Stuff You Should Know - The Origins of Breakfast Foods

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Who doesn't love breakfast? But do you know where most of the typical breakfast foods come from? Well listen in to find out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, before we get going today, we wanted to acknowledge ourselves and you, right? That's right. Dude, dude, look, Chuck, what episode is this? This is episode number 1,500. Isn't that nuts? It's nuts.

Up to this moment, I've just been thinking of episode 1500, but when you say it like that, it just seems like a mind-boggling number. It is mind-boggling and many thanks for an order. First of all, to Jill Hurley, our Minister of Stats for pointing this out because we would have never known, right? Yeah, definitely. We got to thank Jerry, of course, and also Dave, Max, Matt, Noel, all the producers who've helped us along the way, right?

Yeah. And of course, Ed and Livia and Dave Bruse are intrepid writers. Is that the right word? They're intrepid, for sure. They have no trepidation. That's right. And we're acknowledging the stuff you should know Army as well and all the listeners because there's no way we would have gotten to episode 1500, let alone 500, had no one ever listened

to begin with. And we're super lucky to have this job that we continue to be able to do, you know? Yeah. And of course, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere without you guys listening out there. And then, of course, Chuck, last but not least, we got to thank our families, like Yumi and Emily, Momo, Ruby, the whole gang. Yeah. Of course, everyone provides us a lot of support and it's just pretty amazing.

The number 1500 is a weird number to look at and we're not going anywhere anytime soon, so don't think this is a sign-off, but we just wanted to acknowledge it and say big thanks to everybody. Yeah. Thanks, everybody, and we'll just stop now and start the episode. How about that? That sounds great. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast, or should I say, Pancast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. It's just the two of us, but I'm excited about this one enough that I've basically birthed a Jerry. Oh, I'm not even sure what that means. Just don't think about it too much. Okay.

Yeah, we're talking about breakfast, and I mean, I could name about, I feel like about a third of the websites on the internet for this, because if you want to learn about breakfast, there are a lot of websites that want to teach you about it. It's tailor-made for the internet. You know, there's nostalgia, there's tastiness, there's history. It's got everything. It does. But how stuff works, our old colleagues, of course, were involved in Smithsonian Mag,

in the kitchen project, and the breakfast shop in Chicago Waffles. Great website, by the way. The daily meal, there were a bunch of websites where we curated this wonderful, and this is just probably a part one, like there are so many breakfast items with rich histories that we're not going over today, so I feel like we could do another one of these later. Have we ever done one on breakfast cereals specifically, because that seems like something we could spend an hour saying, like, oh, you remember, do you remember Frank and Barry? We haven't, but we should, yes, let's just add that to the list.

That sounds fun. So yeah, we're just going to do kind of a, just a select few today, maybe some that you're not going to be very surprised at, and as a matter of fact, I'll be surprised if anybody surprised at any of these selections, but they're still good nonetheless, but before we get to that, we should probably talk about where the idea of breakfast comes from, because it's just such an integral part, or it once was such an integral part of people's lives, that you just kind of took it for granted, right? Yeah, and it's really interesting, the House of Works article points out that, like, what

we consider breakfast foods, like, there's so many different things that go into what made that happen, and none of them are the same, like, sometimes it's religion, sometimes it's technology, sometimes it's just what was available, sometimes it's cultural, like, regional norms, immigration plays a part. It's just super interesting, I think, but breakfast as a whole is, you know, it's something that people have always eaten. That first meal of the day, depending on where we are in the world and where we are in history, the importance of breakfast is a little bit different.

It's like, it's not quite the same thing as it was, you know, hundreds or thousands of years ago, though. No, not at all, and you can make a really strong case that, at least in the States, it's not what it was 30 or 40 years ago, you know? Yeah, good point. But the idea of breakfast, if you hadn't figured it out by now at this point in your life, it's break and fast, like, you're breaking your fast, put together, and I always thought it just had to do with, you know, you woke up, you hadn't eaten since the day before.

It makes sense. You've been fasting, whether you wanted to or not, because you can't really eat while you sleep. I've tried, and so you're breaking that fast, but apparently, it's much more religious than that, because people used to fast until church, when they would get the Eucharist or the communion wafer, and after that, they could, you know, go whole hog on some meals, and that was their breakfast, but it would come later in the morning, if not in the afternoon. Yeah, and I think, as far as seeing that word written down, they trace it to 15th century,

and that's in the English language, but the same word apparently can mean different things or used to mean different things in different countries, anything from a sort of a smallish lunch, if you're in France, to a lighter supper in Italian, and they, you know, like I said, depending on where you were and when you were, there would be different, and we'll see as we go on, you would eat like things that you would consider really weird now, like unless you're going to a Sunday brunch or a Saturday brunch and having like a Bloody Mary or something, the idea of drinking for breakfast alcohol seems really weird, but that used to happen.

They used to drink, you know, hard ciders and sort of low ABV beers all the way up until like the mid 19th century. I saw it can be anywhere between the 17th and the 19th century, but that, yes, but that went on for millennia. That's just what people did at breakfast. I love that. They drank booze every day. I think kids did as well, if I'm not mistaken, I saw somewhere, but then in addition to like

drinking booze, there would also be stuff that you'd be like fish for breakfast, soup for breakfast, and it seems odd to those of us in the West who are, you know, accustomed to that specific Western kind of breakfast, but that's still the case in some places today, especially Asia, like in Japan, they eat like fish and soup and ramen and stuff like that for breakfast. Like their breakfast looks just like their lunch or their dinner. Oh, really? Yeah.

So the idea of breakfast, as we understand, it isn't like global by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah. So we're taking this from sort of a North American Eurocentric point of view. Yeah. Let's title this like how the Western breakfast evolved, you know? Maybe I will. Okay.

I dare you, Chuck. Game on. So this is a little bit of a rehash, but I just noticed we're saying breakfast words all over the place, like hash. Yeah. See, that's one we could put on the next one. Corned beef hash? Just breakfast hash.

We're not going to cover omelets. We're not going to cover muffins. Okay. Like I think there's a whole part two in the making. Okay. I love it. So bacon and eggs, it seems like eggs have been eaten sort of since time in memoriam for breakfast.

I didn't see anywhere exactly why. My hunch is that you get that egg out of the chicken in the morning. Sure. And maybe it just goes right onto the plate. You pick it up by its neck and shake it until the egg falls out. I think they like eggs in the morning, right? I don't know. I don't remember.

I'm doubting myself because I'm kind of going off the dome here. I don't remember if there's like a specific time or not, but maybe if they laid it overnight or something like that, when you got up in the morning, there was an egg. Who knows? Oh, that's true. That makes good sense. Yeah. But the whole bacon thing we talked about in our, if I do say so myself, our great, maybe

our greatest live episode of all time on Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and PR Mastermind, really good episode if you haven't listened to that one, but bacon and like a big, huge, hearty breakfast wasn't really the thing in America at the time. And this was in the like what, 1920s and 1930s? Yeah. And even before then, and from what I can tell, breakfast more resembled breakfast today. Like if you ate anything, it was really quick, convenient, you had to be out the door. And that was a big result of industrialization and urbanization, like you didn't go work

in the fields and then come in and have a big spread for breakfast a couple hours after you woke up and started working. Like you were away from your house and you had to be out of your house fairly quickly. So breakfast, I think, just kind of went the way of disco. Before disco. Right. But the Beechnut Packaging Company in the 1920s, they sold a lot of stuff, but one of the things they sold was bacon and bacon just wasn't something that was selling as much.

It wasn't sort of the staple item you would think of today. People certainly ate it, but it wasn't a breakfast item. So they got Bernays on board and they mounted a whole campaign, a big PR campaign to basically say, hey, it's first thing in the morning. You need to really just load up on tons of food and bacon should be a part of your stable diet and it goes great with eggs and they're correct. Yeah, they advertise that you lose energy overnight, so you need to fill up on a big breakfast.

And the idea of like breakfast being the most important meal of the day comes from that. Advertising. And we'll see that a lot of the breakfast as we recognize it came from advertising in a company who said, we got a bunch of stuff we want to dump, let's just completely change the way Americans live and think. Yeah. What's your deal with breakfast? Do you like breakfast?

I have changed my eating habits in the last few months and so I've started eating breakfast again, but there was a very long stretch where I didn't eat anything until 11 or noon. That's my deal usually. Yeah. And I'm not quite sure, I've been told like that's not good at all for your body. Not that like breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but just going hours when you're hungry and not giving your body food might not be the best thing for it. So I've started to kind of eat earlier and earlier.

And because that reminds me, I want to do one on, oh, what's the fasting trend called now these days? The intermittent fasting. Yeah. Intermittent fasting, which is all about not eating breakfast. Well we did a whole one on fasting and there's no way we didn't talk about intermittent fasting. Is there? I don't know.

It seems, I don't know. I think there's something there for a full one, but my deal with breakfast is I love breakfast. I just don't ever eat breakfast. Like breakfast is a sort of a treat meal and when I think of like a big breakfast, it's like an out to eat thing on vacation kind of thing. But I love everything about breakfast. Maybe my favorite meal as far as like a plate of hash browns and eggs and bacon and sausage and waffles and pancakes and muffins and bagels and all that delicious.

I love all of that stuff, but you can't eat like that. No, that's why it does seem to be a vacation thing, you know, and that's why they have breakfast buffets when you go on vacation for that very reason, you know. But we are about to talk about one of my favorite breakfast items, especially obviously when I go to New York City and I get my, I bring my extra large ziplocks and I come home with a dozen bagels from Essa Bagel, my favorite one. They're huge. There's no way you can eat a full one.

Oh yeah? Yeah. You split it in half and you eat like a half a bagel. I mean, they're like, they're enormous. That sounds like a wager to me. I mean, you could, but it's just, that's a lot of bread. You'd just be suffering toward the end. But a bagel, if you don't know, is a, they describe it as a kind of roll, but it's a

bakery item. It's yeast risen, it's dough that's shaped by hand and in the form of a ring. The very key part about being a real bagel is you boil it before you bake it and it's very chewy in the middle, but if you do it right, it's, you shouldn't even need to toast it. I do like mine toasted. So like the inside toastie, but very crispy and browned on the outside after you boil and bake it.

