Every PlateTales food history story tagged Inventions, newest first.
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Chicago's Palmer House says it made the first brownie for the 1893 World's Fair. The printed record shows a molasses cake in 1896 and chocolate recipes after 1900.
Tiramisu is younger than most of the people who eat it. The best evidence points to a Treviso restaurant around 1970, but Friuli has a 1959 bill and a Baltimore baker has a story.
The first pecan pie in print dates to February 1886 and was a milk custard with boiled nuts. The syrup pie, the New Orleans legend and the Karo story all came later.
Caesar Cardini of Tijuana has the best claim to the Caesar salad, but the famous July 4, 1924 date surfaced decades later, and three other men said the bowl was theirs.
Dorcas Reilly put green bean casserole together in a Campbell's test kitchen in 1955. Fifty years on, she told a reporter she could not recall doing it.
Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya melted cheese over fried tortillas for four women from Eagle Pass, Texas. His own newspaper interviews say it happened in 1940, three years before the usual date.
Goelitz sold candy corn as Chicken Feed, rooster on the package, to a country that fed corn to livestock. October ads for it only spiked in the 1950s.
Saccharin and corn flakes came from real slips. Potato chips, chocolate chip cookies and Worcestershire sauce are mostly good stories. Here is what the records show.
Dom Perignon did not invent champagne, and he was partly hired to stop the bubbles. The real history runs through a London paper in 1662 and a widow's kitchen table.
Nobody knows who made the first cheese, but milk-fat residue on pottery from Poland puts cheesemaking at about 5500 BCE. Here is what the evidence shows, and what the legends add.
Cacao was in use in Ecuador about 5,300 years ago. The chocolate bar is only from the 1840s on, and several tidy stories about Cortes and Aztec feasts do not hold up.
Cornflakes came out of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the 1890s. Two Kellogg brothers share the credit, and they spent years fighting over it, and over sugar.
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