Nearly every famous dessert comes with an origin story, and many of those stories are better than true. These tiles keep the documented parts: a chocolate cake fought over by a hotel and a pastry shop, a fruitcake found in the Antarctic ice, an actor who left money for cake, and the cookie that came first but got called the copy. Where a tale is only a legend, the card says so.
Every tile in a Desserts game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Classics
nine stories
1The fortune cookie's roots lead to Japan
On the tile: Fortune Cookie1878Myth busted
Fortune cookies end meals in Chinese restaurants across the United States, yet they are conspicuously absent in China. Researcher Yasuko Nakamachi spent more than six years finding out why, and concluded they almost certainly came from Japan. Family bakeries near a temple outside Kyoto still make a bigger, browner version with sesame and miso, the paper fortune pinched into the fold, and she found an 1878 image of a man baking them. Of some 3 billion fortune cookies made each year, almost all are made in the United States.
German chocolate cake has nothing to do with Germany. It is named for Sam German, who in 1852 developed a sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's Chocolate Company, which named the product after him. It did not become well known until 1957, when a Texas homemaker's cake recipe using it ran in a Dallas newspaper. General Foods, which then owned Baker's, sent the recipe to newspapers across the country, and sales of the chocolate jumped 73 percent in a year. Somewhere along the way, German's lost its apostrophe and s.
Fruitcake jokes are about cakes that never go away. In 2017 New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust announced it had found a real one at Cape Adare, inside Antarctica's oldest building, a hut built by a Norwegian explorer's team in 1899 and used by Robert Falcon Scott's expedition in 1911. The cake, made by the British company Huntley & Palmers, was wrapped in paper inside a tin and about 106 years old. A trust program manager said it was in "excellent condition," and the trust said it smelled almost edible.
Australia and New Zealand agree the pavlova is named for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured both countries in the 1920s. They do not agree on who made it first. Australia credits Perth chef Bert Sachse, whose recipe is dated to about 1935. New Zealand researcher Helen Leach found a 1929 recipe there for a large meringue cake named after the dancer. In 2010 the Oxford English Dictionary credited New Zealand with the first written pavlova recipe, a gelatin dessert, but still listed the origin as both countries.
Boston cream pie is a cake: sponge layers, pastry cream and a chocolate top. It is credited to Augustine François Anezin, a French chef at Boston's Parker House hotel around the time of the Civil War, whose name is often misreported as Sanizan, probably because of a misprint in a 1925 newspaper interview. The hotel's chef says it was originally baked in pie tins. In 1996, after a Norton High School civics class sponsored the bill, it became the state dessert, beating Toll House cookies and Indian pudding.
6Tiramisu is younger than it tastes, and still disputed
On the tile: Tiramisuc. 1970Legend
Tiramisu tastes old-fashioned, but its best-known origin is recent. The usual credit goes to the Campeol family's Beccherie restaurant in Treviso, where it is said to have been created around 1970, and the Veneto region's governor, Luca Zaia, has sought EU protection for that recipe. In 2016 food writers Clara and Gigi Padovani published a rival claim from neighboring Friuli-Venezia Giulia, including a "tirimu su" served in Tolmezzo in 1959. Zaia replied, "No one can swindle us out of tiramisu."
As Auguste Escoffier told it, he created peach Melba for the Australian soprano Nellie Melba while he was chef at London's Savoy Hotel. She had sent him tickets to Wagner's Lohengrin, whose production featured a boat shaped like a swan. The next evening he served her fresh peaches over vanilla ice cream in a silver dish set on a swan carved from ice. A few years later he added a sweetened raspberry purée and renamed it Pêche Melba. The singer's stage name came from her home city, Melbourne.
8Black Forest cake may not come from the Black Forest
On the tile: Black Forest1915Legend
Black Forest cake, with its chocolate sponge, cream, cherries and cherry schnapps, is what the region's tourism chief calls the Black Forest's most famous export, yet it may not have been invented there. The official story credits baker Josef Keller, who is said to have first served it in 1915 at a café in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. The town of Tübingen claims an invention in 1930. Black Forest locals point out that preserved cherries with cream, sometimes with a shot of schnapps, had been served in the region for a while.
