Eponymous Foods: All Chocolate

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It is
time for an all chocolate edition of Eponymous Foods. Yeah,

(00:21):
I love chocolate. I'm not really a chocolate person, but
I love these stories. I mean, I won't, you know,
spit chocolate out. It's just not the thing I'm gonna
choose first. But today we have two foods that are
eponymous foods, both, as I said, chocolate. One of these
is a lot shorter than the other. Part of that
is because the second eponymous food we have today sent

(00:43):
me down like such an obsessive rabbit hole that even
my husband was like, why are you so obsessed with this?
But it's like, I don't know, but I gotta figure
this out. Um. Both of them do feature chocolate, so
our chocolate loving listeners might get a kick out of it,
But they also both feature some issues with timelines and
attribution and things being a little fuzzy that need to
be unraveled. Also, I need to give you a heads

(01:06):
up and I will just jump right to the spoiler.
The first section of this show features the story of
tutsie rolls. That sounds super fun in some ways it is,
but it has some very dark elements to it, including
a death by suicide with a firearm. So if that's
not for you, just jump ahead to the first sponsor
break that's going to be right around twelve minutes and

(01:27):
forty seconds. Then if you jump ahead to that part,
the second two thirds of the show pretty much all fun,
I promise UM and a very hilarious and reiterative dance
party on who invented this? Just tree, So, as Holley
just said, we're starting with the tutsie Roll. The creator

(01:50):
of the Tutsie Roll was a man named Leo Hirshfield,
and there's not a whole lot of readily available information
about his early years. We know was born in Austria,
was the son of a candy maker, moved to New
York as an adult in eighteen eighty four. By the
time his story with the Tutsie Roll picks up, he

(02:10):
was already married and had a family, and as this
story is usually reported, on February Leo opened a candy
store in Brooklyn, and one of the candies he sold
there was his own invention that was the Tutsie roll.
This is eponymous because Tutsie was his nickname for his daughter, Claris,

(02:31):
so she is the one who has the bragging rights
to this thing being named after her. And that candy,
which sold for a penny, was recognized for its unique
consistency and flavor almost immediately. I like I used the
word unique because while I do love chocolate, the unique
texture of the Tutsie role is not my favorite of chocolates.

(02:55):
There were plenty of chocolate candies before eight, none that
candy stores could really sell in the summer because they
would always melt. But Tutsie rolls were shelf stable even
in the heat, so they became a really popular year
round treat, and that popularity is said to have gotten
the attention of the Stern and Salberg company, which offered

(03:17):
Leo a merger deal that meant that production could go
from the small setup that had supplied the Heirshfeld's Brooklyn
shop to a much bigger scale, and that would include
distribution to other candy stores. That deal meant that production
moved to Manhattan, so did Leo and his family. So
that's the official story. Don't get too attached to it.

(03:39):
There's a little bit more to this story about how
Leo and his Tutsie Rolls became part of a larger
company perhaps, or there may have been a different route.
Tussie Rolls were not incidentally the first treat that Leo
Herschfeld worked on. We'll talk about some more, but for example,
in he developed a gelatin dessert mix, romance Angeline, which

(04:01):
he created for Stern and Salberg company. Bromangelin was a
precursor to Jello. It was the same kind of thing.
It was a fruity gelatin that you mixed from a powder,
and it was pretty successful until Jello became the dominant
dessert gelatine on the market. That alleged merger with Stern
and Salberg and the move to Manhattan happened in nineteen

(04:22):
o five, But it wasn't until nineteen o seven that
Harshfield applied for a patent on the way that he
made this long lasting heat stable candy. He describes in
the patent application what makes this process unique quote. My
process relates to the treatment of the candy after it
has been pulled and before it is shaped. After the
candy has been pulled for the desired length of time,

(04:44):
the mass is placed in an oven or other heated
receptacle and is subjected to a constant temperature of about
a hundred and forty to two hundred fahrenheit for about
one half two hours, during which time the candy is
not in any manner agitated. After the candy has been
thus subjected to the dry heat, it is ready to
be shaped. The idea of subjecting a batch of candy

(05:07):
to dry heat after it has been pulled and before
it is shaped, is to impart there to a peculiar
mellow consistency, whereby the candy will retain its peculiar consistency
a longer time than it would otherwise, and whereby, while
also while tough in measure, it is not unpleasantly so,
and well, after a reasonable length of time, thoroughly dissolve

