years, that miller in 1731 said that it was needless to undertake to enumerate them.

Gooseberries were cultivated in home gardens in the Low Countries of Europe from the beginning of the sixteenth century. In England, the gooseberry was first cultivated at the time of the reformation.

History of Gooseberry

Brief history of food regulation

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From the beginning of civilization, people have been concerned about food quality and safety. Food regulations have tended to focus on addressing concerns related to food safety fraud, misleading claims and adulterations.

As cities such as Rome increased in size and armies traveled to distant lands, food became very important to the Roman Empire; so much so that Roman civil law included provision to protect the populace against adulterated foods.

It is the most systematic ancient treatment of food law which had a particularly strong emphasis on weights and measures.

Theophrastus (372-287 BC) in his ten volume treatise Enquiry Into Plants, reported on the use of food adulterants for economic reasons.

Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) Natural History provides evidence of widespread adulteration such as bread with chalk, pepper with juniper berries, and even adulteration with cattle fodder.

Pliny also described how unscrupulous Roman merchants adulterated foods such as olive oil, cereal grains, herbs, species and wine.

While Galen and Pythagoras recommended pure and simple food not far removed from its natural state.

From at least 1200 in Europe guilds sought to regulate food in the interests of consumers and honest traders, and doubtless at times in ways that protected monopolies for guild members at least in some cities.

The English passed their first food law, the Assize of Bread, around 1266 to prevent the adulteration of bread with cheaper, inferior ingredients.

After the eighteenth century food adulterations became dangerous to human health. After World War II, activity in international standardization stared to grow intensely. This phenomenon, connected to the new concept of food trade, was also stimulate and supported in the framework of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

In United States in 1906 Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drugs Act the first national laws designed to protect consumers against food borne illness.

The United States Public Health Service first proposed basic food safety practices in 1934. An Ordinance Regulating Food and Drink Establishments was mimeographed in December 1935 with updates in 1938, 1940, and 1943.

Brief history of food regulation

History of fructose

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Fructose was first extracted from sugar cane more than a century ago, and it’s found in varying amounts in such fruits, as apples, grapes oranges, honey, cane sugar and berries.

The sweetness of cane sugar approximates that of wild honey. Honey is mentioned in very ancient documents. It was antiquity’s only form of sugar. Oriental peoples as w ell as early Teutonic tribesmen found honey indispensable to their way of living as both a nutrient and an appetizer, as the writings of Plutarch and Aristotle attest.

It wasn’t until 1744 that a German chemist found that the sugar isolated from sugar beets was identical to the sugar from sugar cane.

During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, chemists isolated and characterized sucrose, glucose, fructose, starch, cellulose, gum arabic, and many other carbohydrate.

The name derived from the observation by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Jacques Thenard in 1810-1811 that the formula of all of the members of these class of organic compounds could be reduced to the generic formula Cn(H2O)n.

In the 1970s, the food processing industry made a discovery: high fructose corn syrup could save them lot do money.

The first hydrolysis plant was built in America in 1967, the Clinton Corn Processing Co., producing syrups of 42% fructose practically as sweet as sucrose.
History of fructose

History of marshmallow

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The historic roots of marshmallows are literally the roots of a plant: the marsh mallow, Althaea officinalis.

Marshmallow were originally medicine, despite their modern reputation as the fluffiest of foods and the emptiest of calories.

Botanical name, Althaea is derived from the Greek, althe which means ‘to cure’. The use of marshmallow originated in traditional Greek medicine and later spread to Arabian and Indian Ayurvedic medicine.

It was ancient Egyptians who are the first documented consumers of marshmallow. 4000 years ago, the Egyptian enjoyed a treat made from the mallow plant which oddly enough grew in the marshes of Egypt.

Egyptians would mix together the mucilaginous sap from the root of the marsh mallow with sweeteners, probably honey; the resulting confection was deemed worthy of pharaohs and even the gods themselves.

It was used in Persian to reduce inflammation in teething babies, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne (A.D 800-814) insisted that it be planted throughout his kingdom.

The word mallow can refer to any a variety of plants of the genus Malva. Mallow comes from Old English mealwe, possibly influenced in its development by Old French malve. Both English and Old French words ultimately descend from Latin malva, mallow.

