pplpod

When the 18th Amendment took effect in 1920, early smugglers were small, disorganized, and often caught by the Coast Guard. This episode tells the story of William S. McCoy, who began running rum from Bimini to Miami and then changed the trade by anchoring just beyond the three-mile limit of U.S. waters and selling to local boats that raced the liquor ashore. We follow McCoy's schooner, the Tomoka...

Kopi luwak, or civet coffee, can cost around $80 a cup and is made from coffee beans that have passed through the Asian palm civet. This episode goes back to 19th-century Java, where Dutch colonial rulers banned local farmers from picking coffee for themselves, so the farmers gathered and roasted beans the civets left behind. We explain how the civet's choice of ripe cherries and its digestion cha...

The durian is prized enough to be given as a gift and sought across borders, yet it is so pungent that it is banned from public transit in cities like Singapore and Bangkok. This episode explains the fruit's chemistry, with sweet esters and ketones alongside sulfur compounds, and why people who grow up eating it notice different smells than first-time tasters. We explore the fruit's evolutionary l...

Edible bird's nest, one of the most expensive animal products people eat, is made from the hardened saliva of swiftlets, not swallows. This episode explains how male swiftlets spend about 35 days building nests from strands of saliva, why the nests are prized for their gelatinous texture, and why their high protein content may be hard for the human body to digest. We follow the trade from dangerou...

Ranch dressing began in the early 1950s when Steve Henson, a plumbing contractor near Anchorage, Alaska, cooked for his work crews and mixed buttermilk, mayonnaise, garlic, onion, and herbs into a dressing they loved. This episode follows his move to Santa Barbara County, the Hidden Valley Ranch guest ranch and steakhouse, and the guests who begged to take the dressing home. We explain how selling...

Spaghetti bolognese is a global comfort food, yet in Bologna the dish as most of the world knows it is dismissed as something that does not exist. This episode explains what true ragù alla bolognese is: a slow-cooked meat sauce built on a gently sweated soffritto, beef or veal with pork or pancetta, white wine, milk, and only a little tomato paste. We trace the sauce from the French ragoût to a la...

Century eggs are duck eggs cured in a strongly alkaline coating until the white becomes translucent brown jelly and the yolk turns into a dark, creamy center. This episode explains the chemistry behind the change: raising the pH to between 9 and 12 breaks down proteins into savory amino acids and produces the dish's famous ammonia smell. We look at Ming dynasty records, folk tales about duck eggs...

In January 2013, DNA tests by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland found horse DNA in 10 of 27 beef burger products and pig DNA in 23. One budget burger was nearly 30% horse. The testing that followed found that many Findus lasagna samples were largely or entirely horse meat, setting off recalls across Europe. This episode follows the meat from legally labeled Romanian abattoirs through a Cyprus-r...

Ciabatta feels like an ancient Italian bread, but Arnaldo Cavallari created it in 1982 in Adria, in Italy's Veneto region, to fight the imported French baguettes that were taking over Italy's sandwich market. This episode tells how weeks of experiments produced a new bread designed to save his bakery. We explain the science of a very wet, high-gluten dough that spreads into a slipper shape and tra...

In October 1858, a market seller known as Humbug Billy sold discounted peppermint lozenges in Bradford, England. They had been accidentally made with arsenic instead of the cheap plaster filler called daft. About 20 people died, mostly children, and around 200 more were seriously sickened in one of the most shocking food disasters of the Victorian era. This episode explains the world of food adult...

Each season, more than a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million boxes of cookies and bring in over $800 million in just a few months. This episode traces the business from a 1917 bake sale in Muskogee, Oklahoma, through licensed commercial baking in 1936, the switch to calendars and war bonds during World War II rationing, and the standardization forced by the baby boom. We break down the two-...

The tamale is far more than a holiday dish. This episode follows the corn dough, filling, and leaf wrapper back to Mesoamerica between 8,000 and 5,000 BC, explaining how nixtamalization, cooking corn in an alkaline solution of wood ash or lime, released niacin and protected whole civilizations from pellagra. We look at Maya travel tamales hardened with extra ash to last weeks on the march, the Azt...

In 1976 Thai entrepreneur Chaleo Yoovidhya created Krating Daeng, a cheap, uncarbonated, sweet tonic sold to laborers and long-haul truck drivers to keep them awake. In 1982 Austrian toothpaste salesman Dietrich Mateschitz tried it to fight crushing jet lag and saw a gap in the Western market that nobody else had noticed. This episode unpacks the 1984 partnership in which each man put in $500,000,...