(05:31):
in the mouth. Now, I'm like, are these the chocolate
candies that Horace Fletcher was chewing in the morning. Maybe?
But here's the thing. This timeline gets so wobbly. Right.
We just mentioned that that that didn't happen, that that
patent until nine seven, and he had allegedly been making
these in the eighteen hundreds. So Samara Kawash author of

(05:53):
the book Candy, A Century of Panic and Pleasure, dug
into hersheld story and found some things that really predict
that official story. For one, according to a city directory
that Caah trackdown, Leo moved from Brooklyn, where he was
listed as a confectioner in eighteen ninety one. At that
point he moved into three sixty five West forty five

(06:15):
Street in Manhattan, so that's much earlier than the nineteen
o five timeline. In four and Leo got multiple patents
for candy technology inventions. One was a machine that deposited
candy into molds, another was a machine that dipped bond
bonds into their codings. He also invented a fork for

(06:37):
bond bond dipping. But these patents were jointly assigned to
Julius Stern and Jacob Salberg, so that suggests that Leo
Hirschfeld was working for the company for years before the
Tutsie Roll ever existed. In nineteen o four, Herschfeld was
listed in a New York City directory of Corporations as
a director at Stern and Salberg, and, as we mentioned

(06:59):
a moment ago, the patent for Tutsie Roll, which Hershfeld
simply titled Process of Making Candy was not applied for
until nineteen o seven, and it wasn't until nineteen o
eight that Stern and Salberg applied for the trademark on
the name. So it really seems much more likely when
you see all these pieces that Leo actually worked for
Stern and Salberg for quite a while before the Tutsie

(07:20):
roll was conceived, and it was a big hit once
it hit the market, and apparently very good for his
career because by nine thirteen he had moved up from
director to vice president. Stern and Salberg made tutsie rolls
a high profile part of their business, delivering stock to
stores first and horse drawn buggies emblazoned with the candies logo,

(07:42):
and then doing the same with automobiles once they were
a part of the company's operation. The ads that ran
for Tutsie Rolls really leaned into the candies stable nature.
One trade ad targeted to stores read quote, Tutsie Rolls
stand any weather, stand any test, and sell at all times.
All this we guarantee. In nineteen seventeen, when Julius Stern

(08:04):
and Jacob Salber retired, Stern and Salberg Company changed names
and became Sweets Company of America, and it also went
through a big reorganization. Herscheld was still there, but he
remained a vice president instead of rising into a higher title,
and it appears that he may have been pushed out
by new management or just got tired of the fact

(08:24):
that they brought in new people to run the company
instead of promoting him, because in nineteen twenty he left
and he started his own company, Mells Candy Corporation. This, unfortunately,
was a short lived venture. In one Leo was ill.
He often had stomach issues. That same year, his wife
was moved to a sanatorium to treat what's only described

(08:47):
in accounts as a serious illness. On January Tho, Leo
Hirschfeld went to work as usual. Before lunchtime, he left
and told staff he would not be back that day.
He went to the Monterey Hotel where he had been
sleeping for several weeks. He wrote a note that simply
said sorry but could not help it, and then took

(09:08):
his own life with a revolver. Newspaper coverage indicated that
Herschfeld had been depressed due to an ongoing illness and
due to being separated from his wife while she was convalescing. Yeah,
most accounts say that he was not in any kind
of financial trouble. That would have, you know, sometimes been
a thing that people pointed to as a reason for

(09:28):
someone to do something like this. He was fine financially.
Tutsie rolls, of course, continued to be sold because Sweets
still owned them, and they continued to be more and
more successful. Herscheld kind of vanishes into the background, and
this is probably part of why the company has this
alternate version of his story. I will mention another thing

(09:50):
in the behind the scenes about how they've tweaked this
story a little bit, um or how the popular story
has tweaked a little bit that that maybe helps um
brush this unpleasant part of it under the rug. The
Tutsi Pop was released in the early nineteen thirties. That
was a success that then enabled Sweets Company of America

(10:10):
to stay afloat through the depression, and when the US
became involved in World War Two, Tutsi rolls were sent
to the front lines as quick energy rations for soldiers,
and the supply of them is sometimes described as a
sort of proto government contract before those were really a thing.
And then, of course in nineteen seventy the first advertisement