By 1917, cookbook were calling for marshmallows as essential ingredients.

In the early 1920s, Red Seal Marshmallow was advertised to manufacture as a product that ‘improves ice cream, ices and sherbet and gives added smoothness’.

In 1955 marshmallow manufacturers made a great leap forward in efficiency and economy when Alex Doumakes patented a method for extruding the marshmallow foam through a tube into a long rope and the n cutting it into uniform pieces.

Soon commercially made marshmallows were popping up for home use in everything from salads to gelatin desserts and of course ice creams.

History of marshmallow

History of leavening agent

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The very first breads were unleavened. They were more like flat tortillas made by moistening and baking ground nuts, cereal, grains or seeds.

The Egyptians were probably the first to leaven bread, As early as 2300 BC, they used breadmash, which contained wild yeast from the air, to lengthen dougns.

The immigrants from Europe, had all brought their national recipes for bread and pastry making to America, using brewer’s yeast or a sour dough process of one kind or another.

Until the late 1700s, naturally occurring airborne yeast was still the leavening agent of choice.

In 1868, the production of bread was advanced by the use of compressed yeast as a leavening agent, a product developed by Charles Fleischman. Earlier bakeries had produced their own leavening agents with uneven result.

The first popular chemical leavening agent was pearl ash, a crude from of potassium carbonate, and alkali.

Carbonates of soda were obtained from ashes of sea plants, as well as from plants and was originally referred to as potashes.

The potash was used in baking as a leavening agent until 1830s. Later, a more favored baking soda (sodium carbonate) soon arrived on the scene.

Baking ammonia appeared on the market at this point and it was used by home bakers as well as in commercial bakeries.

Sodium acid pyrophosphate was the next leavening acid introduced to the United States in 1911.

History of leavening agent

History of food fortification in North America

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Fortification of food with micronutrients has a long history in improving the diet of populations. The food fortification of foods began in the early 1900s as a result of the discovery of the vitamin deficiency diseases pellagra, scurvy, rickets, goiter and beriberi.

In the United States, as in most parts of the world, fortification of food was initiated as a systematic approach to correct identified nutrient deficiencies in the population.

Table salt and milk were the first foods fortified. In 1924 iodine was first added to salt in a voluntary basis in a attempt to address the prevalent health problem of goiter in the United States. It is the first US food fortification program.

Canada has a distinguished history of effectively using food fortification to combat nutritional deficiencies and to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply.

For example the mandatory fortification of fluid milk with vitamin D or the iodization of salt which have virtually eliminated childhood rickets and goiter respectively.

Prior to 1936 only milk and salt were approved for fortification.

Mandatory requirements for flour fortification became effective in 1943 after the US government published its first Recommend Dietary Allowances. These requirements were the outcome of a National Nutritional Conference for Defense convened by President Roosevelt in 1941, to explore why so many military recruits were in poor health.

In January 1998, the United States introduced mandatory folic acid fortification of flour as well as a number of other grain based foods including cornmeal, rice, pasta and breakfast cereal.

History of food fortification in North America

History of crème caramel

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Crème caramel is a custard dessert made with whipped cream eggs and topped with caramel. It is French origin known as ‘cream turned upside down’.

The dessert is known across Europe and the world by different names.

The ancient Romans understood the binding capacity of eggs; they were the first known to cook them with milk and honey into various custard-like dishes.

When the Arabs brought cane sugar to southern Italy, France and Spain, they also brought their love of dessert custard.

Their cooks were skilled in using sugar to create pastries, nougats, syrups, and custards.

In the medieval Arabs world, Spain cooks discovered how to make a delicate and subtly sweet custard by blending eggs, cream and sugar and baking it in an earthware dish.

Moorish cooks also lined the baking dish with a thin covering of caramelized sugar.

It is known as flan in Spain and Mexico and as cream caramella in Italy. Flan and crème caramel, both a mixture of sugar, flavorings and a milk product, differ in that flan is Spanish in origin and is made with sweetened condensed milk while crème caramel is French in origin and is made with whole milk or cream.

History of crème caramel

History of tomato soup in America

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Tomato soup is quintessential American comfort food, usually eaten with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Although tomatoes apparently were introduced into Florida in the 1600s, they made minimal impression on the dietary habits of Americans until two centuries later. The first tomato soup recipes were simply tomatoes added to basic vegetable soups.