MoonPie's own origin story begins in 1917, when a Kentucky coal miner told Earl Mitchell, a traveling salesman for Chattanooga Bakery, that he wanted a snack "as big as the moon." Mitchell reported back, and the bakery answered with marshmallow, graham and chocolate in a round, filling treat that fit in a lunch pail. It sold for 5 cents. The bakery made more than 100 products at the time, but this is the one that lasted, and the company says it now makes about a million MoonPies a day.
Thomas Jefferson is often credited with introducing ice cream to America. Monticello's historians call that claim false: there are accounts of ice cream in the colonies as early as 1744. What Jefferson did leave is the first known ice cream recipe recorded by an American, in his own hand, probably learned from his French butler, Adrien Petit. At the President's House, guests were served ice cream inside warm pastry. One guest, Samuel Latham Mitchill, wrote that it looked "as if the ice had just been taken from the oven."
Häagen-Dazs sounds Scandinavian. It came from the Bronx. Reuben Mattus, a Polish immigrant who had worked in ice cream since childhood, wanted a foreign-sounding name for his rich new ice cream. He said he put together a made-up Danish name to honor Denmark's rescue of Jews during World War II, and early cartons reportedly carried a map of Denmark. Danish does not even use that umlaut; Mattus added it to stand out. As he put it, "Häagen-Dazs doesn't mean anything."
3Hot, cold and probably not about the Alaska Purchase
On the tile: Baked Alaska1880-1894Myth busted
Popular lore says chef Charles Ranhofer invented baked Alaska at Delmonico's in New York in 1867 to honor the Alaska Purchase. Food historian Jim Chevallier says Ranhofer never called it that. His 1894 cookbook recipe is "Alaska, Florida," Alaska because the ice cream is cold and Florida because the dish is hot. French cooks had their own version, the omelette surprise. The British journalist George Augustus Sala, served one at Delmonico's on New Year's Day 1880, wrote that it was "strangely good."
Two Rivers, Wisconsin, has a state historical marker saying that in 1881 a soda fountain owner topped ice cream with chocolate sauce and at first sold it only on Sundays. In that telling, the spelling changed when a glassware salesman ordered "sundae dishes." Ithaca, New York, has paperwork instead: pharmacy ledgers, an 1892 newspaper ad, and an 1894 letter from a patent attorney about protecting the Platt & Colt pharmacy's ice cream "Sunday." Both towns still claim the title.
At Margaret Thatcher's funeral in 2013, the Bishop of London said the former scientist had been "part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice-cream." The story is popular, and it is a myth. Thatcher did work as a food research scientist at J. Lyons around 1949 to 1951, reportedly on cake and pie fillings as well as ice cream. But soft serve had originated in the United States about a decade earlier, and a Royal Society article found no firm evidence that she helped invent it.
In 1978 Ben and Jerry opened their first scoop shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, on a $12,000 investment, $4,000 of it borrowed. Their training was a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State. The university's teaching goes back to a winter dairy class first offered in 1892, scheduled for when "farm work is least pressing and the boys can best be spared." By 1925 ice cream had its own course, which still runs every January.
The story goes that on a very cold night in 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson left a glass of soda powder and water, stirring stick still in it, on his porch in San Francisco and woke to find it frozen. SFGate checked the weather: the city's lowest temperature that year was 39 degrees. What is documented is his 1924 patent for a frozen confection eaten "without the need for a plate, spoon, fork or other implement." How it became the Popsicle depends on who you ask.
In 1904 David Strickler, a 23-year-old University of Pittsburgh student working the soda fountain at Tassell Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, split a banana lengthwise and built a sundae around it. There was no proper dish to serve it in, so a glassmaker in nearby Grapeville made one. Wilmington, Ohio, credits a split made there in 1907 and has held a Banana Split Festival since 1997. In 2013 Pennsylvania approved a historical marker in Latrobe, calling its claim better documented.
In 1920 a boy in Christian Kent Nelson's sweet shop could not choose between ice cream and a chocolate bar, because he had only a nickel. Nelson spent weeks finding a way to make chocolate stick to ice cream and sold the result as the I-Scream Bar. With chocolate maker Russell Stover he patented it in 1922, but the patent was so broad it seemed to cover every coated ice cream bar, and the legal fights reportedly cost about $4,000 a day. By 1924 Nelson had sold the company.