(10:30):
featuring Mr Owl and the age old question of how
many licks does it take to get to the Tutsie
roll center of a Tutsie pop aired. Uh, there's another
another story that goes with the Korean War that we're
going to talk about in the behind the scenes today.
The entire company is called Tutsie Roll Industries. Tutsie Roll
has pretty much driven the bus for a while, and
in addition to its namesake, that company manufactures Andy's Mints, Dots, Razzles,

(10:55):
Charleston Chew, and a variety of other candies. Okay, gonna
go on an adventure of tracking down the origin of
the next treat, but before we do, we will have
a quick sponsor break. Okay, just in case you have

(11:19):
never had German chocolate cake, here is what it is.
It is a chocolate layer cake with a distinctive custard
like icing in between the layers and on the top.
It typically does not get iced down the sides. That
rich icing is usually made with egg, yolks, evaporated milk,
coconut and pecans. That icing is going to be really

(11:40):
important as this piece of history unfolds, and the name
suggests to a lot of people that it came from Germany,
or it's related to a baking tradition from that country,
or is someone trying to make something like a German thing,
or is even a type of chocolate from Germany. No,
this isn't upon him as food. It's named after a person. What.

(12:03):
We'll talk about him in a minute. I read this already,
so I already knew that, and I'm still like, what
what uh? This story, though, is about much more than
the man who lends this cake his name, but we
are going to start with his story, what little we
know about it. Samuel German not from Germany, born in

(12:24):
eighteen o two. We do not know if he was
born in Biddleford, Devonshire, England, but that's the last place
that he lived before moving to Dorchester, Massachusetts as an adult,
according to a history of the Baker Chocolate Company. Anyway,
he lived in Dorchester Lower Mills with his wife, Charlotte
Pder German, who he married after moving to the United States.

(12:48):
His boss when he first got to the US was
Thomas Tremlett, who had an estate on the corner of
Washington and Tremlett Streets, and Thomas Tremlett was also from England.
German worked for them as a sort of handyman, kind
of a jack of all trades, doing whatever he needed
on the estate, assisting him however it was requested. And
through this work on the grounds there, Samuel who went

(13:11):
by Sammy to his friends, became friendly with the neighbor
basically the person who owned the estate that abutted their's,
and that was Walter Baker of Baker Chocolates. Baker eventually
hired Sammy away from Tremlett to work for him as
a coachman, but then he gave him a job at
his chocolate mill. I think we should just also take

(13:32):
a moment to talk about how while Baker's chocolate is
used in baking and a lot of recipes, that there
is also a brand named after a person thing I
didn't really realize until just now. It was at Baker's
chocolate company that Sammy German created a new chocolate called
German Sweet Chocolate that was in eighteen fifty two. This

(13:54):
was a sweeter blend of chocolate than Baker's other offerings,
and the extra sugar make it really popular with kids.
The product was billed as quote palatable, nutritious, and healthful
in addition to being a hit with younger consumers. Baker
purchased the recipe and it's rights for a thousand dollars
and marketed this as Baker's German Sweet Chocolate. Now. According

(14:18):
to that same history of Baker's company, a recipe for
German chocolate cake appeared in the Dallas Morning Star on
June three, seven, and that recipe of the day, as
it was build, specifically called for the use of Germans chocolate,
so this is quite a while after the chocolate was developed.
It called for an eight ounce bar of it. That

(14:40):
was apparently an error. The paper ran a correction two
days later for a four ounce bar to be used.
That same recipe popped up again in August, with far
less required. This one said a quarter ounce bar. I
can only assume that this was kind of an editorial
mistake and that it was maybe supposed to be a
quarder of a full size bar, and someone just didn't

(15:03):
understand and got the copy wrong, because a quarter rounds
bar is like less than a tutsie roll for so
whatever it was supposed to say. The recipe had been
sent into the paper by a woman named Mrs George Clay. Unfortunately,
we do not know her actual first name, only her husband's.