How do you eat your bagels? Well, I used to just eat butter before I knew anything about life, but now. That's still good though. That's still very good. It's like that kind of plain, simple taste can be really good. No, I like it. I like nothing but everything bagels. That's my, the only bagel for me, but now I do sour cream.

I prefer not whipped, I prefer just the regular sour cream, but I will have it whipped and then I really love the smoked salmon on top now. Yes. Okay. You finally got to the important part. And the everything bagel shake. I add that on top as well. Wow.

So let me ask you this. Do you over treat yourself and get a red onion, carve up a few like ultra thin slices and put some capers on top? I'm not into capers and onion. Oh, well, then definitely avoid that. But if you were into capers and onion, I would strongly recommend doing that. Yeah. I mean, that's a very classic bagel, I'd about say recipe, but what would you call that,

an assemblage? I think that's perfect for it. But then one last thing about that Chuck. So I'm glad you said smoked salmon because that's my preference too. And for a very long time, that's all I ate. And I wasn't aware that there was a difference between locks and smoked salmon until I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and locks out and ate it and I was like, what is wrong with this salmon?

And it turns out locks is different. Locks is entirely salt cured. So it's one of the saltiest things you'll ever eat in your life. Whereas smoked salmon is also salt cured, but they go lighter on the salt and it's heavier on the smoke flavor. It's way better in my opinion. Yeah. And the everything bagel is already pretty salty.

So that, yeah, that would be what Emily would call a salt lick. Right. And we don't even know actually where the word bagel came from. It's kind of a weird word if you think about it, but there's some pretty good contenders. Yiddish has one called bagen, which means to bend. Makes sense. The Germans are friends in Germany. They have a word for bracelet that sounds familiar, bracelet or ring, bugle.

Not bad. That's awfully close if you ask me. The one that I always thought it was because I learned it from Uncle John's bathroom reader is that it's an Austrian term for stirrup, bugle, because the stirrup is supposedly what the bagel was originally shaped after, at least according to Gordon Javna. I'm going to go with that one too. That one spoke to me. Yeah.

So that's where we're going to go with. That's the official SYSK choice for where the word bagel came from. That's right. And if you want to know where the printed word B-A-G-E-L came from first, they've tracked it down to the year 1610, very impressive in the community relations, I guess, handbook for Krakow, Poland, and this is pretty great. A bagel is on the list of official items that you can give a woman on the occasion of her son's circumcision.

Bam. I love that. So that's the first instance of bagel, you say, right, as we understand it, B-A-G-E-L? In print, yeah. So that's fine and good, like the people of Krakow had been eating bagels for centuries by the time we got on board. But we can thank our friends who were part of the 19th century Jewish exodus to the United States for bringing bagels to us.

And at first, it was strictly considered an ethnic food, and it was really pretty much relegated to the Jewish community of New York in particular. And they set up bagel bakeries out the yin and yang, there was at least 70 in the Lower East Side alone in the early 20th century. And there was a bagel baker's union that was formed there, and they did their whole meetings in Yiddish. So you can kind of understand if you put all that together that, yeah, it didn't really creep outside of that neighborhood for a little while.

Yeah, but this is one of the instances where, I guess, modern technology sort of came into play to take something wide, as is the case a lot of times. But they got bagel factories, basically, they got these machines that could mass produce bagels in the mid to late 1950s in the United States. That was a big deal. And a man named Harry Linder of New Haven, Connecticut, got ahold of these things and were like, these are great, we can make tons of bagels now. And his son Murray, Murray Linder, obviously of Linder's bagels, invented a slicing machine.

So they're pre-sliced, which is always appreciated. But usually, if you get a pre-sliced bagel, it's probably not the best bagel. But you can imagine, that's when they really took off like a rocket. Absolutely. People were like, I don't have to slice them, they're already mostly sliced for me, sold. Yeah. And you can get those, I don't have one, but the little bagel slicers you see in the shop, like the guillotine.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think those work that well. They tend to smash the bagel down, and then if they don't fit in there right, it's just, I get why they use them, but the coffee shop up the street for me uses those. And I'm always like, please don't cut it, I'll cut it when I get home. Yeah. I mean, the best thing is just a serrated knife or a bread knife, which also is serrated. That's what you want.

Exactly. And by the way, let me thank you publicly for the avocado whirligig that you got me. You're very welcome. Have you used it yet? I did. Yeah, what I found out on the first use is that it's not great if it's a little softer, but I bet if it's a good firm avocado, it works wonders. It really does.

And I had no illusions whatsoever that you were going to just change your whole game, but I thought, you know, I'd give you the chance too if you wanted to. No, I have to now, because my daughter likes it, so. Oh, oh, oh, okay, wow. She loves avocados. Nice. So that's perfect. So it was really for her then, I guess.

