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Here are today’s five things to know about Guacamole:

Avocados are native to Central and South America.

They have been cultivated for over 10,000 years.

Another name for the avocado is the “alligator pear.”

The Aztec word for avocado was ahuacatl, which means “testicle tree”.

Spanish explorers could not pronounce ahuacatl, so they called the avocado, “aguacate.” This is the origin of the word guacamole.

Today’s Food History

• 1851 Herman Melville’s novel ‘Moby Dick’ was published. Captain Ahab’s search for the white whale.
• 1863 Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born. He was a chemist who invented Bakelite, the first plastic that did not soften when heated. Those black plastic knobs on stoves were made of bakelite.
• 1865 Prosper Montagne was born. Montagne was one of the great French chefs of all time. He is mainly remembered as the creator of ‘Larousse Gastronomique’ (1938), a comprehensive encyclopedia of French gastronomy.
• 1889 George S. Kaufman was born. A playwright, he wrote ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner,’ and the script for ‘Cocoanuts’ for the Marx Brothers.
• 1889 Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochran), began her successful attempt to beat the record of Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg to go ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’. Bly was a U.S. newspaper reporter and completed the journey in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds.
• 1922 The BBC officially began  daily radio broadcasting with the 6 p.m. news.
• 1964 Nic Dalton of the music group ‘Lemonheads’ was born.