Food
World Whisky Day
In 2012, a 21-year-old student named Blair Bowman was on a year abroad in Barcelona, studying Hispanic Studies for his University of Aberdeen degree, …
Topic
Food
From world-famous food holidays to gloriously obscure culinary observances, these are the special days devoted to what we eat and drink — with a recipe to match wherever we can.
273 articles
Food
World Pasta Day
On 25 October 1995, forty pasta producers from across four continents sat down together in Rome for the first World Pasta Congress and decided, more …
Food
World Olive Day
In October 2019, at the 40th session of UNESCO’s General Conference in Paris, delegates unanimously adopted a resolution proclaiming 26 November …
Food
World Nutella Day
On 5 February 2007, an Italian-American blogger named Sara Rosso published a post on her food blog declaring that day to be World Nutella Day. She had …
Food
World Milk Day
Somewhere in central Europe or the steppe roughly seven thousand years ago, a genetic accident took hold that most of the world still does not share. …
Food
World Gin Day
In June 2009, a gin enthusiast named Neil Houston invited a handful of friends into his garden in Birmingham to drink gin together. That was the whole …
Food
World Food Day
On 16 October 1945, in the bombed-out city of Quebec, delegates from forty-two nations signed the constitution of the Food and Agriculture …
Food
World Coconut Day
On 2 September 1969, in the years after several newly independent Asian and Pacific nations were searching for ways to coordinate their export …
Food
World Cocktail Day
On 13 May 1806, a reader of a small newspaper in Hudson, New York, wrote in to ask what exactly the editor had meant by the word …
Food
World Chocolate Day
In 1828 a Dutch chemist named Coenraad Johannes van Houten patented a hydraulic press that squeezed most of the fat out of roasted cacao, leaving a …
Food
World Bread Day
When archaeologists sifted the floor of a 14,400-year-old hearth at Shubayqa in north-eastern Jordan, they found charred crumbs of flatbread, baked …
Food
Waffle Iron Day
A medieval waffle iron was a serious object: two hinged iron plates on handles long enough to reach over an open hearth, often engraved with a coat of …
Food
US Take Your Webmaster to Lunch Day
The word “webmaster” entered print in 1993, two years after Tim Berners-Lee put the first website online from a NeXT computer at CERN. It …
Food
US Sandwich Day
On 23 March 1965, an hour and a half into the Gemini III mission, pilot John Young reached into a pocket of his spacesuit and produced a corned-beef …
Food
US Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day
In 1869 an American named Cornelius Swartwout patented a stove-top waffle iron with a handle and a hinge that swivelled in a cast-iron collar, so the …
Food
US National Zucchini Bread Day
Ask any gardener why zucchini bread exists and they will answer before you finish the question: because a single courgette plant produces far more …
Food
US National Wine Day
In 2017, a team of archaeologists announced that pottery fragments excavated at Gadachrili Gora, a Neolithic village about fifty kilometres south of …
Food
US National White Wine Day
On 24 May 1976, in a Paris hotel, a panel of French wine experts tasted a flight of Chardonnays blind and awarded the top score not to a white …
Food
US National Whiskey Sour Day
In 1862 a New York bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bar-Tender’s Guide, the first cocktail manual of any consequence in the English …
Food
US National Walnut Day
In June 1949 the Walnut Marketing Board, working from Folsom, California, declared the first National Walnut Day and fixed it to 17 May. This was a …
Food
US National Waffle Day
On 24 August 1869, a man named Cornelius Swartwout of Troy, New York, was granted United States Patent No. 94,043 for an improvement in waffle irons. …
Food
US National Vodka Day
In 1938 a Hartford businessman named John G. Martin bought the American rights to a Russian-émigré brand called Smirnoff for fourteen thousand …
Food
US National Vanilla Milkshake Day
The first time the word “milkshake” appeared in print, in 1885, it described an alcoholic drink. It was a sturdy tonic of eggs, whiskey …
Food
US National Vanilla Ice Cream Day
One of only ten recipes surviving in Thomas Jefferson’s own handwriting, now held by the Library of Congress, is for ice cream. It calls for two …
Food
US National Vanilla Custard Day