Yes, that's right. So she says, thank you, Uncle Josh. You're very welcome here. We share a birthday and happy birthday tomorrow to you, by the way. Yeah, happy birthday to her tomorrow too. Yeah. I'm not sure people know that, but that's one of the very funny things about life is that my daughter was born and I was looking up celebrity birthdays to see who shared a

birthday with her and your face pops up. That's awesome. It was a very, very funny day. Was that sadcelebrity.com? No, it was a legit celebrity birthday site. I wasn't on it. I was like, how'd you get on there? They reached out to me sometime and I was like, sure, I'll definitely lift a finger to be

on this website and it paid off in aces, apparently. Yeah. It was a very, very funny moment. I was like, you got to be kidding me. So just one last thing, let's put a punctuation mark on bagels and then take a break. How about that? Let's do it. So apparently, as far as how stuff works reports, the idea of spreading cream cheese

and adding locks to bagels was, if not invented at the very least, widely popularized in America by Family Circle magazine. I love it. Me too. Good stuff. That's a punctuation mark, if I've ever heard one. Right through that hole in the middle of the bagel. All right, let's take a break.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. The Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. You know something we should have mentioned in the bagel segment? What? Biallis. What?

A bialli is sort of a cousin of a bagel, B-I-A-L-Y. Never heard of a bialli? No. I think of the deal with a bialli is there's no hole. I'm not sure what the other difference is. I didn't look this up, but I just thought we should shout out the bialli because I know we'll get listener mail. It sounds suspiciously like an English muffin joke.

I think it's just, I got to look it up because I don't want to misspeak, but I think it's a bagel without a hole. Okay, I've genuinely never heard of that by name or by concept either. Oh, interesting. All right. So let's talk oats then. Yeah, oats is one of those things that is maybe in the running for oldest breakfast food because for centuries and thousands of years, people have been eating growing oats and eating

oats and some kind of sloppy porridge type thing. Yeah, what's crazy is the oat was actually domesticated relatively late compared to wheat and barley because the yields of the oat are much smaller. But eventually they were like, oh, we'll give this a try too. So as far as what about 4,500 years ago, we were domesticating them and eating them. But the way that they were eating oats before was they would take the husk off and then eat the whole oat. That method or that what you have after you just de-husk and leave the whole is called

a groat. Yeah, it doesn't sound very good. No, well, prepare for this. Apparently there are fats in oats, specifically in groats that can go rancid. So you could be eating rancid groats for breakfast had it not been for a couple of geniuses named Henry Seymour and William Heston who developed a different process called rolled oats, which actually gets rid of those fats that can go rancid. That's right.

And then you have, I mean, kind of exactly what we have today. I mean, there are obviously different kinds of oats like steel cut and different varieties. But rolled oats is what we're eating today. They founded, Heston and Seymour founded Quaker Oats. And apparently one of the... They're not Quakers. Apparently one of the reasons, at least as legend goes, that they named themselves Quaker Oats is because they wanted to seem like an upstanding non-fraudulent company because

food fraud in the 1800s was a thing where they would water milk down and they would basically try and trick the customer into thinking they were eating a more pure product that was cut with something else, like bad cocaine. It makes sense, though. Yeah. If you're going to sell cocaine, you should be like, this is Quaker brand cocaine and people will be like, I can trust you. I don't need to test that first.

That's funny. So the Quaker man, I was looking to see who it was based on because all those things are modeled on somebody. And I came across the very famous version of it that you and I grew up with. It was painted by Haddon Sunblom who painted the Coke Santa. Oh, okay. And once you know that, you can kind of see the difference or the similarity. Anyway, some people say it was based on William Penn of the famous comedy duo Penn and Teller.

But apparently Quaker Oats says, no, it wasn't based on anybody. But if you go look at the old Quaker Oats, like the original ads, it looks a lot like William Penn. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. And I love that you sent me that little nostalgic page on the old 1970s and 80s, I mean, you will make them those delicious sugary flavored packets of Quaker Oatmeal.

Yeah. You can see the progression of them from like zero taste to adding raisins and then all this stuff. And then by the 90s, there was like a blue raspberry one. Did you see that? No. Grody. I think that was on clickamericana.com, which is a great site for nostalgia like that.

I do like the overnight oats thing. That's something I didn't know was a thing until a couple of years ago. Yeah. It seems to be very popular now, but those are tasty. All the kids these days are eating overnight oats. That's right. It's the hipster version of hot oatmeal. So we have to talk about coffee for a couple of reasons.

I mean, we did an entire episode on coffee. We did an entire episode on caffeine, so we'll keep it short, agreed? Yeah, because we covered most of this, but the very origin, the very origin, the origin of how supposedly, and it's a pretty good story, even if it's not true, but the legend of the Ethiopian goat herder that saw goats eating what ended up being coffee beans or coffee berries. And those goats started jumping around and dancing and getting down and boogieing. And the goat herder was like, huh, let me see if I want to eat one of those.

And they realized the stimulating effects right off the bat and caffeine and coffee beans became a thing. Yep. That was Calde, by the way, the Ethiopian herder. That's right. So in the colonies in America, everybody mostly drank tea, even though coffee had made its way to Europe by then, but everybody liked tea. And then England began to heavily text tea, and so they adopted coffee widely in America.

It became kind of a patriotic thing to drink coffee. But then round about this time, or maybe a century or so before, depending on who you ask, coffee started to replace beer and wine as like the breakfast drink, because people noticed that you didn't like fall over on your scythe at 11 a.m. if you drank coffee for breakfast, and you would if you drank a bunch of like hard cider instead. Yeah. Drinking booze for breakfast is, unless you're at Sunday brunch, it's not a great way to start your work day.

No, not at all. So get this Chuck, 63% of Americans drink coffee every day seems like a lot, right? Yeah. Australia has just totally beat 75% of people in Australia drink coffee every single day. That doesn't surprise me. They do everything to the max. Okay, so you think that's pretty impressive though? Listen to this.

Oh boy. In the UK, 84% of people who live in the UK drink tea every day. Oh, okay. I thought you were about to say coffee. No, I would have been blown away. Yeah. They don't do that. But 84% of people drink tea over there, and only 63% of Americans drink coffee.

But I feel like I'm standing on my head right now. Should we do OJ? Yeah. All right. Well, orange juice is such a staple item for breakfast, even though apparently it's over the past couple of decades, consumption of orange juice has been going down in the United States. But it's still a staple breakfast item.

And this is because, again, people were drinking low alcohol booze at breakfast for many hundreds of years. And then finally, orange juice came along, but it was really expensive. Oranges were expensive. You can't grow them everywhere, obviously. So getting them across America was an issue. But trains came along, and all of a sudden you could get oranges around the country pretty speedily.

And vitamin C became a thing in the 1920s where scientists isolated and said, hey, this stuff is really good for you. And there's a lot of it in oranges. And this is also another breakfast food that came about because the company was like, we need to unload a bunch of these things. And there's a bumper crop of oranges in 1916. And so orange producers kind of got together and started a campaign called Drink an Orange. And it was like, buy a bunch of oranges and make orange juice and drink that for breakfast.

So that's another idea where it came from. But they ran into a problem until the 1940s, Chuck. And that was that, yeah, you could get oranges across the country. And you could get orange juice kind of far. But there was a chance it was going to show up turned. It was going to spoil along the way. And so the US government was like, our soldiers want orange juice, but we can't give it to them.

We're going to give a bunch of money to anybody who can come up with a way to get orange juice across the United States without it turning bad. That's right. And that's when frozen concentrate orange juice came into play thanks to the Minute Made Company. And I haven't had that stuff since I was a kid, but I have great nostalgia for it because that's how we drank orange juice in my house growing up. Yeah.

I just realized that that's what's wrong with my freezer as an adult. It's missing like that Minute Made can that was just kind of like a little blast of sunshine every time you open the freezer, you know? Yeah. And I will say this, even though there are many more ways to make a sophisticated cocktail, if you're hanging out in the summertime by the pool and you happen to have like a blender nearby. Sure.

There are a lot worse things you can do than get some limeade or some of that strawberry frozen junk and make a big thing of frozen daiquiris, just cheapy little frozen daiquiris. Yeah. Remember that Bacardi Breezers ad from the 80s where the person went inside when they came out, her friends were like 80 years old and they're like, what took you so long? The weird thing. Oh man. So Minute Made, by the way, was founded by a guy named Richard Morse who invented that

process of creating concentrate from orange juice and shipping it across the country. And for the first season, they packaged for a company called Snow Crop. It took off like a rocket and Minute Made said, we're going to stop doing that and form our own company. And they did. Why did they spell it like that though? That's the one thing I've never understood. Minute Made?

Yeah. Why isn't it spelled M-A-D-E, like it's made in a minute. That's what it implies. Why is it spelled like a house maid? I'm going to make something up completely, but you could also call it hazarding a guess, okay? Sure. Let's hear it.

So it's made in a minute. So you get that just from the Minute Made together, but the fact that they spell it like that makes it seem like it's so easy to make, you might as well have a domestic servant helping you. That's my guess. That's my guess. Now, I'm wondering what the actual definition of maid is, there may be something in there that I don't know about.

I don't think so. I think I'm right here. And of course, I very quickly just Googled maid, and the first thing that pops up is a bunch of sexy Halloween outfits. Halloween costumes, I'm sure of it, I'll bet, man. Should we take another break and then finish up with a triplet of delicious pancake-y, waffle-y, French Toasty things? Indeed I do, Chuck.

I think that's a great plan. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide

you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find a skyline drive in the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we're back and we're talking first about pan clocks.

Have you ever seen fifty-first states? I've seen parts of it, I don't know if I ever saw it all. Adam Sandler's trying to attract Drew Barrymore, so he pretends like he's trying to order off the menu, but he can't read, so he's sounding it out. He says, pan clocks, and then he gets all frustrated. It's a pretty cute little scene. But anyway, that was a reference to that. Instead we're talking about pancakes.

And you said that oats are one of the oldest breakfasts, and actually it seems that pancakes are probably the oldest breakfast of all time, because they found that Utsi, remember our friend Utsi, the ice man? Oh, sure. He had a breakfast of iron corn wheat in his stomach, and they think that he probably ate it in the form of a cooked pancake. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because you can make a batter out of some sort of grain and pour it on a hot rock,

and there's your griddle right there. Yeah, that's a good point. There are all kinds of different pancakes throughout antiquity that were made from all kinds of ingredients depending on what was readily available. Even consider like a potato pancake, a pancake, because the name is right there. If you're talking official recipes, it was a Dutch cook in the 16th century that I think has the first official pancake recipe, but like you said, that was way, way later. People had been eating some kind of pancake-y thing for a long, long time.

