February 17

is

National Café Au Lait Day

Five things you should know about

Café Au Lait

  1. Indian pudding is a more elaborate form of corn hasty pudding.
  2. Hasty pudding is a pudding or porridge of grains cooked in milk or water.
  3. In the United States, it invariably refers to a version made of ground corn.
  4. Indian pudding consists of milk, cornmeal, and molasses, (or, alternatively, maple syrup and honey, and sometimes sugar), spices (nearly always including cinnamon and ground ginger), butter, and usually raisins and nuts, baked in a slow oven for several hours.
  5. It is a traditional New England dessert.

On This Day in Food History…

1665 Rudolph Jacob Camerarius was born. A German botanist, he showed the existence of sexes in plants, and identified the stamen and pistil as the male and female organs.
1876 Canned sardines went on sale in the U.S. for the first time. They were packed in oil.
(Some sources say 1873).
1889 H.L. Hunt, the pioneering Texas oil millionaire (Hunt Oil Company) was born. He carried a brown bag lunch to his office each day and considered himself as ‘just plain folks.’
1958 ‘Sugartime’ by the McGuire Sister topped the charts.
2002 New regulations to go into effect this year require German pig farmers to spend at least 20 seconds every day with each pig, 10 seconds in the morning and 10 seconds in the afternoon. I do not know about what regulations there might be for spending time with German cows, sheep, chickens and other farm animals.
2008 The USDA announced the largest beef recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaghterhouse.