Every PlateTales food history story tagged Modern, newest first.
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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.
KFC Japan ran its first Christmas campaign in December 1974. The manager who claims the idea admits a white lie, and NHK was teaching Christmas roast chicken in 1959.
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.
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.
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.
Trick-or-treating began as a protection racket run by children, and for decades the payoff was apples, nuts or coins. Candy took over only in the 1950s.
French cooking did not rise on Italian help alone. The record shows a printed system from 1651, restaurants before the Revolution, and two chefs who wrote the rules.
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.
Armies have fought a long battle between food that keeps and food soldiers will eat. Here is how Roman wheat, hardtack, tin cans, C- and K-rations and the MRE came about.
A 2009 government campaign, a palace-kitchen TV drama and a Los Angeles taco truck all helped Korean food travel. Here is what each did, and how well the plan worked.
Four household dishes, from Italian bread soup to Jewish schmaltz, show how family recipes survive, change or vanish when nobody writes them down.
Canning really was a wartime invention. Spam, instant coffee and M&M's were not, but war made them household names. Here is what the sources say.
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