Two More Eponymous Foods

This eponymous food episode features a(nother) salad that came together improvisationally out of necessity, and a cracker made to align with specific dietary guidelines, with a namesake who would undoubtedly be horrified at how that item has evolved. 

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Episode Transcript

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. Working on
our episode on eponymous foods a few months back with
so much fun that I wanted to do another installment,

(00:23):
and this one ended up because they got to be
rather large stories to have just two foods. First is
a salad that, much like other eponymous foods we have
talked about, came together improvisationally and out of necessity. And
a second a cracker made to aligne with specific dietary
guidelines with a namesake who would, without a doubt be

(00:45):
horrified at how that item has evolved. So today we
are going to talk about the Caesar salad and the
Graham cracker. So a mainstay on restaurant menus is, of
course the Caesar salad. The Caesar salad is not named
after Julius Caesar as you might have thought, or at
least it probably was not, and it's also a much

(01:07):
newer invention that you might have thought. It was made
in the twentieth century. But this is also one of
those items that has some conflict and its origin story yes. So.
The main story, and the one that is most widely repeated,
is about a man named Caesar Cardini who was born
Abullardo Caesari Cardini in the Novara region of Italy on

(01:29):
the western shore of Lago Majore in e six. He
had five siblings, Risino, Nareo, Carlata, Gaudenzio, and the youngest Alessandro.
And though although he was born, of course, with the
Italian spelling of his name, which ended in an E,
Cardini used the spelling that we would normally associate with
Julius Caesar Uh, including on the signs for his restaurants.

(01:51):
So professionally he went by Caesar with kind of the
anglicized spelling, and we're going to get to those restaurants momentarily.
Caesar moved to the United States after having worked for
a number of summers in Canada. First he moved to
San Francisco and worked as a waiter at the Palace Hotel.
Then he moved to Sacramento, California, and opened a restaurant
called Browns with his business partner, William Brown. But then

(02:15):
in late nineteen nineteen, a lot of people were avoiding
public places because of the influenza pandemic, so the restaurant
was closed. Caesar went back to Italy for a time
and then back to the North America, first in Montreal
and then eventually San Diego, where his brother Alex joined him.
In nineteen and because of prohibition, the Cardinis operated a

(02:36):
restaurant across the US Mexican border in Tijuana, where they
could serve drinks to their patrons along with their food.
They also did kind of a nightclub scene, and it
was very common for residents of the US to cross
the border to frequent establishments in Mexico for this reason,
and the Cardines restaurant, which was called Caesar's Place uh
and which had opened in nineteen twenty three, was very popular.

(02:59):
According to Cardini himself, here's the origin of the salad.
This is usually dated to nine although there are also
different years sided depending on the source material. Quote. It
was a fourth of July weekend, over thirty five years ago.
I had my restaurant in Tijuana. Then we were out
of food and the suppliers were closed. I went back

(03:21):
to the kitchen and took inventory. There were a few
crates of romaine lettuce, half a creative eggs, a bin
of stale bread and a wheel of romanello cheats. That
was all with all those people out front that wanted
to eat. So I rolled up my sleeves, I rubbed
a bowl with garlic, broke up the romaine, and coddled
the eggs. I had my cooks cut up the stale

(03:43):
bread and soak it an olive oil, then put it
in the oven to toast. I mixed the eggs and
lettuce with pear vinegar and green olive oil, added the
grated cheese and toasted croutons. That was it. As for
the tradition of mixing the salad table side, that also
at Cardini came from the scarcity of options in the kitchen.

(04:03):
If customers only had one choice of dish on the menu,
Cardini figured his servers could at least make a show
of serving it. But Caesar is not the only person
who claimed to have invented this salad. Another man named
Paul Maggiora, who was Cardinis business partner, said it was
him who threw the salad together, and that because he

(04:24):
had made it for airmen from the United States, he
called it aviators salad. Yeah, that name will come up,
and yet another version But before we get to that,
there is another man, Livio Santini, who was eighteen when
he worked for the Cardinis in their tu on a restaurant.
He claimed that the salad was when his mother had
made back in Italy, and then he made it in

(04:45):
the restaurant kitchen, only to have it taken over and
claimed by Caesar. Even Cardini's brother Alex, said that he
was the real inventor, a story that has been debated
in the family for years. According to the version, Alex
told he may a salad for a bunch of Air
Force pilots from rockwell Field who had fallen asleep in
the restaurant after partying all night. The Cardinis let them doze,

(05:09):
and when they woke up, Alex made them the aviators
salad for breakfast. Alex's version may have been a variation
on the original variation that included Anchovi's that's something that
Caesar was apparently against. Yeah, we're gonna have a quote
about that later. Uh. There are even though a couple
of variations within this version. One is that though Alex

(05:32):
Cardini invented the dish, the salad came to have Caesar's
names simply because it was his name on the restaurant.
Another version that sometimes pops up is that Alex invented
the salad when the two were running their first restaurant together,
and that he named it for his brother, But that
is a little unclear. In the restaurant that he mentioned,

(05:53):
which is called Alex and Caesar's, there's not really evidence
that that really existed or if he was misremembering, because
it appears that there was a time when Alex had
his own restaurant called Alex's Place. That is based on
advertisements in papers that that's confirmed, and it's possible that
he considered that a joint venture. But in any case,
Alex Cardini eventually moved to Mexico City and opened several

(06:16):
restaurants of his own, and on the menus there it
was called the Alex Cardini Caesar Salad. In recent years,
Alex's granddaughter Carla Cardini, has shared Alex's version with foodie groups,
including the tip that it should include lime juice, not
lemon juice, which is often attributed to a mistranslation. But wait,
we're not done yet. There is yet another claim to

(06:39):
the salad's invention. This one does not originate in Cardini's
restaurant at all, and it predates the Tiawaa creation by decades.
This version places the salad's inception in Chicago, totally different place,
at a restaurant called the New York Cafe, and the
year nineteen o three and the spersion. It's another Italian

(07:01):
who gets the credit, Jacomo ja who was a cook
at the cafe, and he is said to have named
the recipe after Julius Caesar. But this version has appeared
in print a number of times. The first example of it, though,
seems to be in a book titled Bull Cook and
Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, which was self published in

(07:22):
nineteen sixty by a man named George Leonard Herder, and
Herder was quite a character in a variety of ways,
but the lack of sourcing for most of his history
details means this version has a whole lot of question
marks around it. It is entirely possible that Jacomo Jr.
Is a fictional character that herd Or dreamed up. Herd
Er claimed that this person, Jacomo Jr. Had made the

(07:45):
salad dressing out of ingredients that he had on hand
because he was trying to make mayonnaise, but never pulled
it off, and that he had then just made it
into addressing and added croutons to please his French customers
and bacon to police his German patrons. Herder also claimed
that this was the only version worth making, and that
any other version of a caesar salad was quote fouled up.

(08:09):
One of the elements of a Caesar salad that comes
up from time to time, and it's really not clear
in which of these many iterations that originated, is that
you're supposed to eat it with your hands. The romane
lettuce isn't supposed to be chopped. The leaves are left intact,
so each leaf can be picked up by the rigid
base and then eaten without any utensils. Serving it this

(08:31):
way means that the preparation has to be done to
really exacting standards, with the leaves rolled in the dressing
instead of tossed the way one would toss a chopped salad,
to ensure that the leaves are coated evenly. Because the
ends need to be left clean, you to grab them
with your hands. I kind of love this, I kind
of want to try it. Um. I know I have

(08:53):
seen plates of caesar salad plated that way. It never
occurred to me you were supposed to pick it up
with your hand. I always just cut, cut, cut, But
now I will know. So coming up, we're going to
talk about how the caesar salad spread in popularity, which
probably contributed to this ongoing conflict over who got credit.
But first we are going to pause for a sponsor break.