(15:24):
But the following year, when General Foods, which had acquired
Baker's Chocolate, published a booklet of recipes, including the German
chocolate cake recipe. It also credited a Dallas County food
conservationist named Mrs Jackie Huffins, who, according to the company,
had since a very similar recipe to a television show

(15:46):
around the same time. So they both got recognition. Oh
but there's so many more than two. Uh So. Research
turned up several versions of the story that stated that
the original recipe was Germans Apostres chocolate cake, referencing the
bar specifically, and that eventually the apostrophe s fell off,

(16:06):
and that that has led to the confusion over the
years that this was a German treat and not something
made with German's chocolate. That doesn't appear though to be
entirely accurate, because Baker's Chocolate Company changed the label from
German's Chocolate to Baker's German Chocolate way before that. It's
entirely possible that this is one of those instances where

(16:28):
the public refers to a thing that is not an
accurate representation or version of the name. So a modern
example would be like the company Starbucks has no apostrophe
in its name, but people often write it that way,
as though Starbuck owns the company. Um, these things happen
all the time. Here's the thing, though, If you do
a certain old newspapers, you'll find recipes for German chocolate

(16:51):
cake that pre date this late nineteen fifties story. As
early as the eighteen seventies, we found advertisements for German
and chocolate or German sweet chocolate for cakes. That's not
a recipe, obviously, but it does indicate that Samuel German's
Sweeter chocolate was being marketed for people to use when
baking cakes. The earliest recipe that I was able to

(17:16):
find that was called specifically German chocolate cake was from
nineteen o one, but that particular recipe is not much
like the cake that that name is associated with today.
It did call for one cake of sweet chocolate, and
Baker's German was often listed as a cake of chocolate
rather than a bar, but the recipe doesn't mention the
German chocolate ingredients specifically by that name. Also, this is

(17:40):
a recipe for something that actually sounds more like a
sweet from Germany. It's a very thin style of cake
that's then cut into small strips or bars and assembled
into kind of like small servings or even finger foods
by layering multiple slices of the cake with jelly in between.
About six years before the Mrs George Clay recipe appeared,

(18:01):
newspaper advertisements for Pat Steakhouse of Welsh Louisiana touted quote,
try our homemade German chocolate cake was apparently a popular
dessert at Pat's, but we don't really know what style
or recipe it was. And a nineteen fifty two article
in the Denton Record Chronicle of Denton, Texas, under the
headline Miss Florence Davis charms family with German Chocolate Cake

(18:25):
recipe talks about a cake that has been handed down
in Miss Davis's family for generations that uses German sweet chocolate.
This article is a little weird to read to modernize.
It's super fixated on the fact that Florence never married,
and it calls her an honored spinster. But it does
eventually get to her recipe. And here's the thing. This

(18:47):
base cake for this recipe is pretty close to pretty
much all of the cakes that are called German chocolate cake, right,
So it has sugar, German sweet chocolate, baking, soda, flour, shortening, buttermilk,
four eggs, a pinch of salt, and vanilla. Just about
all of the cakes that we're talking about here under

(19:07):
this banner of German chocolate cake are very similar to this,
with just subtle variations on measures or the fat element,
for example, like instead of shortening one will say butter,
one will say o, leo, etcetera. The big difference in
Florence Davis's German chocolate cake to the standard version that
we call German chocolate cake today was the icing. So

(19:30):
HER's is a pretty standard icing. It's butter, egg, yolk, coco,
a box of confection or sugar, and then cold coffee
or cream to thin it to the consistency that you like.
So this doesn't really qualify as the first of the
kind of German chocolate cake we're talking about, but that
cake base really is pretty much what everything else looks like.

(19:52):
Article called County Cook's Corner, which appeared in the Tailor
Daily Press of Taylor, Texas, described a German chocolate cake
recipe provide by a woman named Sarah lou It's very
similar to the Florence Davis recipe, and the main difference
is that her icing called for more than double the
amount of cocoas this is a more chocolate version. Okay,

(20:13):
so when did the coconut and pecan icing enter into
the picture? Unclear, but we can't say for sure that
it predates the most repeated version that states that that
recipe was first published in June seven and then kind
of became an overnight sensation, because there is an identical
recipe in the Chickashaw Daily Express of Oklahoma from April

(20:36):
of ninety seven. That version is attributed to a Mrs E. F.
McDonald of ten seventeen Grand Terrorists. One interesting note on
the German chocolate cakes origins came from an article in
the Eugene Registered Guard of Eugene, Oregon in August. The
article is really about how buttermilk can be used to

(20:57):
enhance baking, but it mentions the juror and chocolate cake
in particular and delves into its mysterious history. According to
the articles writer Ka lundin quote, exactly who developed the
cake remains a mystery, but grocers in Dallas suddenly became
aware of a heavy demand for Germans Sweet chocolate, so
stores who regularly handled a few cases were sending for

(21:21):
fifty cases at a time. As the popularity of the
recipe spread across the country, bakeries also developed the recipe
for their use. A woman in St. Louis wrote that
thirty years ago, as a bride, she was given a
very similar recipe by her mother in law. She discontinued
baking the cake during the depression because it was too expensive.

