Food History Facts That Sound Made Up, But Aren't

Carrots weren't always orange. In fact, wild carrots only came in white, yellow, or purple until a few centuries ago. 

When people began cultivating the carrot in Eurasia, it looked very different from today's crunchy vegetables. Ancient Greeks talked about carrots and parsnips interchangeably. People in Central Asia began domesticating purple and yellow carrots around 900 AD. Orange carrots are actually a mutation that farmers cultivated for its sweeter taste. 

PEZ wasn't always a fruit-flavored candy sold in novelty dispensers. When an Austrian named Eduard Haas III invented PEZ in 1927, he thought the drops would be used as a smoking alternative.

At first, customers could only buy PEZ in round drop form. And the only flavor was peppermint. That's how the candy got its name: Pfefferminz, the German word for peppermint, was shortened to PEZ. But Haas eventually changed the design to the tiny brick shape and added more flavors. 

Today, we think of ketchup as a red sauce made from tomatoes. But originally, ketchup was a fish sauce.

The name and the food came from China, where it was called ke-tsiap. In Asian cuisine, the pickled fish sauce seasoned food. In the 17th century, European sailors imported "kechap," adding in ingredients like mushrooms and anchovies. 

In the American colonies, ketchup was a mushroom sauce. It wasn't until the 19th century that tomatoes first appeared in the condiment. And that's why even today the popular condiment uses the name "tomato ketchup."

Imagine visiting a beach in New England and finding lobsters piled 2 feet high on the shore. That's how many lobsters used to live in the Atlantic. Native Americans used the plentiful shellfish as fertilizer for their crops. They also ate lobster by wrapping them in seaweed and baking them on rocks. 

Lobsters were seen as a poor man's food since they were so abundant. In the colonial era, prisoners dined on lobsters. Massachusetts servants even negotiated their contracts to say they refused to eat lobster more than twice per week.

Waffles might seem modern, but they actually date back to the ancient Greeks. 

However, ancient Greek waffles weren't quite like today's fluffy breakfast treats. Instead, they were more like pressed wafers. The Greeks used their ancient waffle irons to create the wafers. A cook would hold the iron over an open fire to cook it. The practice gradually evolved through the medieval period into the fluffier Belgian waffle. 

There's nothing like an Epsicle on a hot day - at least according to Frank Epperson, the 11-year-old who invented the first version of a Popsicle.

Frank came up with the invention by accident. Back in 1905, he left a cup of soda outside overnight. The next morning, Frank found that the stirring stick had frozen in the soda. The young inventor decided he'd created something like a tasty icicle, which he named an Epsicle. 

The name evolved when Frank became a father and his kids started calling the treat "Pop's 'sicle." The new name - Popsicle - took off, and the rest is history.