(09:23):
Regardless of who initially thought up this salad, it quickly
gained a following. One of Cardini's most famous customers was U. S.
Army General Billy Mitchell, who was considered the father of
the U. S. Air Force and whose outspoken criticism of
military leadership led to a widely publicized court martial in
but in the early nineteen twenties. Mitchell was stationed at

(09:46):
San Diego and was a regular at Cardinis. To you
on a restaurant, and the general fell so in love
with caesar salad that when he traveled he would show
chefs at the restaurants he visited how it was made,
and that helped spread the dishes popularity. Cardini later said,
quote when he had his big court martial, his wife
told me he used to come home from the hearings

(10:06):
and mix a caesar salad for dinner. Julia Child wrote
about experiencing the caesar salad at Caesar's place as a
child in her book From Julia Child's Kitchen quote, My parents,
of course ordered the salad. Caesar himself rolled the big
card up to the table, toss the remain in a
great wooden bowl. And I wish I could say I
remembered his every move, but I don't. The only thing

(10:30):
I see again clearly is the eggs. I can see
him break two eggs over that romain and roll them
in the greens, going all creamy as the eggs float
over them. Two eggs in a salad to one minute
coddled eggs and garlic flavored croutons and grated parmesan cheese.
It was a sensation of a salad from coast to coast.

(10:51):
In seven, journalist and gossip columnist Earl Wilson wrote a
piece about the popularity of the caesar salad in Hollywood
that was for a syndicate new column which appeared in
papers across the US, and he opened it with quote,
I've long noticed that such Hollywood glamor pusses as Joan Crawford,
Dorothy Lemore, Lana Turner, and Betty Hutton smells strongly and

(11:13):
strangely of and here your columnist blushes furiously of garlic.
Wilson eventually discovered that the source of that garlic smell
was the movie stars fondness for Caesar salad. But the
truly interesting part of this right up is a paragraph
in which Wilson gives the reader of today some clues
about how the dish was spread around the country and

(11:35):
how it became so popular. Note in the quote, though
he got Cardini's name wrong, he writes, quote, I found
it was invented by an Italian named Caesar Gardini in
his Tioana restaurant. Edmund Low tasted it there and brought
it to Hollywood. Caesar's ex partner, Peter Fregario, is now
a captain at On Reeves here, where, of course you

(11:56):
can get a wonderful Caesar salad. That column all so
evidence is how garlic was at this point not the
dietary staple for the US that it is today. And
I think we've all been on social media and seen
people make the joke like when the recipe calls for
two clothes of garlic, I put in six or whatever
other number not the case at his point in time.

(12:17):
Wilson goes on to tell the reader how to make
a Caesar salad, although he does this in a very
jokey way. There's a whole side story about how his
kids tennis ball got in it um and then he says, quote,
try it. What can you lose but your stomach. Some
people out here say you can eat all that garlic
and because of the climate, absorb and never smell up
the joint with it. That's what they say. I love garlic.

(12:44):
You've probably heard at some point that a true Caesar
salad has anchovies, or that it originally had them, And
we mentioned that Alex's version had them, and they come
up in an interview that Caesar card and he gave
in that article, which likens Cardini's influence on food in
the US to that of Buddy Bolden's on jazz quotes

(13:05):
and is saying, quote, it's a wonder my salad has
survived at all what some chefs have done to it.
They had anchovy's tomatoes, minced ham, even asparagus. Why do
they want to spoil it? Going about the rift between
Alex and Caesar and Alex's inclusion of anchovy pace. This
seems like a dig on Caesar's part against his sibling.

(13:29):
Very publicly. In nineteen fifty three, the International Society of Epicures,
which was based in Paris, named the Caesar salad quote
the best original dish to come out of the United
States in the past fifty years. Since Caesar Cardini became
famous as a salad expert. After being lauded by that
international society, he was often asked for tips on making

(13:53):
great salads in the press, and one that showed up
repeatedly in newspapers in nineteen fifty six was that quote,
horse radish should be added to the dressing for every
green salad to really tease the palette, use one half
level teaspoon for every four servings, and be sure to
add a pinch of cinnamon. I'm okay with this horse
radish suggestion, but then you add cinnamon to it, and

(14:16):
I'm like, what I literally when I read it made
the scooby doo confused noise. I was like, but now
I want to try it and see, because maybe he
knew maybe I have both those things in the fridge.
We'll see. So by that time Caesar Cardinny had relocated
to Los Angeles. He had been selling his dressing by

(14:38):
the bottle, initially from his small gourmet grocery store, which
was Caesar Cardini Foods, and then by a wider distribution
That dressing was trademarked in and he had left two
restaurants behind in Tijuana. They continued to operate under his name,
but they had new owners. On November three, Cardini had

(14:59):
a stroke and he was interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery.
His brother Alex offered a reward after his brother's death
to anyone who could prove him wrong that the salad
was his invention and not Caesar's. And while this stoked
an ongoing family feud, and both sides feel that they
know the real truth, it doesn't seem that this matter

(15:19):
was ever definitively settled. After Caesar's death, his daughter Rosa
ran the family business until it was eventually sold. It
continues today. You can still buy Cardie news dressing at
grocery stores across the country and also from online retailers,
and I did while I was researching this delicious. As
for the restaurants Caesar's place, it still exists it's in

(15:41):
what was the second location where it moved to in
uh there in Tijuana. Although it's life of service has
not been continuous for a while. It had over the
years become quite run down, and in two thousand nine
it actually closed. But now it is run by the
Placentia Group which acquired it in and they re modeled
it and dressed it up and made it beautiful, and

(16:02):
now it's a very um like high end experience, and
if you order a Caesar salad there, you will get
the entire table side show of careful preparation. And while
the restaurant still touts itself as the home of the
original Caesar salad, it now credits Caesar Alex and Livio
Santini with its invention. And July four is now National

(16:24):
Caesar Salad Day in the United States. I feel like
now I will always have a Caesar salad on that day.
Not a difficult ask in my book. Um are now
moving on to our second story, which is Graham crackers,
which are today a sweet standard in many cupboards. It's
the base on which we build s'mores. It's a snack
for toddlers. It is the star ingredient in some dessert crusts.

(16:48):
But the origin of the Graham Cracker was all about
clean living, and to get into that, we have to
talk about Sylvester Graham. Sylvester Graham was born July five
in West Suffield, Connecticut. He had sixteen siblings sixteen. His father,
he was seventy when his youngest child was born, died

(17:10):
when Sylvester was only two. His mother was left destitute,
with many of these children still young enough to be
living at home. The pressure of this whole situation caused
his mother to really have a breakdown. The courts determined
her to have quote a deranged state of mind. So
a year after his father's death, Sylvester, who was still

(17:30):
a toddler, started down a long series of foster living situations,
sometimes with older siblings. And after working a number of
jobs as a young man, Graham, who is described as
having been sort of odd and also you'll see him
described as weak bodied in his youth, started college, but
not until the age of twenty nine, but that did
not last. He too had some sort of mental breakdown

(17:54):
one semester into his education at Amherst, and that led
to two significant events. One and he decided to leave
college and instead become a Presbyterian minister, and two he
got married to one of the nurses who took care
of him. That was a woman named Sarah Earle. Graham
preached about nutrition and health in tandem with any discussion

(18:14):
of religious matters, because he really believed they were all connected.
And this was not entirely unusual for the time, but
Graham was definitely an extreme example. Although he was technically
a minister, he did not have a congregation. He was
really good at public speaking, so he gave lectures first
on temperance, which was a cause he had long supported,

(18:36):
and then on wider health topics. He would use the
idea of moral debasement as an example of how damaging
behaviors like drinking and eating rich food could be, always
with plenty of anecdotal stories of people who had fallen
from grace through indulgence. Graham published a book in eighteen
thirty seven titled A Treatise on Bread and Breadmaking, and

(18:59):
it jumps right into the heart of the matter regarding
the reverence beliefs in the opening lines, which read quote,
there are probably few people in civilized life who were
the question put to them directly, would not say that
they consider bread one of the most, if not the
most important article of diet which enters into the food
of man. And yet there is in reality almost a

(19:21):
total and universal carelessness about the character of bread. Thousands
in civic life will, for years and perhaps as long
as they live, eat the most miserable trash that can
be imagined in the form of bread, and never seem
to think that they can possibly have anything better, nor
even that it is an evil to eat such vile
stuff as they do. He was also a proponent of

(19:44):
what we would call a raw food diet today. Graham
felt that food in general should be eaten in its
natural state, as provided by God to achieve the best health.
He wrote quote, if man were to subsist wholly on
uncooked food, he would never suffer from the improper temperature
if his ailment. Hot substances taken into the mouth serve