(21:42):
So that cost of the cake is something that came
up in a number of articles and write ups. Eggs, sugar,
and flour have certainly fluctuated in price at times, and
especially during wartime when ration ng was in place. Right
during World War Two, flower was particularly ration. But they're
also of staples that tend to come right back into

(22:02):
regular use. So if the expensive ingredients were causing people
to shy away from baking it during the depression, it
suggests that the coconut and perhaps even the pecan may
have been the problem, and that this version is in
fact much older than the nineteen fifties when it became popular.
We're gonna talk a little bit more about the pecan
aspect of it in just a moment, we'll take a

(22:25):
quick break first to hear from the sponsors that keep
Stuffy miss in history class going. When we get back,
will track down some additional cases where various people were
credited for inventing the German chocolate cake. Bump Bump, bump Bump,

(22:48):
and even earlier instance of the German chocolate cake recipe
than those that we mentioned before the break appeared in
February nineteen fifty seven in a paper in Guthrie, Oklahoma,
that was attributed to Mrs Floyd yen Zer. But wait,
in January of that year, it was published as Mrs A. R.
Brown's recipe in the Waureka News Democrat, and that instance

(23:10):
mentions that a similar recipe appeared in the same paper
about a year earlier. Mrs Virginia Berbers German Chocolate Cake
was published in the Oklahoma City Advertiser on January eleven,
and that won her a five dollar prize from the
paper as the best recipe submission of the week. Predating
any of this, and Burne, who's one of our favorite

(23:31):
podcast guests, traced the cake back to an even earlier
mentioned in a newspaper. In Texas Fan's entry on German
chocolate cake in her book American Cake mentioned a nineteen
fifty six right up by journalist Daisy Pierce in an Irving,
Texas paper. So we went looking and found that it's
called Summer German Chocolate Cake. The recipe that was basically

(23:54):
the same in a column called Cooking with Daisy. The
story of Daisy's first encounter at the cake is detailed.
Quote impressed when her daughter, Mrs Milton Tomlinson of Frederick,
Oklahoma served this during a recent visit, Daisy filched the
recipe for her irving friends. As usual, the editor sampled
a generous serving with a stein of cold lemonade, and

(24:17):
we heartily endorse its texture and flavor. So this murky
origin to the version of German chocolate cake that included
the coconut and pecan icing was actually something that was
being discussed as the recipe rocketed to popularity. Remember that
General Foods Recipe booklet we mentioned a little while ago. Well,

(24:37):
when the company reached out to various newspapers with the
cake recipe to spread the word about that booklet, the
Austin American Statesman noticed that it was not a new cake,
but one that they had seen before. In an article
titled anything Just so long as it is with Chocolate,
which was published on September four, writer Mary Jane Bowed

(24:59):
stated quote, last January, we received a letter from General
Foods Kitchen saying they had a new recipe called German
Chocolate Cake, and they thought it was so good they'd
send us the recipe. We replied by sending General Foods
a copy of the October twenty seven Austin American Statesman,
in which we ran a story about the Austin Woman's

(25:20):
Club catering service. The story featured a wc's bestseller German
Chocolate Cake. The recipe that the paper printed in that
article is the one from General Foods. With a couple
of notes. They specifically mentioned that the Austin Women's Club
used butter, not shortening, and then instead of the two
and a half cups of sifted cake flour called for

(25:43):
in the General Foods version, the women of Austin found
three cups. Created a quote moist but not soggy cake.
It reids a little like. It has a subtext of
that's cute, General Foods, that's a right up, mentions that
General Foods ultimately credited the origin of the cake to

(26:04):
quote somewhere in Texas that was after they had published
that book, that they kind of did a revision. It
also comments on the fuzzy nature of where recipes often start,
saying quote, the sudden popularity of a dessert recipe is
somewhat of a mystery, like a joke or a fad.
Nobody knows who started it or how it spread. But

