National Pecan Torte Day

Five Food Finds about Pecans

  • If the body does not get enough zinc, it may have difficulty producing testosterone – a key hormone in initiating sexual desire in both men and women.  Pecans provide nearly 10 percent of the recommended Daily Value for zinc.
  • It would take 11,624 pecans, stacked end to end, to reach the top of the Empire State Building in New York City.
  • Texas adopted the pecan tree as its state tree in 1919.  In fact, Texas Governor James Hogg liked pecan trees so much that he asked if a pecan tree could be planted at his gravesite when he died.
  • Albany, Georgia, which boasts more than 600,000 pecan trees, is the pecan capital of the U.S.  Albany hosts the annual National Pecan Festival, which includes a race, parade, pecan-cooking contest, the crowning of the National Pecan Queen and many other activities.
  • Pecan trees usually range in height from 70 to 100 feet, but some trees grow as tall as 150 feet or higher.  Native pecan trees – those over 150 years old – have trunks more than three feet in diameter.

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1647 Denis Papin is born. The French physicist who invented the pressure cooker (Papin’s Digester) in 1679

1865 William Sheppard of New York City received a patent for liquid soap.

1867 Charles Francis Jenkins was born. An inventor who is best known as an early television pioneer. Among his many inventions was a cone-shaped drinking cup.

1867 Maximilian Bircher-Benner was born. He was a Swiss doctor who developed the cereal product ‘Muesli,’ which is similar to Granola.

1939 The first U.S. patent was issued for a disposable whipped cream aerosol container. Julius S. Kahn’s patent was titled “An Apparatus for Mixing a Liquid with a Gas” and was specifically concerned with making whipped cream, using a ordinary soda bottle.

1970 ‘Spill The Wine’ by Eric Burdon & War hit number 3 on the charts.

2004 Sonya Thomas won $500 and a trophy belt at the World Lobster Eating Contest in Kennebunkport, Maine. She ate 9.76 pounds of lobster meat (38 lobsters) in 12 minutes.  She also holds the record for hard boiled eggs, and pork & beans (8.4 pounds in 2 minutes 47 seconds). She weighs only 105 pounds.

2007 A 12 year-old boy in Manchester, England was charged with assault for throwing a cocktail sausage at a 74 year-old man.