Right, and since it was around so long, different cultures kind of tinkered with it here or there, and came up with like their favored version of it. So that's why you have so many different pancakes today. You've got the American pancake or flapjack, which I looked it up, same exact thing. It's apparently just a regional difference in the name. If you're in Australia, you'll eat pancakes for dessert. Apparently Germans eat them as strips alongside soup. Yeah, I've never heard of that.

No, I haven't either, but the Swedish know what they're doing because they basically go the iHop route and put whipped cream on their pancakes and like sweetened fruit too. I think that's the deal, why it's the international house of pancakes, right? Oh, I guess so, because they also have crepes, the French version. Yeah, I never really thought about it before, which is kind of dumb. I never really considered a crepe like a French pancake. I guess, I mean, I know it's similar, but I don't know, the taste is too different to me.

It's like pancake pan clock. You like pancake, what's your favorite of pancake waffle or French toast? Man, why would you do this to me? I can actually tell you that French toast is my favorite, but I will eat pancakes any day of the week, any time of day, any day of the week. I love pancakes, but the actual delicacy, like the taste or the delicateness and just general like mouth feel, if I can get weird and gross of French toast is like, it's tough to beat that.

Yeah, see, I love all those too, but boy, a crispy waffle, the way those squares fill up with syrup, little individual cubicles just waiting for me to dive in. That's right. Oh, God. That's why there's always a line at the Holiday Inn Express the next morning around the always far too few waffle makers. I remember when we toured Australia, the Virgin Air Lounge in the airport had waffle makers, and I'd seen them in hotel, like the Hampton Inn, do-it-yourself thing, but I'd never seen

them in an airport lounge. It was quite a little treat. Did it have the Virgin logo emblazoned on it? No, but I mean, since we're there, I guess we should talk about that because apparently waffles in the early days of, not early days of religion, but in medieval Europe, at least, the Catholic Church actually had, and I'm not sure how they did this. That's the one thing I couldn't figure out, but they had biblical scenes and things on the waffle.

So they made them using etched plates. Oh, okay. So it was in the mold. Exactly. It's just exactly like what we do today, except they had theirs on long handles, and they held it over a fire and then turned them over. Oh, okay, that makes sense. And so the original waffle apparently goes back, or the predecessor of it's called the

obelios, goes back to ancient Greece. And it was basically an extension of pancakes, but rather than cooking it on one flat surface and turning it over, they would cook it between two metal plates, and then turn the whole thing over. And that was the predecessor of the waffle. And give or take a thousand or so, maybe 2,000 years. Nah, yeah, about 2,000 years. The Catholic Church said waffles are so awesome, we're going to basically make them plan B

of the communion wafer. That's right. And the little printed waffles that I was talking about, I think was, they started out with like, oh, hey, it's a cross or something a little less fancy. But as time went on, they got really, they kind of went crazy with this stuff, and they would have landscapes and family crests, and they got way more elaborate. I'd like to see, I couldn't find a picture of any of those. Did you see any?

No, I didn't, but I can imagine them. Okay. I can guess what they look like. I tie the waffle so closely to that squared grid pattern, it would just look strange. So, I've got one on that. They think that the word waffle came from a derivation of wafer, right? Like the communion wafer. But I saw another explanation too, that it might have come from waffle, W-F-A-L, or

goffra, G-A-U-F-R-E, which is old French. And the old French goffra or waffla means a piece of a honey beehive. Oh, well, so you got the honeycomb? Yes. I love it. I do too. Those old French knew what they were talking about. Yeah, and they were cooked back then, like you said, between these iron plates like long

handled over a fire. I have these things at the camp now, they're not in the shape of a waffle, they're called pie irons. Oh, okay. And it's the same kind of thing, you just put bread in there, and you can make little pizzas or you can make little apple pies or whatever, and you just like spray the iron, put the bread in there, and I guess it was the same for the waffle, and then squeeze them together and then hold it over a fire and brown it up really nicely.

I've got something for you to try then that you might work with that. Okay. It's called a chawful. Okay. And instead of like a grain-based or cereal-based batter, you use eggs and cheese mixed together as the batter, but you do everything else the exact same. So what is it? Is it just like a little square-gritted omelet?

Basically. Okay. And easily cooked, like you could very easily cook it in that pie iron. All right. Give it a shot and report back. Well. Okay. So there's a guy named Cornelius Swarthout, which I love, and he's actually the guy who

was first granted a patent for a waffle iron back in 1869. Like a real deal waffle iron? Yeah. And apparently on that day, August 24th, the date that he was granted the patent, that is considered National Waffle Day here in the United States. I love it. And as legend goes, who knows if it's true, but they credit Thomas Jefferson with bringing over those long-handed pie iron-style waffle irons to America in the late 1700s, I guess

he saw those things were like, these are fantastic. Yeah. And walking it back to pancakes for another second, one of the reasons why they seem to be so old is that so many different cultures came up with them on their own independently. Like you can't really say that they were imported to America because the Native Americans were already making their own, they just use cornmeal. So like all of the different techniques kind of came together, and in America, we said we like this, this, and this, and you got the American pancake.