(26:24):
it does seem as though the variation on the cake
to include the now familiar coconut and pecan icing did
start in Texas or Oklahoma, but with so many people
claiming it, there is no telling at this point who
was actually first. Regardless of who was first, in nineteen
fifty seven and nineteen fifty eight, the interest in the
cake skyrocketed when the Austin American Statesman mentioned it's sudden

(26:47):
popularity that was an understatement. In October eight, the Charlotte
Observer ran an article titled here's that Chocolate cake Again,
and the opening paragraph, written by Eudora Garrison, kind of
says at all, but also hints at the cake having
been around for quite a while. Quote. This recipe is old,
and so is a story. But over the past year

(27:08):
so many of you have requested the recipe for German
chocolate cake, not once, but time after time. Here we
go again. Will you please clip this and tuck it
carefully in your recipe box. I love that it was
so like people get tracked together. So we already mentioned

(27:30):
the many questions of attributions and write ups commenting on
how no one knew where this cake came from, and
even in the popularity boom of the late nineteen fifties
for it, various versions were being printed as possibilities in
the Atlantic Constitution. In September, food editor Virginia Disard writes, quote,
there are many stories about this recipe's origin. One is

(27:54):
that a serviceman stationed in Germany brought it home to
his wife. More likely, the name originated it's unique ingredient,
German sweet chocolate, which has nothing to do with Germany.
There's one element to this that may explain, at least
to some degree, the way the cake seems to just
show up everywhere at once, claimed by many bakers in

(28:14):
the mid nineteen fifties, That has to do with agriculture.
Wild pecans are native to Texas and Oklahoma. Even today,
a significant fraction of commercially produced pecans in these states
are from natural orchards rather than from bread or cultivated varieties.
Texas remains one of the top three producers of pecans
in the country, but in the years nineteen nineteen fifty,

(28:38):
so the decade prior to this explosive popularity of German
chocolate cake quote, aphids and mites appeared in epidemic numbers
according to Texas A and M University Forest Service, so
they were basically really harming these trees. There were treatments
for the contrees, but it wasn't until the nineteen fifties

(28:58):
that air blasts speeds prayers were introduced that offered a
much more effective and comprehensive way of treating pecan orchards
for pests. So this is a little bit of conjecture,
but healthier nut trees would have been producing more pecans,
lowering the price, and also just offering enough of them
that people could use them more frequently. So it seems

(29:20):
like if this recipe had existed for a while before
the nineteen fifties, which is seems like it did, that
decade may have been a moment when suddenly a lot
of people could pull their copy out of the recipe
box and bake the cake. Since it seems like people
hadn't been making it frequently for a while, it's entirely
possible that any given person might think that their's was unique,

(29:42):
like that was their family recipe, because they hadn't heard
other bakers talking about it, because pecans were not doing
so well in the decade prior. So, in case you're wondering,
how can so many people be claiming they wrote the
recipe and it's there's Recipes fall in an interesting space
when it comes to copyright. Here is how they're handled

(30:02):
in the US. Per the U S Copyright Office quote,
a recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure
required for making a dish of food. A mere listing
of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions
is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes
consisting of a set of ingredients in a process for

(30:23):
preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains
or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity
might be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover
the written description or explanation of a process that appears
in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations

(30:43):
that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will
not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe,
the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting
dish itself. The registration also will not cover the activities
described in the work that our procedures, processes, or methods
of operation which are not subject to copyright protection. So

(31:08):
even if you write a cookbook and you have that
cookbook copyrighted, the actual ingredients and how to put them
together to make a thing will not be protected, just
the additional information and images that you were to provide
in the book. So it kind of makes sense that
no one was really getting too worked up over who
actually invented this dish in when. And it's also why

(31:29):
a lot of recipes today remained secret. Like if a
company developed something, they don't copyright it because they can't
and if they try to, then it would be publicly
available because it would be filed with the patent office,
so they just keep that to themselves. That's the mystery
of of recipes. The popularity of the German chocolate cake
was so rapid and so far reaching that it didn't