In the summer of 1919, two brothers selling ice cream from a tile-fronted stand on the Coney Island boardwalk made a small change to their recipe that …
Food
US National Vanilla Cupcake Day
In 1796, in the first cookbook written and published by an American, a woman named Amelia Simmons gave instructions for “a light cake to bake in …
Food
US National TV Dinner Day
In late 1953 the Swanson company had a crisis measured in railway cars. Some 260 tons of frozen turkey were left over after Thanksgiving, far more …
Food
US National Tequila Day
In 1758 the Spanish king Ferdinand VI granted a parcel of land in the town of Tequila, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, to Don José Antonio de Cuervo. …
Food
US National Taco Day
The first written mention of the taco does not describe food at all. In eighteenth-century Mexican silver mines, a taco was a small charge of …
Food
US National Sugar Cookie Day
In the 1740s, Moravian settlers — German-speaking Protestants of the Renewed Unity of the Brethren — founded the town of Nazareth in the Lehigh Valley …
Food
US National Strawberry Sundae Day
On Sunday 3 April 1892, after services at the Unitarian church in Ithaca, New York, the Reverend John M. Scott walked round to the Platt & Colt …
Food
US National Strawberry Cream Pie Day
In 1714 a French military engineer named Amédée-François Frézier sailed home from Chile with five live strawberry plants and a reputation for spying …
Food
US National Sponge Cake Day
In 1615, the English poet Gervase Markham published The English Huswife, and tucked among its instructions for the well-run household was a recipe for …
Food
US National Spicy Hermit Cookie Day
In 1880, two cookbooks printed on opposite sides of the same year carried a recipe for something called “Hermits”: one from the young …
Food
US National Spaghetti Day
Around 1154, an Arab geographer named Muhammad al-Idrisi, working at the court of King Roger II of Sicily, described a town near Palermo called Trabia …
Food
US National Scrapple Day
In a diner in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the cook does not ask whether you want scrapple — only how thick you want it sliced and how dark you …
Food
US National Sausage Pizza Day
When Italian families began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the late 1800s, they carried Old World sausage recipes built around one …
Food
US National Sandwich Day
On 24 November 1762, the English historian Edward Gibbon — the man who would later write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — noted in his diary …
Food
US National Rum Punch Day
“One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.” A bartender in Bridgetown can recite that line without thinking, because it is …
Food
US National Rum Day
An anonymous Barbadian, writing around 1650, described the local spirit with no affection whatsoever: “Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divill,” he …
Food
US National Rice Ball Day
In November 1987, archaeologists digging at the Sugitani Chanobatake site in what is now Nakanoto, Ishikawa Prefecture, lifted a small charred lump …
Food
US National Raspberry Cake Day
The raspberry carries its origin story in its scientific name. Rubus idaeus means “bramble of Ida”, after Mount Ida in what is now …
Food
US National Pumpkin Pie Day
In 1796, a writer who identified herself only as “an American orphan” published a thin book called American Cookery, the first cookbook …
Food
US National Pretzel Day
In 1861, in the small Pennsylvania Dutch town of Lititz, a baker named Julius Sturgis opened what is generally credited as the first commercial …
Food
US National Potato Day
Around eight thousand years ago, on the cold, thin-aired plateau surrounding Lake Titicaca, at roughly 3,800 metres above sea level on the border of …
Food
US National Popcorn Day
In 1948 and 1950, two Harvard graduate students, the anthropologist Herbert Dick and the botanist Earle Smith, dug into the dry earth of Bat Cave in …
Food
US National Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day
The anchovy is the only pizza topping famous enough to have a national holiday named after the fact that nobody wants it. On 12 November, the United …
Food
US National Pizza Day
In June 1889, in a kitchen on the Salita Sant’Anna di Palazzo in Naples, a pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito is said to have baked three pizzas …
Food
US National Pie Day