Ice cream was served in colonial America, but it was so hard to make that few people could afford it. In 1843 Nancy M. Johnson of Philadelphia patented an "artificial freezer": a tub of ice and salt around a container, with a hand crank turning beaters that kept scraping frozen cream off the inside walls. Her patent even recommended glass cylinders and wood or ivory beaters for acidic fruit juices. The New-York Historical Society credits her machine with making ice cream a dessert all Americans could afford.
2The chocolate chip cookie was probably no accident
On the tile: Ruth Wakefield1930sLegend
The story goes that Ruth Wakefield ran short of baking chocolate at her Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, chopped up a Nestlé bar and was surprised when the pieces held their shape. Author Carolyn Wyman doubts the accident: Wakefield was a trained dietitian known for running a tight ship. Pastry chef Stella Parks found ads for chocolate chip cookies from 1928, a decade before Wakefield published her recipe. What Wakefield surely did was make them famous. Nestlé printed her recipe on its wrapper and later sold ready-made morsels.
In 1950 three women from the Hadassah Society of Minnesota asked H. David Dalquist, whose company became Nordic Ware, to reproduce a heavy cast-iron cake pan one family had brought from Germany. He made it in cast aluminum and added a "t" to Bund so he could trademark the name. For years it was relatively unknown. Then in 1966 Ella Rita Helfrich of Houston won second place in the Pillsbury Bake-Off with a Tunnel of Fudge cake made in one, and Pillsbury got more than 200,000 letters asking where to buy the pan.
In 1897 Pearle Wait, a carpenter in LeRoy, New York, who also bottled a cough remedy at home, experimented with gelatin and came up with a fruit-flavored dessert that his wife, May, named Jell-O. Lacking money and experience to sell it, he sold the trademark in 1899 to a fellow townsman, Orator Frank Woodward, for $450. Sales were so slow that Woodward reportedly offered the whole business to his manufacturing supervisor for $35. By 1902, after an advertising campaign, Jell-O sales reached $250,000.
In 1930, with the Great Depression under way, James Dewar was managing Continental Baking's Hostess bakery in Chicago. "We needed a good two-pack nickel number," he later recalled. The bakery already had molds for little shortcakes that it sold only during strawberry season, and Dewar's idea was to fill those cakes with a sweet cream. He adapted the name from a sign for Twinkle Toe Shoes he saw on a sales trip. By 1980 Twinkies were selling at a rate of about a billion a year.
Betty Crocker was never a real person. In 1921 a Gold Medal Flour puzzle contest brought the Washburn-Crosby Company about 30,000 entries, along with several hundred letters asking cooking questions. The company created a woman to sign the replies, taking Crocker from a retired executive and choosing Betty for its friendly sound. Female employees competed to write her signature, and one secretary's version is still used. Betty got a radio voice in 1924, a painted face in 1936 and, in 1947, her name on boxed cake mixes.
7An American orphan wrote the country's first cookbook
On the tile: Amelia Simmons1796
Until 1796 the cookbooks used in America were British. That year Amelia Simmons, who described herself as an American orphan, published American Cookery in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the first cookbook by an American published in the United States, just 47 pages in its first edition, and the first to include cranberry sauce, johnnycakes and a custard-style pumpkin pie. Almost nothing is known about Simmons beyond her title page, but the Library of Congress counts her book among the Books That Shaped America.
Frances Hashimoto was born in 1943 in a World War II internment camp in Poston, Arizona, where Japanese Americans were held. She grew up in Los Angeles and became a teacher, until her widowed mother urged her to take over Mikawaya, the family's traditional Japanese sweet shop in Little Tokyo. She did, at 27. Hashimoto is often credited with inventing mochi ice cream, balls of ice cream wrapped in soft, sweet rice cake, and she put it into supermarkets such as Trader Joe's and Safeway. In Japan, though, Lotte has sold a version called Yukimi Daifuku since 1981.
O.D. McKee started out in 1933 selling nickel cakes, using his 1928 Whippet car as a delivery truck. In 1935, in the middle of the Depression, he softened a hard oatmeal cookie and sandwiched two of them around a creme filling. When the family's Tennessee bakery launched a new brand on August 23, 1960, McKee named it for his granddaughter Debbie and put her picture on the box. The portrait was painted by artist Pearl Mann, and a slightly modified version is still used.