(31:51):
stay strictly in baked dessert form. In ninety nine, an
entire children's line of clothing by the manufacturer young Land
was fired by it. One ad red quote, German chocolate
cake is the color for fall. His clothes were mostly
brown with white trim. Yeah, there was a lot of
white rick rack going on. It was. It's very cute

(32:13):
little pinafores and whatnot. I couldn't help thinking if you
dressed your kids like that, they might look like gingerbread. Uh. Incidentally,
to close the loop on Samuel German, he died in
He's buried at Cedar Gross Cemetery in Dorchester, so he
never knew about the wide reaching fame of the cake

(32:34):
that carried his name, or that most people assumed it
was from Germany and didn't know it was an eponymous food.
I love this little revelation. Yeah, I yeah. It never
made sense to me that it was called German chocolate cake,
which I thought meant that it was from Germany, because

(32:55):
it's like coconuts aren't from Germany. I did ask, uh too,
friends of mine who bake a lot, uh, and have
you know done so professionally, and both of them when
I was like, did you know German chocolate cake was
in German? They were like, yeah, it's named for the chocolate.

(33:15):
But I was like, but did you know that's a
dude's name, and they were like, what you know? Right? Right? Yeah?
So many many mysteries for listener mail. I have a
listener mail that sits in an intersection of a listener
mail I want to do and a shout out I
want to give. This is a listener mail about eponymous foods.

(33:36):
This is written by our listener, Margaret, who writes Hi,
Holly and Tracy. I have been catching up on podcasts
from the end of the year, and I've just finished
the latest eponymous Foods episode. I love the eponymous foods episodes,
by the way, They're probably my favorite category. Every time
you do one, I start thinking about the reverse. I
am a small animal veterinarian, and you would not believe
the number of pets we see that are named after foods.

(33:58):
Chocolate colored creatures named Hershey, orange cats named Cheddar, or Cheeto, marshmallow,
sugar pepper, there are a ton of them. When I
was little, my mom used to make a dish for
supper called Rumbled the Thumps and fink Adela, who was
certain that it was mom shorthand for I've got a
fridge full of leftovers that I want to be sure

(34:18):
the kids will eat, so I will call it something weird.
Imagine my surprise when Google came around and I learned
that this was a real thing, and there's a link
to the recipes. I ever knew about this. I missed
this female. I gotta go look at the recipe. Uh,
it's pretty recent, so you may have just not seen
it yet. Margaret continues. When we got our two current cats,

(34:39):
my husband and I waited, as we have always done,
a few days after bringing them home to let their
personalities tell us what their actual names are. Thus, I'd
like to introduce Rumbled the Thumps. We call him Urt,
who is when he runs the loudest creature without hoofs
that I have ever run across, criminally cute kitting pictures.
Our ties brother is not named fink Adela because I

(35:01):
just couldn't see calling a cat fink his whole life.
But even though he's not named after food, I'll have
to include Scooch here because otherwise he'll be jealous. Also
painfully cute, like if I could have baby kitties at
all times, that would be great. The two of them
have grown from being the most adorable kittens on the
face of the planet, not that I'm biased or anything,

(35:22):
into handsome, troublemaking house panthers. They are both um tuxedos,
and they are gorgeous, gorgeous cats, and we're two of
the very cutest. Margaret also gives a couple of interesting
suggestions for future episodes. UM so I won't include those,
but I will say this, um. One, thank you for
being a vet too seriously criminally cute cats. Three. This

(35:45):
dovetails nicely into my next thing, which is just UM.
I met one of our listeners at my specialty vet
this week, wow um, and she I wanted to give
a shout out to Tabitha and tell her I hope
her bibbit is doing good, uh, and that I know
she said. She sent us an email. I could not
find it, so Tabitha, if you're hearing this, re send

(36:05):
it because I want to read it. UM. I want
to read about your other cat information and then UM
maybe we will share that one as well. But it
was great to meet you and like I said, I
hope everything's going great. She got referred to especially met
that I have also used and think very highly of.
So that was a great moment where I could be reassuring. Uh,
if you would like to write to us about your

(36:26):
katies upon himous foods, what you name your cats, foods,
you name cats after, et cetera, I encourage you to
do that. You could do that a history podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. We are also on pretty much
all of the social media as Missed in History and
you can also subscribe to the show if you haven't yet.
That is easy to do on the iHeart Radio app

(36:47):
or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H

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Tracy Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Eponymous Foods: All Chocolate