(20:06):
more directly and powerfully to destroy the teeth than any
other cause which acts immediately upon them, And hot food
and drink received into the stomach always in some degree
debilitate that organ, and through it every other organ in
portion of the whole system, diminishing. As an ultimate result,
the vital power of every part, impairing every function and

(20:29):
increasing the susceptibility of the whole body to the action
of disturbing causes and predisposing it to disease. Again, if
man were to subsist entirely on food in a natural state,
he would never suffer from concentrated ailment. Again not a doctor.
But as we mentioned just before quoting these passages, all

(20:52):
of these thoughts about food and eating raw were tied
up with morality, not in the sense of today's very
problematic associations of assigning food's moral values usually associated with
how it could impact your weight, which is its own
whole problematic thing. But this was a different connection between
food and morality. Specifically, Sylvester Graham thought that people were

(21:14):
just too full of lust and sinful sexual urges, and
he thought that their diets were causing that problem. Graham's
entire approach to eating and health and morality weighed everything
on a scale where things he perceived a sinful were
and he believed going to negatively harm a person's physical
well being just as much as their soul. And he

(21:36):
thought that the fatty and meat heavy food that was
so common in US homes was over stimulating people in
a way that manifested as sexual urges. He had a
whole odd logic where he thought that meat raised a
person's body temperature in such a way that it made
them lustful. Reminds me of John Harvey Kellogg. Yeah, I

(22:00):
wrote a note in this outline that just bless his heart.
Coming up, we are going to talk about what came
to be known as the Graham diet. Those were Graham's
guidelines for eating and good health, and they got to
be surprisingly popular. But before we get to that, we
are going to take a moment to hear from the sponsors.
They keep stuff you missed in history class. Going to

(22:27):
achieve health of body and soul. Graham outlined the ideal diet,
and while it's definitely got some merit nutritionally at its roots.
For example, he was very big on a plant based diet,
but his system also does not sound very enjoyable because
in addition to eating simple food with little preparation, you
really were not allowed to season anything. Definitely no salt,

(22:50):
definitely no pepper. Meat obviously was out, as was alcohol,
and of course no smoking. But do you like coffee
or tea? Too? Bad? Water? Only there's no there's no
delightful beverages. Um. He would allow eggs, which is a
whole weird thing. I'm not sure what his logic was there.
But in addition to that strictness of what you could eat,
he also had steep limits on how much of it

(23:13):
you could eat, which was not very much. He prescribed
two meals a day, and they should be on the
small side. His inspiration for this diet wasn't eating the
same way that he believed Adam and Eve would have eaten.
He preached the civilization had gotten humans away from the
perfect nutrition of the garden of Eden. He wrote, quote,

(23:33):
we are informed also that the Romans more than two
thousand years ago had four or five different kinds of bread.
But at whatever period in the history of the race,
this artificial process was commenced, certain it is that indirect
violation of the laws of constitution and relation which the
Creator has established in the nature of man. This process

(23:54):
of mechanical analysis is, at the present day carried to
the full extent of possibility. He wanted people, ideally to
grow their own wheats, or, barring that, to find sources
of quote the best new wheat that can be produced
by proper tillage in a good soil, and here they
could wash and grind the wheat for their bread themselves.

(24:15):
He believed this was a lot healthier than anything you
could purchase. The coarse wheat flour he encouraged people to
make themselves became known as Graham flower. So In that
same book about bread, Graham also managed to pick a
fight with professional bakers, writing quote, in cities and large towns,
most people depend on public bakers for their bread. And

(24:37):
I have no doubt that public bakers as a body
are as honest and worthy a class of men as
any in society. I have no wish to speak evil
of anyone, and it is always painful to me to
find myself compelled infidelity to the common cause of humanity,
to expose the faults of any particular class of men,
when probably every other class in society is as deeply

(24:59):
involved in errors, which, in the sight of God events
at least an equal degree of moral turpitude. But public bakers,
like other men who serve the public more for the
sake of securing their own emolument than for the public good,
have always had recourse to various expedients in order to
increase the lucrativeness of their business. Graham then goes on

(25:21):
to explain how bakers have started to use additives in
their flower to make bread, and some of them are dangerous.
He also says that even bakers who don't stretch their
supplies with additional materials are still using mediocre flower. He
talked about this in speeches and sermons as well as
in print. Do you can imagine how much bakers liked this?