Robert Baddeley was a comic actor, never a leading man. In his will he told his executors to invest £100 so that every Twelfth Night the company at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, would get wine, punch and a cake. Actors there have gathered for Baddeley cake since 1795. In 2019 the theatrical fund's archivist said the ceremony had been missed only 13 times, during wars, theater closures and once when a visiting French company was performing. In 1888, guests reportedly included Oscar Wilde and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Girl Scout cookies were first baked at home, by girls and their mothers. In 1917, five years after Juliette Gordon Low started Girl Scouts in the United States, the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, baked cookies and sold them in its high school cafeteria. In 1922 the organization's magazine printed a cookie recipe, estimating ingredients for six or seven dozen at 26 to 36 cents, to be sold for 25 or 30 cents a dozen. During World War II, shortages of sugar, flour and butter led troops to sell calendars instead, starting in 1944.
3Did Shrove Tuesday buns really kill a Swedish king?
On the tile: Semla1771Legend
Swedes eat semlor, cardamom buns filled with almond paste and whipped cream, around Shrove Tuesday, and every year they retell a story: King Adolf Frederick died in 1771 after eating 14 of them, each in a bowl of hot milk. Archive records confirm he died of a stroke on February 12, 1771, a few hours after a Shrove Tuesday dinner, and semlor were probably served. But one account of the buns comes from a diplomat's diary written in Vienna, not from an eyewitness, and an archivist who checked the royal records called the story doubtful.
4The Christmas bread that needed the Pope's butter
On the tile: Stollen1474-1730
Dresden's Christmas stollen first appears in 1474, in a hospital's accounts, as a plain cake for the fasting period. Church rules banned butter and milk, so it was made of little more than flour and water and was rather tasteless. Saxony's Elector Ernst and his brother Albrecht asked the Pope to lift the ban, and in 1491 the reply, known as the Butter Letter, allowed butter in return for a penance payment. In 1730 Augustus the Strong had Dresden's bakers make a stollen weighing about 1.8 metric tons for some 24,000 guests.
New Orleans king cakes come with a tiny baby, and food expert Poppy Tooker traces the custom to the 1940s. As she tells it, a traveling salesman with a big overrun of little porcelain dolls from France suggested that Donald Entringer, whose McKenzie's was one of the city's biggest bakeries, bake them into king cakes. When the porcelain ran out, Entringer found plastic babies at a French Quarter importer. Earlier, Twelfth Night balls hid a bean in the cake, and whoever found it was crowned king or queen.
Pumpkin pie is a Thanksgiving fixture, but it was not on the menu at the 1621 harvest celebration at Plymouth. The only two surviving accounts of the meal mention wildfowl, corn and five deer brought by Wampanoag men. Kathleen Wall, a foodways culinarian at Plimoth Patuxet, points out that the colonists had no butter or wheat flour to make pie crusts, though the Wampanoag grew pumpkins and squashes. The first American cookbook to include a custard-style pumpkin pie was published in 1796.
A famous tale says that in the 14th century, rebels against Mongol rule in China hid messages in mooncakes calling for an uprising at the Mid-Autumn Festival, and so helped found the Ming dynasty. Historian Hok-Lam Chan collected the many versions and called the idea that a rebel strategist planned the hidden messages "preposterous." What is known is that an uprising did bring Zhu Yuanzhang to power as founder of the Ming. The festival's dense cakes, filled with red bean, dates or lotus seed paste, needed no conspiracy.
The Christmas pudding began as a pottage, a broth of raisins and other dried fruit, spices and wine, thickened with breadcrumbs or ground almonds and often made with meat or meat stock. A recipe called Fygey, from the 1390s, simmered almonds, figs, raisins, ginger and honey. It was served at the start of the meal, not the end. Only in the late 1600s did it firm up, and it was the Victorians who tied pudding-making to Stir Up Sunday, after a prayer beginning "Stir up, we beseech thee."
Pi Day began in 1988 at San Francisco's Exploratorium, the idea of a museum physicist named Larry Shaw. Because March 14 is written 3/14, the first digits of pi, celebrants parade around a brass pi marker at 1:59 p.m. and then eat pie. The date is also Albert Einstein's birthday, so the crowd has sung "Happy Birthday" to him as well. Shaw, nicknamed the Prince of Pi by his colleagues, explained the circling this way: "Ours is a mystery religion."