29 Dumb Facts About Dessert - mental_floss List Show (Ep.227)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube

And did you know that popsicles were invented by Frank W. Epperson when he was just 11

He left a glass containing soda powder, water, and a mixing stick on his back porch one night

The next morning, it was frozen, he had a popsicle, and then he went on to patent that idea in 1924

Let that be a lesson to you, youth of America. If you haven't discovered something important by the time you are 11, you are doomed

Anyway, that's the first of many facts about dessert I'm going to share with you today

Okay, let's start with a few more dessert origins. Strudel comes from a Middle High German word meaning whirlpool

The oldest known recipes for strudel are from 1696 and can be found in the Vienna City Library

Now, we don't know who invented strudel. It was probably Mr. or Mrs. Strudel, but we're not positive

But we do know that it was inspired by an older pastry, baklava

Baklava became popular in the Ottoman Empire, and most believe it came from Turkey

But there are even older desserts, like the 5th century Greek physician Agamas wrote a piece about the art of making cheesecake

He was also the first person to write a treatise about pulses. But cheesecake, baklava, strudel, these are disgusting desserts

Let's talk about something delicious, like bear claws, which is American. Bear claws were invented in the western US

The first printed reference to one appeared in a 1942 newspaper article in San Francisco

Two towns claim to have invented the banana split in the early 1900s

Latrobe, Pennsylvania and Wilmington, Ohio Now interestingly, residents of both towns claim that college students popularized the dish

So we don't know exactly where it's from But we do know that apparently college students like to eat dessert

Brief personal aside, when I arrived at Kenyon College in the fall of 1995, I discovered that I could eat Lucky Charms in the cafeteria whenever

I wanted and so for about two months I only ate Lucky Charms Moving on from dessert origins the world most expensive dessert is the Frozen Haute Chocolate Ice Cream Sundae at Serendipity 3 in New York City It costs

It has a blend of 28 cocos and edible gold toppings, because nothing tastes as good as

eating gold. Plus, you eat it with a golden spoon decorated with diamonds, which you can bring home with you

Although, if you are really baller, you just eat the spoon. Another world record, biggest gingerbread house. In 2013, a 2,520 square foot gingerbread house was built in Texas

That's 35.8 million calories. But don't worry, no one ate it, because this is America where food is for bragging about, not for eating

The word for the Sicilian dessert, cannoli, by the way, comes from a word meaning little tube

So I guess this is a cannoli. No, it's a finger trap! I gotta keep my finger away from it. Another word of origin, French macaroons, aka the sandwich cookies that Blair enjoys on Gossip Girl, a reference clearly written by Meredith, got their name from an Italian word that referred to pasty food

English speakers borrowed this term to refer to an entirely different cookie, one with coconut or almonds

They added an extra O to the word, though, you know, to make it less confusing

In France, they call candy apples, pommes d'amour, which means apples of love, because nothing says love like candying your apples. That's actually my life motto

And eclair comes from the French word for lightning, but no one knows why it got that name

It may have something to do with the glistening icing or how quickly they're eaten

An eclair on my kitchen counter is very similar to a cow in a field in a thunderstorm

They can both be gone very quickly with limited warning. In the 1960s, Jell-O tried to make dessert much less appetizing by introducing vegetable flavors like celery, Italian salad, and seasoned tomatoes

And if that sounds good to you, you should head down to Texas, where you can try a Piccadilly

a pickle-flavored snow cone. Oh, that sounds disgusting? Well, imagine being a 16th century Italian who ate eel marzipan

All right I done grossing you out now I promise Let move on to something delicious Cookies Italians used to eat eel cookies No I just kidding Let talk about Girl Scouts Girl Scouts sell about 200 million boxes of cookies a year bringing in 700 million dollars

Speaking of Girl Scouts, the first time a s'more recipe was ever published was in the 1925 Girl Scouts Handbook

Marshmallows are derived from a plant called Althea officinalis, which has medicinal properties

The leaf and root of the plant can be used to treat sore throats and stomach problems

But how will we work off all the calories from these desserts? Well, perhaps at the Tour de Donut, a bicycle race that originated in Staunton, Illinois

but has since spread around to other locations. Along the 32-mile route, there are two donut stops

Donut eating is not required, but for every donut that a participant eats, five minutes

is subtracted from their time. I'm not very good at math, but I wonder if there's a way to win the race by just eating donuts

Ruth Graves Wakefield, the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, sold the rights to her

recipe to Nestle in 1939 for one dollar. Although to be fair, that's like eleven dollars in today's money

Speaking of inventors, in 1897, a dentist and confectioner teamed up to create the first

cotton candy machine. They called their cotton candy Fairy Floss. A dentist co-created cotton candy

That doesn't surprise me at all. I have a theory about dentists that they want us to get cavities because that's how they

get money. Our pain, their profit. But I'm not, of course, referring to the dentists in the Mental Floss fan community

I mean the other dentists. You guys are awesome. The first time a pie was thrown in someone's face on film was in 1909

The movie was called Mr. Flip. Bet that guy really flipped out

Speaking of pie-throwing, every year teams compete in the World Custard Pie Throwing Championship in Kent, England

This is how you win. You get six points for hitting someone in the face, three for the chest, and one for the arm

If you miss three times, points are taken away. By the way, there is a pie town, New Mexico. According to the town's website, the name came from a World War I veteran who broke down on the side of the road there in the 1920s, and he started baking apple pies

And then the pies were so good that they built a town around him The moral of the story is they didn have cell phones in the 1920s so wherever your car broke down you just moved there The store sprinkles cupcakes as a few 24 cupcake ATMs which can hold 700 cupcakes at once The Beverly Hills ATM sells around 1 cupcakes a day

We only have one cupcake, and it isn't even real. In 2011, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan got a frozen yogurt machine installed in the

Supreme Court cafeteria. For that, she got the nickname, the frozen yogurt justice

It's like the worst X-Man ever. What's your superpower? Well, anytime you want, I can give you chocolate soft serve, or vanilla soft serve, or a mix of the two

Another US leader who took dessert seriously, Ronald Reagan. In Presidential Proclamation 5219, he made July 15, 1984 National Ice Cream Day

In the proclamation, he describes ice cream as a nutritious and wholesome food. Now National Ice Cream Day is celebrated on the third Sunday every July

And on the topic of people your dad likes, in 2003, on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno took a bite out of a 125-year-old fruitcake

It was brought to the show by 83-year-old Morgan Ford, who explained that the fruitcake had been passed down from generation to generation in his family

After sampling it, Leno said, it needs more time. And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you another story about old desserts

In 2004, the Associated Press ran a story about a science teacher at George Stevens Academy in Maine

It wasn't because Mr. Benotti had won an award or anything, the AP wanted to know about the unwrapped Twinkie that he had been keeping on his chalkboard for 30 years to see what its shelf life was

Benotti told them, quote, It's rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it's probably still edible. Science

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