Sometime in the mid-1970s, a Boulder schoolteacher and nuclear engineer named Charlie Papazian decided that his birthday, 23 January, ought to be …
Food
US National Pickle Day
Around 2030 BC, traders are thought to have carried cucumbers from India to the Tigris valley, where the people of Mesopotamia dropped them into salty …
Food
US National Pepperoni Pizza Day
The first recorded mention of pepperoni dates to 1919, in New York City, where Italian-American butchers in Lower Manhattan took dry salami and worked …
Food
US National Pecan Pie Day
The earliest known pecan pie recipe is not Southern, not folksy and not anonymous: it appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1886 as a pecan custard …
Food
US National Pecan Cookie Day
In 1955, the Keebler Company began selling a round, crumbly biscuit it called Sandies, a pecan shortbread that has barely changed in seventy years and …
Food
US National Peanut Day
When George Washington Carver arrived at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1896, the peanut was not even classified as a crop by the United States …
Food
US National Peanut Cluster Day
The peanut cluster is the sweet that gave the world the verb “to glob”: a rough, unrepentant mound of roasted peanuts bound in chocolate, …
Food
US National Peanut Butter Lovers Day
There is a quiet absurdity in the fact that the United States observes a National Peanut Butter Day on 24 January and then, scarcely five weeks later …
Food
US National Peanut Butter Fudge Day
In 1888, a Vassar College student named Emelyn Battersby Hartridge made a thirty-pound batch of fudge in her dormitory and sold it to her classmates, …
Food
US National Peanut Butter Day
In 1884, a Montreal chemist named Marcellus Gilmore Edson filed for a United States patent describing a “peanut-candy” made by milling …
Food
US National Peanut Butter Cookie Day
In 1916 George Washington Carver published a slim pamphlet from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with the unwieldy title How to Grow the Peanut and …
Food
US National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day
The first known recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich appeared in 1901, in the Boston Cooking School Magazine, written by a woman named Julia …
Food
US National Peach Pie Day
When Amelia Simmons published American Cookery in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796, she gave the new republic the first cookbook written by an American …
Food
US National Peach Ice Cream Day
On 9th September 1843, a Philadelphia woman named Nancy Maria Johnson was granted United States Patent No. 3254 for an “Artificial …
Food
US National Pancake Day
In 1991, archaeologists studying the gut contents and tools of Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old “Iceman” found frozen in the Alps, concluded that …
Food
US National Orange Blossom Day
In the 1680s, Anne-Marie Orsini, the Italian-born Princess of Nerola near Rome, took to perfuming her gloves, her bathwater and the rooms of her …
Food
US National Noodle Ring Day
Open almost any American community cookbook printed between the 1920s and the 1960s — a church-circle compilation, a Junior League fundraiser, a …
Food
US National Noodle Day
In 2005, archaeologists working at Lajia in Qinghai province, north-western China, lifted an overturned earthenware bowl that had lain sealed beneath …
Food
US National Monte Cristo sandwich Day
At the Blue Bayou restaurant in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square, where diners sit in perpetual twilight beside a still, lamplit lagoon, the most …
Food
US National Milk Chocolate Day
In a workshop in Vevey, on the shore of Lake Geneva, a candle-maker turned chocolatier spent seven frustrating years trying to do something that …
Food
US National Meatball Day
In the Roman cookbook attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, compiled around the late 4th or early 5th century, there are recipes for …
Food
US National Margarita Day
In 1945, an advertisement for Jose Cuervo ran across the United States with the tagline “Margarita: it’s more than a girl’s …
Food
US National Macademia Nut Day
In 1857, the German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller gave a newly catalogued rainforest tree the genus name Macadamia, honouring his friend …
Food
US National Mac & Cheese Day
In 1802, a guest at one of Thomas Jefferson’s White House state dinners recorded with some bemusement that he had been served “a pie …