Pepsi began in 1893 as Brad's Drink, a pharmacy remedy for indigestion created by Caleb Bradham in New Bern, North Carolina. This episode traces how the brand became a mirror of more than a century of economics, civil rights, and geopolitics, starting with Bradham's 1923 bankruptcy after a disastrous bet on sugar prices. We cover Charles Guth's revival of the brand out of spite toward Coca-Cola, t...

Pemmican, a 5,000-year-old Indigenous invention from the North American plains, packed dried, pounded meat and rendered fat into a dense, nearly imperishable fuel. The name itself comes from the Cree word for fat or grease, and this episode explains the chemistry behind its preparation and how it could stay edible for years, sometimes decades. We follow pemmican from Métis bison hunts and 90-pound...

George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. This episode follows the spread from the Inca and Aztecs, who reportedly used ground peanut paste for aching gums, to Marcellus Gilmore Edson's 1884 patent in Montreal and John Harvey Kellogg's 1898 paste made from boiled peanuts for sanitarium patients. Meat rationing during World War I made it popular, but the oil kept separating until chemi...

In 1850s New York City, an estimated 8,000 infants died in a single year, and contaminated milk was blamed. This episode explains how the swill milk scandal happened. The city was growing fast, clean water was scarce, country milk was too expensive for most families, and distilleries were producing huge amounts of leftover grain mash. Distillers kept cows in sheds next door and fed them that hot s...

McDonald's is also one of the world's biggest property owners, with an estimated $42 billion in land. This episode tells the company's life story, starting in 1940 when Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a drive-in in San Bernardino hoping to make a million dollars. In 1948 they fired their carhops, got rid of plates and silverware, and cut the menu to nine items, creating the Speedy Service Syst...

Nobody knows for certain who invented the margarita. This episode goes through a fight over credit that has lasted about 90 years. The drink follows the pattern of the older daisy family of cocktails, and margarita is simply Spanish for daisy. A tequila daisy was reported in Tijuana in 1936, and the Picador appeared in the 1937 Cafe Royal Cocktail Book. We also look at the glamorous claims: Carlos...

Kool-Aid began in 1927 in Hastings, Nebraska, when Edwin Perkins turned his liquid concentrate Fruit Smack into a powder to avoid the costs of shipping heavy glass bottles that often broke. Sold for pennies in paper packets during the Great Depression, it became a national hit. Perkins moved to Chicago in 1931 and sold the brand to General Foods in 1953, and Hastings still celebrates with Kool-Aid...

Every year, Tokyo authorities warn people to cut their mochi into small pieces, because the chewy rice cake sends more than 100 people to the hospital in the city alone. This episode explains what makes mochi different, starting with mochigome, a glutinous short-grain rice that is almost entirely amylopectin. Its branched starch molecules trap water and form a stretchy, chewy gel, and the result s...

The hot dog dates back to 13th century Frankfurt, where pork sausages were handed out to celebrate imperial coronations of the Holy Roman Empire. Vienna also claims it, through butcher Johann Georg Lahner's blend of pork and beef, which is where the name wiener comes from. This episode covers the competing stories of who first put the sausage in a bun: Charles Feltman's Coney Island cart in 1867,...

Tonkatsu started out as a Japanese take on the European cutlet. This episode follows the schnitzel, from the Middle High German word for slice to a dish found on nearly every continent. We explain why pounding meat thin makes it cook evenly, why Austrian law says a true Wiener Schnitzel must be made from veal, and why it is fried in clarified butter and never covered in sauce. Then we look at the...

In 1893 the US Supreme Court decided Nix v. Hedden, which asked whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable for tariff purposes. This episode traces how the tomato reached that point. Its wild ancestor, Solanum pimpinellifolium, grew in western South America and produced pea-sized berries. Mesoamerican farmers domesticated it, and the Aztecs grew many varieties. After Spanish conquest it spread t...

The hamburger's history reaches back to Hannah Glasse's 1758 recipe for Hamburg sausage served on toasted bread, and to the Hamburg steak that German sailors brought home from Baltic trade routes. This episode looks at the competing American claims from the 1880s and 1890s, including Charlie Nagreen, the Menches brothers, Louis Lassen and Oscar Weber Bilby, and argues that the burger was really a...