(25:43):
That was not at all? The baking profession got so
tired of being bad mouthed by Sylvester Graham that in
eighteen thirty seven a group of bakers in Boston protested
his lectures, causing one venue to shut down. The replacement
venue had to be boarded up to keep the mob out.
His lectures regarding Butcher's were similarly damning, and on two

(26:05):
occasions Butcher's showed up to protest Graham's talks. The year
after a treatise on Bread and bread Making, Graham released
a lecture to young men on Chastity, which offers very
detailed information on how the minister believed that a poor
diet would lead to sinful behavior. It is already pretty
clear that Sylvester Graham was not what you might call

(26:27):
sex positive, but he makes that so abundantly clear in
the preface of this book, writing that quote he who,
in any manner endeavors to excite the sensual appetites and
arouse the unchased passions of youth, is one of the
most heinous offenders against the welfare of mankind. He also
speaks out in this published lecture against basically any sexual

(26:49):
activity that's not conducted in an effort to produce offspring,
even masturbation, which he refers to as self pollution and
asserts is a quote very great and rapidly increasing evil
in our country. Even married couples should be careful because
quote sexual excess within the pale of wedlock is really
a very considerable and an increasing evil. Basically any sex

(27:15):
as evil, which is not a great attitude. In addition
to eating a very rigid diet, Graham also believed that
salvation and longevity required that people forego a lot of
creature comforts. He preached that people should bathe frequently, which
is great, of course for hygiene, but he also taught
his followers that they should do that bathing only with
cold water. It should never be warmed up, because again,

(27:37):
remember if you get warm, you'll have bad thoughts. Mattris is,
according to Sylvester Graham, should not be soft and cozy. Uh.
There were more appealing aspects to his guidelines for healthy living,
including that he did want people to get fresh air
and move their bodies, and also he was a big
fan of wearing comfortable clothes. Despite those more pleasant aspects,

(27:57):
a lot of this sounds extreme and even bizar to
the modern ear, but in the nineteenth century a lot
of people really liked what Graham was saying. For one,
the temperance movement was well under way by the eighteen thirties.
There were an estimated six thousand local temperance societies in
the US. By eighteen thirty three, Graham was affiliated for
a time with the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use

(28:20):
of Ardent Spirits. Historian Adam D. Spritzen makes the case
in his book The Vegetarian Crusade that social movements like abolition,
which encouraged people to avoid foods that were connected to slavery,
had set the stage for people to think about food
from a moral perspective. Additionally, cholera had claimed the lives
of thousands of people in North America, leading people to

(28:43):
fear anything that might spread disease, including the food and
drink that they consumed. Eventually, Graham had amassed such a
following that Graham might boarding houses were established so that
his followers could adhere to the principles of his teaching
in sort of an easy, organized way. Graham didn't really
profit from any of these they seemed to be run,

(29:04):
for the most part by people who believed in his message.
Sylvester Graham did continue to tour giving lectures and even
started publishing his own periodical, briefly, which was the Graham
Journal for Health and Longevity. Graham had emerged as an
early dietary reformer, one of the first people to create
a model of health lifestyle that his followers embraced. Just

(29:26):
as the concept of a meat abstaining lifestyle was really
gaining traction in the US and the world, the word
vegetarianism had started to become more common. Sylvester Graham died
on September fifty one at the age of fifty seven.
Death notices of his passing in the press were pretty minimal,
in part because his relatively early death invited criticism of

(29:48):
the very lifestyle he had helped to establish. Your food
was so great, why you die so young? Would be
critical just the same. The death did cause all manner
of controversy, even though they tried to keep it low key,
and accounts began to spring up in papers about the
last days of Graham's life. He had been sort of
frail his whole life, from the time he was a child,