But the reason I wanted to kind of walk it back is because we just talked about National Waffle Day. There's National Pancake Day too, of course. But in certain countries, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday is also National Pancake Day, and that apparently dates back to medieval times, not the Dark Ages, where people would use up all of their fats, their eggs, their sugar, stuff that they had to give up for Lent on the last day before Lent, which was Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday. Makes a lot of sense.

It really does, Chuck. That brings us to French Toast. I do love French Toast because you can, I love just the little cheap old sliced bread version you can do at home. I like going to a fancy brunch restaurant and having the big, really delicious kind of like holla bread French Toast, and there are all kinds of different breads they can use and like the vanilla, and this is all just making me so hungry. Oh, the mouth feel.

That's twice. There's a legend that, you know, I saw all over the internet, apparently everyone has seen this, who looks into French Toast history, but I just don't know if it's true because it's not documented, and it may be one of those sort of internet stories that there was a man named Joseph French, who was an innkeeper in the 1700s that made this meal, and the name, he didn't want to call it French's Toast because supposedly he did not make it an apostrophe, and so it became French Toast, but that just seems dubious to me. It does, and it's contradicted by the historical record because the first use of the term French

Toast for a type of toast that is dipped in like an eggy batter, and then fried, shows up in 1660, so it would have been in the century before that guy in a book called the Accomplished, I have to spell it, A-C-C-O-M-P-L-I-S-H-T Cook. I love it. Like the S should be backwards in there. Yeah, it totally should be. So that's where the first use of French Toast came from. And so people would say like, well, okay, so the French came up with this.

There shouldn't be any really big mystery to it. That apparently is not the case, because the French call it Pam-Perdue, which means lost bread, which means bread that's gone stale, and you didn't want to just throw out bread, you would use it, and one way you could use it was for French toast, but it seemed like they were calling it lost bread after an older English tradition, which they just called lost bread. So the French didn't call it French toast, and they didn't lay any kind of claim to French toast as like their national invention.

There's some other really interesting ideas of where it possibly came from, the name French toast, right? Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of French, like a French fry is not from France either. That comes from the slicing technique, the old Irish word for to slice is French, like French that potato. And so that sort of falls in line with the same thing with French toast, it would be a sliced bread.

I do love the whole lost bread thing, and that all makes perfect sense that bread was a little stale. If you dip it in something and fry it in a pan, you're still going to be able to enjoy that bread. It won't taste super stale. And with French toast in particular, that name, there's some food historians who say maybe that could be it, but they suspect that it's actually marketing among some people, especially in America, to call it French toast because it makes it sound fancier.

Yeah. I totally buy that. And then get this, dude, in Great Britain, specifically in Windsor, it's called Poor Nights of Windsor. That's what you would order Poor Nights of Windsor and they would bring you French toast. Yeah. I've never heard of that. Neither.

Now, are these competing explanations for that or is it sort of the same version? That's what they call French toast, and it has its own story. No, no, no, I mean the competing stories for where that came from because one I saw said that the battle of, what is it, CRECY in France in 1346, there were knights who were captured by the French and they basically had to sell off their lands in order to pay their way out of that, pay for their release. And Edward III, as legend goes, gave them a place to stay in Windsor Castle in trade for their labor.

So they would be the poor knights, because knights, it's not like all the knights were rich or anything like that, and they stayed in Windsor Castle. So they were the poor knights of Windsor, but I guess that they were fed that there? Maybe. That's right. I don't get the connection. I don't know. Well, I like the other explanation more for that reason.

The French connection. Right. So the reason why you might call it poor knights, there's another explanation is that so if you were a gentry, landed gentry during the medieval era, you were expected to serve dessert at dinner and knights were gentry, but not all knights were rich, as you said. And so to kind of like still serve dessert, they would serve this French toast with jam as a dessert, because it was very cheap and easy to make. And so it would be called poor knight.

Oh, that's interesting, because the, what's that sandwich that we talked about before? The croque monsieur? No, the one that's made like French toast, but it has jam in it, the Monte Cristo. Monte Cristo. Yeah. I wonder if that's came from that too. I don't know, man. Maybe.

Can we talk about, can we finish with brunch? Oh, man, there's no way we can't finish with brunch. We need to do brunch in this one and part two. Yeah, I think so, because brunch, brunch is something that we had growing up occasionally, like very rarely when we were allowed to skip church growing up. I think my mom would say, you know, we can have brunch at the house. And that was just the first time I'd ever heard that word. It didn't become like a, like an out to eat at a restaurant kind of thing in my life until

much, much later. And of course, now brunch is a very trendy, like big time Saturday and Sunday weekend meal. If you ever read the height of the New York brunch heyday from the mid 2000s, where just things got so out of hand with like the, all you can drink mimosas and, and Bloody Mary's and people getting in fist fights and people waiting in line for hours and then angry and they're drunk. It's just like, it gave brunch a bad name, but brunch is really one of the great meals

if you can indulge a bit. Man, one of the best brunch drinks I've ever had or one of the best drinks I've ever had was called a breakfast Negroni and it was made with apparel. So it was much sweeter and I can't remember what else they put it in, but oh man, it was so good. And that was in a New York brunch place for sure. Where does brunch come from though? They don't know, but the earliest we've ever found and obviously it's breakfast and lunch.