Food
US National Lobster Day
There was a time in colonial New England when serving lobster too often was considered something close to cruelty. Along the Massachusetts and Maine …
Food
US National Lemon Meringue Pie Day
Around 1806, in a cooking school on Philadelphia’s Dock Street, a pastry-shop proprietress named Elizabeth Goodfellow faced a small surplus that …
Food
US National Lemon Juice Day
In May 1747, aboard the Royal Navy ship HMS Salisbury, a Scottish surgeon named James Lind divided twelve scurvy-ridden sailors into six pairs and …
Food
US National Lemon Cream Pie Day
Late November is a season of heavy desserts: dense fruit cakes, suet puddings, the lingering aftermath of pumpkin and pecan. Onto that crowded …
Food
US National Lasagna Day
In 1282 a Bolognese notary copied out a ballad that mentioned a dish called lasagne, and in doing so left behind the oldest written trace of a food …
Food
US National Junk Food Day
In 1972, a young microbiologist named Michael Jacobson, working at the newly founded Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, DC, did …
Food
US National Iced Tea Day
In the summer of 1904, on the sweltering fairgrounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, a British-born tea merchant named Richard …
Food
US National Ice Cream Soda Day
Robert M. Green was so certain he had invented the ice cream soda that he had the claim carved onto his headstone. According to his own account, …
Food
US National Ice Cream Day
On 9 July 1984, Ronald Reagan sat down and signed Presidential Proclamation 5219, declaring July to be National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday …
Food
US National Hot Mulled Cider Day
On the night of Old Twelvey, 17 January, in the cider counties of Somerset and Devon, men once carried a wooden bowl into the orchard, soaked slices …
Food
US National Hamburger Day
In 1895, in a cramped lunch wagon in New Haven, Connecticut, a Danish immigrant named Louis Lassen is said to have served a customer in a hurry a …
Food
US National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day
The phrase “grilled cheese” did not appear in American print until the 1960s. For the decades before that, the sandwich most cooks now …
Food
US National Greasy Food Day
In 1942, two former vaudevillians named Neil and Carl Fletcher introduced a hot dog dipped in sweetened cornmeal batter and deep-fried on a stick at …
Food
US National Gingersnap Day
The biscuit is named for a sound. Break a properly baked gingersnap and it gives a brittle, audible crack — the snap — and that small acoustic event …
Food
US National Gingerbread Day
At the Tudor court of Elizabeth I, who reigned over England from 1558 to 1603, the queen had gingerbread baked and decorated into the likenesses of …
Food
US National Garlic Day
When Howard Carter’s team opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, among the gold and the calcified flowers they found cloves of garlic, tucked …
Food
US National Fruitcake Day
There exists, in Tecumseh, Michigan, a fruitcake baked in 1878, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. It has been passed down through one family for …
Food
US National French Fries Day
In December 1802, a guest at one of Thomas Jefferson’s White House dinners recorded a curious dish on the table: “potatoes served in the …
Food
US National Fortune Cookie Day
In 1983 a body called the Court of Historical Review and Appeals convened in San Francisco to settle a question that had simmered for decades: who …
Food
US National Food Day
In 1975, the Center for Science in the Public Interest set out to do for food what Earth Day, five years earlier, had done for the environment: create …
Food
US National Fast Food Day
In 1921, in Wichita, Kansas, a short-order cook named Walter Anderson and an insurance man named Billy Ingram opened a tiny burger stand clad in white …
Food
US National Eggnog Day
At Mount Vernon, the kitchen accounts record that George Washington served eggnog to his guests, and a recipe long associated with the estate is …
Food
US National Egg Day
The egg in your fridge has a wilder ancestry than its plain white shell suggests. It comes from a bird descended from the red junglefowl (Gallus …
Food
US National Eat A Peach Day
Archaeologists working at the waterlogged Neolithic site of Kuahuqiao, near the lower Yangzi River in eastern China, have pulled peach stones from the …
Food
