National Pancake Day

Five Food Finds about Pancakes

• The tradition of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day) is almost 1000 years old.

• One pancake fan ran a marathon while continually tossing a pancake for three hours, two minutes and twenty seven seconds.

• The first ready-mix food to be sold commercially was Aunt Jemima pancake flour. It was invented in 1889 in St. Joseph, Missouri, USA.

• The first pancake recipe appeared in an English cookbook in the fifteenth century.

• Celebrity chef Aldo Zilli set the world record for the highest pancake toss in 2005 with a toss of 329cm.

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1754 Joseph-Louis Proust born. Proust was a French chemist. In 1799 he extracted sugar from grapes, and proved it identical to sugar extracted from honey.

1774 John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed was born. American pioneer and legend, he planted apple seeds in the Ohio River valley area (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois).

1820 Daniel Boone died. American pioneer and frontiersman.

1843 Ivan Pavlov was born. He was the first to notice that dogs began to salivate when they could see, smell or taste food.

1902 Levi Strauss died. Inventor and manufacturer of jeans.  He originally planned to make canvas tents for miners in the California gold rush, but soon found that durable pants sold better.

1904 Lafcadio Hearn died. (Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Hearn). A writer, translator and teacher, her wrote ‘La Cuisine Creole,’ the first Creole cookbook.

1914 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission was established.

1953 Sugar rationing ended in Great Britain.