The next time you have a cheese or ham sandwich , have a thought on how it came to be known by that name. Actually the term is derived from the creator of the sandwich. John Montagu (1718-1792) who was The 4th Earl of Sandwich. The story goes to detail that he in his youth , he was one with a fiery temperament , a fire raising rebel who had a fierce inclination for gambling .A habitual hard core gambler , he very seldom wanders away from the gambling table even when for something as insignificant as eating.
So whenever he gets hungry he will ask for a slice of beef between two pieces of bread for sustenance after which he will just continue his gambling.He was known to have stayed at the gambling table non stop for 24 hours,and that is how the term sandwich came to be in the year 1762. So the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific ( which is now a part of Hawaii
Another popular perception of common folk who knows their history will assume that a Caesar Salad was a dish of preference for the roman emperor, Julius Caesar.That is also far off the mark as impressions go. This tasty culinary masterpiece was only created almost 2,000 years after Caesar’s demise. It was in fact created by Caesar Cardini , who was running Caesar’s Place restaurant in On the 4th of July 1924, it turns out that more people had turned up than he had anticipated and prepared food for but like any competent chefs, in the tradition of great kitchen creativity, Caesar improvised a salad, making do with the ingredients he had, which included lettuce, garlic, olive oil, croutons, cheese and eggs. He added a little bit of his flair for showmanship and tossed the ingredients himself at the diners' tables. The Cardini family took the original recipe in 1948 and trademarked it, and since then have come up with more than a dozen varieties of bottled "Cardini's" salad dressing,so well loved by fans today.
Welsh Rarebit or Welsh Rabbit. A dish of melted cheese and butter mixed with seasoning and poured over buttered toast has nothing to do with rabbit.
Bombay Duck is not a duck at all but a fish. How the origin of the term "Bombay duck" came to be is uncertain. There are suggestions that, during the days of British Raj, the fish was often transported by rail after drying.
It was noted that the train compartments of the Bombay Dak which happened to be the name of a train, the Bombay Mail, had the smell of the fish wafting all through the deck, thereby leading the British to refer to the peculiar smell emanating from that train compartment as the "Bombay Dak".
Another misnomer Mock turtle soup has nothing to do with turtles at all. It refers to an English soup created in the mid-18th century as a cheaper imitation of the costly delicacy of green turtle soup. The ingredients were brains and organ meats such as calf's head, or a calf's foot that imitates closely the texture and flavor of the original's turtle meat.
Another myth worth dispelling is the derivation of "curry” It is not from the army officer, Sir George Curry (1826-1890), who developed a taste for the highly spicy stews of the Indians, and as a consequence, had to distance him from the other officers and dine by himself in the officer's mess.
Curry is actually an anglicized version of the Tamil word “kharii ” which means "gravy" or "sauce" instead of "spices".