US National Eat A Cranberry Day
In 1816, a Revolutionary War veteran named Henry Hall, farming near the beach in Dennis on Cape Cod, noticed that the wild cranberry vines he had …
Food
US National Dumpling Day National Chocolate Milk Day
In 2024, archaeologists working at a site in Shandong Province in eastern China unearthed dumplings roughly 2,500 years old, their thin dough wrappers …
Food
US National Drink Beer Day
In 1992 archaeologists excavating the Sumerian city of Godin Tepe, in what is now western Iran, scraped a yellowish residue from the inside of a …
Food
US National Doughnut Day
The United States is one of very few countries to celebrate the same food twice in one year, and the doughnut is the reason. The famous doughnut day, …
Food
US National Double Cheeseburger Day
The story usually begins on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California, in 1924. A sixteen-year-old fry cook named Lionel Sternberger, working at his …
Food
US National Donut/Doughnut Day
In the autumn of 1917, two Salvation Army officers stationed near the front line in Montiers-sur-Saulx, France, found themselves with limited supplies …
Food
US National Deviled Egg Day
In the fourth- or fifth-century Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria, attributed to the gourmet Apicius, there is a recipe for boiled eggs whose yolks are …
Food
US National Dessert Day
The word “dessert” first appears in writing in 1539, and it does not mean what you might expect. It comes from the French desservir — to …
Food
US National Date Nut Bread Day
For much of the twentieth century, American shoppers could buy date nut bread in a can — a literal cylinder of dark, sweet loaf that you opened at …
Food
US National Cupcake Day
In 1796, in the first cookbook written by an American and published in America, Amelia Simmons gave instructions for “a light cake to bake in …
Food
US National Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day
Among the flavours reportedly served at the early American White House, none startles the modern palate more than oyster ice cream, an unsweetened …
Food
US National Cream Filled Donut Day
In September 1917, four Salvation Army volunteers arrived at the camp of the 1st Ammunition Train of the American 1st Division, only a few miles from …
Food
US National Cranberry Relish Day
In November 1959, two and a half weeks before Thanksgiving, Arthur Flemming, the United States Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, told a …
Food
US National Cookie Day
In 1987, Matt Nader, who four years earlier had founded the Blue Chip Cookie Company in San Francisco with his wife Lori, declared 4 December National …
Food
US National Coffee Milkshake Day
When the word “milkshake” first appeared in print in 1885, it described nothing a child would be allowed near. The early milkshake was a …
Food
US National Coffee Ice Cream Day
In much of the United States, vanilla is the safe order. In New England, a sizeable share of people reach instead for coffee — a milky-brown scoop …
Food
US National Coffee Day
On 29 September 2009, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans staged the first New Orleans Coffee Festival and billed the opening day …
Food
US National Coconut Torte Day
The oldest cake named after a place is the Linzertorte, and the earliest known recipe for it, found in 2005 by the researcher Waltraud Faißner in a …
Food
US National Cinnamon-Raisin Bread Day
On 7 July 1928, in the small town of Chillicothe, Missouri, the Chillicothe Baking Company sold the first commercially sliced loaf of bread, made on a …
Food
US National Chocolates Day
In 1868, a chocolate-maker in Birmingham named Richard Cadbury found himself with a surplus of cocoa butter, a by-product of his firm’s new …
Food
US National Chocolate with Almonds Day
In 1908, the Hershey Company took its already famous milk chocolate bar and pressed almonds into it — a small change that helped define one of the …
Food
US National Chocolate Wafer Day
In July 2023, thousands of American home bakers discovered that a cookie they had relied on for decades had quietly vanished from supermarket shelves. …
Food
US National Chocolate Pudding Day
In 1747, Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a book so successful it stayed in print for a century and shaped how …
Food
US National Chocolate Milkshake Day
In 1922, behind the soda fountain of a Walgreens in Chicago, a counter worker named Ivar “Pop” Coulson did something small that turned out …