By 1840s tomatoes were an important part of most cookery books, Modern Cookery, written by the British cookbook author Eliza Acton for publication in the United States, in 1845 contained several tomato recipes.

Between 1832 when N. M. K. Lee’s first tomato soup recipe was published and in 1841, when Lettice Bryan’s version published the multitude of other vegetable were left out and the purely tomato soup know today emerge. Lettice Bryan’s Kentucky Housewife feature more than twenty tomato recipes, including some for baked, broiled, stewed, fried and pickled tomatoes.

Andrew Smith in his The Tomato in America stated that tomatoes were used in soup at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century in colonial America.

In 1897, John T Dorrance created a process of condensing soup which involved removing half of the water from the soup to create a thicker consistency.

The first production in 1898 means reducing volume to make it lighter and more transportable, cheaper to can and yet convenient to cook was a new development of a specifically commercial commodity food.

History of tomato soup in America

Discovery of Acesulfame potassium

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Acesulfame potassium entered the food world in 1967. Karl Clauss and H. Jensen of Hoechst AG in Frankfurt, Germany, reacted 2-butene and fluorosulfonyl isocyanate in 1967 to produce a new compound with a novel ring system.

Clauss accidently spilled some on his finger, which he then licked as he reached for a piece of paper.

The substance was found to have a sweet taste. The generic name initially chosen, acetosulfam, was change to acesulfame potassium salt.

Approved for use in the United States in 1988, acesulfame potassium is marketed under the brand name Sunette. The brand name Sweet One when sold as a table top sweetener. Later approved for use in beverages in 1998.

It was approved for use in Europe in 1983 and used in more than 3000 products in the world. Approval for use in confections was granted by FDA in 1993.

Discovery of Acesulfame potassium

History of cinnamon

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Cinnamon is one of the oldest spices known. It was used in ancient Egypt not only as a beverage flavoring and medicinal herb but also as embalming agent.

Cinnamon has probably been known in the Mediterranean since the second millennium BC.

Herodotus describes is as being used in mummification and Ezekiel mentions it as one the commodities handled by the Tyrian trading network.

It was written that Nero, Emperor of Rome burned a years’ supply of cinnamon at a ceremony for the death of his wife.

In the early times, nomad tribes in Arabia were frequent traders in the markets along the Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf and on the coats of India. When they traded with merchants in India they were introduced to cinnamon.

The Indians have always used cinnamon lavishly, but the Greeks and Romans did not really introduce it into their cooking until the final period of the Roman Empire, around the third and fourth centuries.

During the late Middle Ages, cinnamon became one of the frost commodities traded regularly between Europe and the Near East.

The demand for cinnamon was enough to launch a number of explorers’ enterprises, especially exploration by the Dutch and Portuguese.

Cinnamon was one of the spices sought on European 15th and 16th century voyages.

During Dutch settlement in Ceylon, cinnamon made by them a lucrative article of trade and one which they strive by every means wholly to monopolize, this tree was not made by them an object of cultivation in Ceylon until 1766.

The Dutch controlled of cinnamon and their monopoly subsequently passed to Britain in 1796.

In 1771, the French introduce cinnamon to the Seychelles, and form 19th century cinnamon was more widely cultivated.
History of cinnamon

Early history of papaya

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Papaya belong to the Caricaceae, a small family of only four genera and 27 to 30 species. Linnaeus gave the papaya the Latin name of ‘Carica papaya’ in 1753. The Mexican Indians named the papaya ambapaya.

The papaya most probably originated along the Caribbean coast of Central America. The species was probably widely cultivated by Indians in Mexico and Central America prior to 1492.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it quickly became favored by Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

The Spanish brought the plant from tropical America to the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands and South east Asia in the 16th century.

Papayas are consumed year round in the tropics and subtropics, The numerous seeds, when dried, remain viable for several years and this facilitated their movement from the Caribbean region to Malacca and to India.

The fruit was first describe by the Spaniard Oviedo in 1526. Papaya was quickly disseminated to tropical and some subtropical areas of the world by Spanish and Portuguese sailors.

In twentieth century, papayas were brought to the United States and have been cultivated in Hawaii, the major US producer since the 1920s.

Early history of papaya