(30:11):
when he was being sent from one foster situation to another.
Physician Russell Thatcher Trall, who had known Graham, pointed out
in one article that Graham had only become a vegetarian
at the age of forty, so he could not have
gained all the possible benefits from it that someone who
gave up meat earlier in their life might have. Trall
also disclosed to readers that Graham's doctor had insisted at

(30:33):
the end of the man's life that he eats some
amount of meat to improve his circulation, or that he
would no longer treat him, and according to Trale's accounts,
Sylvester Graham acquiesced, but immediately regretted having done so. We
do not know if any of this account is true,
and despite the controversy. Graham ms continued to follow his
teachings well after his death, and it's in the second

(30:54):
half of the nineteenth century that the Graham cracker emerged
as a commercial product. The specific the origin of the
Graham cracker is a little bit unclear. Sometimes you will
see Sylvester Graham himself credited with inventing it. I actually
saw several articles say that it was invented in e
nine in bound Brook, New Jersey, by him, but there's

(31:14):
not a lot in the way of substantiation for that
specific date. The phrase Graham cracker does appear in various
things starting in the eight thirties um, but it's always
unclear what exactly it means. It is also entirely possible, though,
that this evolved as a food created by Graham Mites
an attempt at making some sort of cracker with Graham

(31:36):
flower to just sort of fill that need in their diets.
Most accounts you will see kind of couch the Graham
crackers having been inspired by Sylvester Graham and his food reforms,
rather than invented by him. But we do know that
it originated either with the man himself or with his followers.
But that form of a baked good would have been

(31:57):
very different from the food that we call a graham
cracker today. For one, it would not have been sweet.
According to article in the Washington Post quote, the real
graham cracker was closer to a brand salteine without the salt.
That weighed a ton and missed out on taste. Probably
not a thing you would want to use to sandwich

(32:18):
a big chunk of chocolate and some toasted marshmallow. In
the late eighteen nineties, the National Biscuit Company, which would
eventually become Nabisco, started mass producing graham crackers. They weren't
the first to do it, but they were the first
to release successfully launch it as a product. Then in
their honeymade graham crackers were introduced, and at that point

(32:40):
anything truly tying them to Sylvester's ideals was completely gone.
Not only were they mass produced at that point, but
they were sweetened with molasses. That was something he would
have abhorred. It is the safe bet he would think
smores are fully demonic. I just can't imagine him not
being really, really ho afied by them. Yeah, well, if

(33:03):
it makes them feel any better from beyond the grave.
When I was a child my mom who had a
lot of very strong opinions about the the types and
quality of food that her children should eat. Graham crackers
were one of the acceptable things in our household where
we did not have a lot of refined sugar. So

(33:26):
there's that. I mean, they're still better than a lot
of sweet things you could give a kid in terms
of sugar content. Now I kind of want to look
up and see if there are any like old school
Graham cracker wricipies that I could try making and just
see what sort of horrors emerge from my oven um.
In the meantime, we're gonna have a more fun listener

(33:48):
mail about John Henry Pepper and his legacy. This is
from our listener Alex, who writes, Hey, Holly and Tracy,
I just listened to your episode on John Henry Pepper
and his Ghost, and your descriptions of his demon strations
at the Royal Polytechnic Institution reminded me strongly of a
similar series of lectures I went to as a kid.
I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where there's a large

(34:09):
university and Professor Bassam Shaka Shari used to put on
public chemistry demonstrations for audiences of all ages. My first
grade teacher took me to see one of his Christmas
lectures one time, and it was a formative experience for me.
Pepper sounds like he had a similar approach to science
education as Professor Shaka Shari. I ended up working in
science education for many years as a biologist at the

(34:31):
Exploratory Um, a science museum in San Francisco that sounded
like a more modern version of Pepper's installation at the Theater.
I highly recommend a visit if you're ever in the area.
Alex also suggests a topic that is I don't know
if it will happen or not for various reasons. It's
kind of a tricky subject, but I really appreciate both
the suggestion and this wonderful uh. Missive also thank you

(34:54):
for being an educator Alex and a scientist. UH. If
you would like the right to us you can do so.
You can do that at History Podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as missed in History. And if you would like
to subscribe to the show and have not done so yet,
it is super easy. You don't need a science educator
to show you you can do that very simply in

(35:14):
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