Food
US National Chocolate Milk Day
London’s Natural History Museum still lists Sir Hans Sloane, the Irish physician whose collection seeded the British Museum, as the man who …
Food
US National Chocolate Macaroon Day
In 827, Arab troops from Tunisia captured Sicily and, among the spoils of conquest and exchange, brought a tradition of almond-paste and rosewater …
Food
US National Chocolate day
In the markets of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, a rabbit cost ten cacao beans, a turkey hen a hundred, and a labourer’s daily wage could be …
Food
US National Chocolate Cupcake Day
In 1796, a cook named Amelia Simmons published American Cookery in Hartford, Connecticut, the first cookbook written by an American. Tucked among its …
Food
US National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day
In eighteenth-century France, confectioners began making a sweet called griottes — long-stalked sour cherries soaked in a little kirsch and enrobed in …
Food
US National Chocolate Cake Day
In 1765, an Irish immigrant named John Hannon who had trained as a chocolate-maker in London met James Baker, a Dorchester physician and shopkeeper, …
Food
US National Cheesecake Day
On the Greek island of Samos, archaeologists have found cheese moulds dated to around 2,000 BC, and ancient sources record that a fresh-cheese cake …
Food
US National Cheeseburger Day
The most repeated origin story of the cheeseburger begins around 1924 at a roadside stand in Pasadena, California, where a teenage short-order cook …
Food
US National Cheeseball Day
The first written cheese ball recipe as Americans now recognise it appeared in 1944, in a cookbook called Food of My Friends compiled by Virginia …
Food
US National Cheese Toast Day
In 1968, at a Sizzler steakhouse in Hollywood, a cook took a thick slice of bread, slathered it with a garlicky butter spread, blanketed it with a …
Food
US National Cheese Pizza Day
The most famous origin story in pizza history is probably a fake. According to the cherished legend, a Neapolitan baker named Raffaele Esposito …
Food
US National Cheese Fondue Day
The image of fondue as an ancient Alpine peasant tradition is almost entirely the work of a cheese cartel in the 1930s. Until then the dish of melted …
Food
US National Cheese Doodle Day
Sometime in the 1950s, in a Bronx food company that had started life making ice-cream cones, a Marine Corps veteran named Morrie Yohai sat at a table …
Food
US National Cheese Day
In a clay pot dug from a site in Poland’s Kuyavia region, archaeologists found fatty residues that pushed the documented history of …
Food
US National Champagne Day
For much of the seventeenth century, the bubbles in Champagne were regarded not as a triumph but as a defect. The winemakers of the chalky hills …
Food
US National Cashew Day
Sometime between 1560 and 1565, Portuguese ships working down the western coast of India unloaded an unfamiliar tree at Goa. It came from …
Food
US National Caramel Day
In 1977, a chocolatier named Henri Le Roux opened a shop in Quiberon, on the Brittany coast, and began making a sweet that would quietly conquer …
Food
US National Caramel Apple Day
Around 1950, a Kraft Foods sales representative named Dan Walker found himself with a surplus of the company’s individually wrapped caramels …
Food
US National Candy Day
The word arrived in English by way of a long journey: from the Sanskrit khanda, meaning a piece or fragment of crystallised sugar, through the Persian …
Food
US National Candy Corn Day
In the 1880s, a Wunderle Candy Company employee in Philadelphia named George Renninger pulled off a small feat of confectionery engineering: a sweet …
Food
US National Candied Orange Peel Day
When sixteenth-century European hosts wanted to send their guests home with something special, they sometimes packed candied citrus peel into pretty …
Food
US National Canadian Bacon Day
In 1854, a young pork butcher named William Davies left England and set up a stall in Toronto’s St Lawrence Market. The business he built there …
Food
US National Cake Day
In 1843, a Birmingham chemist named Alfred Bird mixed bicarbonate of soda with an acid to make a raising agent that needed no yeast and no eggs. His …
Food
US National Burger Day
At least four American towns insist they invented the hamburger, and none of them can prove it. New Haven, Connecticut, points to a Danish …
Food
US National Brandied Fruit Day
