Five Food Finds of  Chocolate Mints

1.  In tea houses and dinner halls of the early 1900’s  mint sprigs and dark chocolates served after desserts for patrons to ‘chew for good breath and aid digestion’.  Soon thin mints, layered mint and dark chocolate candies appeared in many forms.

2. Thin Mints, a Girl Scout cookie first sold in 1951, accounts for over 25% of the annual Girl Scout cookie sales.

3.  After Eights, introduced in 1962, were considered a classier version of the classic thin mint, with dark chocolate and rich mint center, considered at the time the perfect after dinner mint.

4. Andes chocolate mints, created in 1921, have little to do with the Andes mountains. They were once called “Andy’s Candies”  but the owner ‘found that men did not like giving boxes of candies with another man’s name on them to their wives and girlfriends’ so he changed the name.

5.Frago Mints, perhaps the first chocolate mints, were first patented in 1918. They were sold in tea houses and sold frozen to emphasize the sharp mint flavor.

 Daily Quote:

“A wise man knows that if someone offers you a breath mint, accept it.”~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr. 

Events of February 19

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

• 1764 Gottlieb Sigismund Kirchhof was born. He developed a method for refining vegetable oil, and also improved brewing & fermentation.

• 1855 Bread Riots in Liverpool.

• 1906 Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company (W.K. Kellogg Company) was founded by Will Keith Kellogg to manufacture breakfast cereals (cornflakes).

• 1913 Cracker Jack began to put prizes in each box.

• 1976 Iceland broke off diplomatic relations with Great Britain when the two couldn’t settle their disagreement on the ‘cod war’ fishing rights issue.

• 1985 Cherry Coke was introduced nation-wide

• 1999 The world’s largest strawberry shortcake was created in McCall Park, Plant City, Florida, the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World. The city holds the Guinness record for the world’s largest strawberry shortcake, over 6,000 pounds.