So probably a million people came up with it. But the first guy to write it down in print was a guy named Guy Beringer who was a British author and he published an essay in 1895 in the, the magazine, I guess Hunters Weekly and it was called Brunch Colon, a plea. And in this, he basically says, Hey, we all like have Sunday brunch and it's like a huge meat filled affair that people eat after church and it's too much. It's too much because not all of us go to church and some of us really drink too much the night before.

So we need something else that is going to replace that midday meal. Let's call it brunch and it's meant to basically get over a hangover. Yeah. And that makes sense. They also trace its roots as a meal. I don't know if they called it brunch. In fact, they didn't. They called it a hunt breakfast in England, I guess, before they went out on the Fox hunt.

They would have these really big multi-course meals and it sounds a lot like brunch. They would have sweet pastries and fruit and meat and eggs and sort of like a big smorgasbord. Right. And for the same reasons, because they had to have something large to eat and this was before they ate big breakfast, I guess. And in the 1930s is when it seems to have caught on in the U.S., right? Yeah. Apparently it was Hollywood movie stars who started to brunch and everybody said, oh,

I've got to start doing that because that sounds pretty awesome. And it is awesome. And apparently one of the reasons why it took off was because people stopped going to church as much after World War II, but they still wanted to do something socially on Sunday mornings to replace it, so brunch kind of filled that vacuum. I'm trying to picture the Newswire reports on that. You know,... Church attendance down.

Yeah. Well, at Rock Hudson sits down at 10.30 a.m. for a meal. What? Right. It is a great meal, though. Church attendance is down. Another thing that happens supposedly post World War II is when women started joining the workforce more.

They were like, hey, I like to do a little something fun on the weekend, too, right? So can I go out and eat Sunday brunch as well? And I wondered because, you know, that same working mom was still like expected to cook at home. I'm sure. So going to Sunday brunch was a way to give her a break. Exactly. And it made me wonder if that's where the origin of Mother's Day brunch came from.

Oh, maybe so. Because I think people who don't normally do brunch still do brunch on Mother's Day, you know? Yeah, my brunch thing is I still always get almost exclusively breakfast things along with like a Bloody Mary. But I'd never have understood the lunch side of brunch. It's more of the time that you eat it. But you know, people do go in there and get like a shrimp cocktail or a sandwich, like

a lunch sandwich. And I think some people see that as the beauty of brunch is that it's sort of that one time of the day you can order from both sides of the menu. But I still just do my breakfast stuff. So I saw the year after Guy Beringer said, you know, he introduced brunch that somebody said, well, if you eat it closer to lunch, you have to call it blanch. And it didn't catch on for very obvious reasons. Hey, you want to go get some blanch?

Yeah, if you were hungover, it'd just make you vomit on the spot. Yeah, no good. You got anything else for now? I have nothing else. I think we should do a breakfast part two at some point. I agree. And since I agreed to what Chuck just said, that means listener mail is unlocked. Yeah, and maybe people can send in their unusual breakfast traditions, and maybe we can kind

of incorporate that in. Yeah, it's a great idea. All right, so I thought this email was really cool. This ties into our mangroves episode. Miss from Caleb Vickari. I didn't help wonder if you guys knew just how relevant your episode on mangrove trees is to the gaming community right now. The game Minecraft just recently got a large update that added mangrove swamps to the game.

Oh, wow. Specifically featuring red mangroves. They're very unique compared to all the other trees in the game, and you guys have just clarified exactly why. Because of the addition of mangrove trees, we now also have root blocks upon which the new trees are elevated off the ground, just like in real life. Re-planting them is also very different from the other trees in the game. Typically, you would need to break the leaf blocks on other trees, each of which has a

chance to drop a sapling, which you can then plant and wait for it to grow into a tree. The mangrove trees, however, will instead have propagules growing on them, which I believe are the living birth trees you were talking about. You can take these and plant them either on the ground or in water, which is also unique to mangroves in the game. Point is, the game brought a lot of interest in mangroves into me, and now you guys have amplified that, so thank you. Keep being awesome.

And again, that is from Caleb Vickari. Great name. Thanks, Caleb. Yeah, totally. And that was in World of Warcraft, you said? No. Were you making a joke? Yeah.

It's in Game of Thrones. Thanks a lot, Caleb. That would be cool, because I don't know that we would have ever known that or heard about that, so thank you for letting us know. You told us something we should know, some stuff. If you want to be like Caleb and tell us some stuff we should know, we are wide open for that. It'd be pretty hypocritical if we weren't.

You can send it in an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want

to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones from The Bobby Cast. We are Nashville's most listened to music podcast, in-depth interviews with your favorite country artists, plus the biggest songwriters and producers in Nashville, all from the comfort of my own home, so it gets a little more laid back. They're sharing stories behind the biggest songs in country music, and personal stories that you will not hear anywhere else. So if you love country music, I think you will love this podcast.

Listen to The Bobby Cast on I Heart Radio, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.