In the mid-1970s, a particular glass jar appeared on kitchen counters across suburban America: cloudy with syrup, packed with peaches, cherries and …
Food
US National Boston Creme Pie Day
In October 1856, the newly opened Parker House hotel on Boston’s School Street put a “Chocolate Cream Pie” on its menu: two discs of …
Food
US National Blueberry Popsicle Day
One cold night in 1905, an 11-year-old boy in Oakland, California named Frank Epperson left a cup of powdered soda mix and water on his porch with the …
Food
US National Blueberry Popover Day
The oldest known written use of the word “popover” appears in a letter dated 1850 from a writer recorded as E. E. Stuart, and the first …
Food
US National Blueberry Muffin Day
In the dining room of Jordan Marsh, the grand Boston department store founded by Eben Jordan and Benjamin Marsh in 1841, shoppers once queued for a …
Food
US National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day
In 1826, in the Swiss town of Serrières near Neuchâtel, a 29-year-old confectioner named Philippe Suchard opened a small chocolate workshop and soon …
Food
US National Better Breakfast Day
In 1863, at his health resort in Dansville, New York, a physician named James Caleb Jackson took graham flour, baked it into hard sheets, broke them …
Food
US National Beer Lovers Day
Around 1800 BCE, a Sumerian scribe pressed a hymn into clay that doubled as a recipe. Addressed to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing, the “Hymn to …
Food
US National Beer Day
On the evening of 6 April 1933, crowds gathered outside breweries in Milwaukee, St Louis and New York, waiting for midnight. They were not queuing for …
Food
US National Bavarian Cream Pie Day
The most misleading thing about Bavarian cream is its name. It is not a German dessert; it was perfected in the kitchens of the French aristocracy, …
Food
US National Banana Split Day
In 1904, a 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist named David Evans Strickler stood behind the soda fountain at Tassel Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, …
Food
US National Banana Lovers Day
Almost every banana sold in an American supermarket is, genetically, the same plant. The Cavendish has no seeds and cannot reproduce on its own; each …
Food
US National Banana Creme Pie Day
In a survey conducted with the United States armed forces in 1951, banana cream pie was voted the favourite dessert. Ahead of apple, ahead of …
Food
US National Banana Bread Day
In 1933, a Minnesota home economist named Mary Ellis Ames included a recipe for banana bread in the pages of Pillsbury’s Balanced Recipes, and …
Food
US National Baked Scallops Day
Medieval pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela, the Spanish cathedral city believed to hold the remains of Saint James, sewed a scallop shell to …
Food
US National Applesauce Cake Day
Around 1625, an eccentric Anglican clergyman named William Blaxton planted the first cultivated apple orchard in North America on the slopes of Beacon …
Food
US National Apple Turnover Day
Every first Sunday of September, the small town of Saint-Calais in the Sarthe region of France holds a festival dedicated to a pastry — and in 2023 it …
Food
US National Apple Dumpling Day
In the farmhouse kitchens of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, an apple dumpling was as likely to turn up at breakfast as after supper, drowned in cold …
Food
US National Apple Cider Day
John Chapman — the barefoot nurseryman remembered as Johnny Appleseed, born in Massachusetts in 1774 — did not plant apple trees so that frontier …
Food
US Johnny Appleseed Day
When John Chapman died near Fort Wayne, Indiana, in March 1845, the local newspaper, the Fort Wayne Sentinel, noted the passing of a man …
Food
US International Whiskey Day
On 27 March 2008, at a whisky festival in the northern Netherlands, a group of writers raised a glass to a friend who had died seven months earlier. …
Food
US International Chocolate Day
Milton Snavely Hershey was born on 13 September 1857 in a farmhouse in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, and that date is the reason chocolate has its own …
Food
US Homemade Bread Day
In 2018, archaeologists working at a site called Shubayqa 1 in the Black Desert of north-eastern Jordan published the charred remains of a flatbread …
Food
US Eat a Red Apple Day
The apple in your hand is descended from a wild tree that still grows in the Tian Shan mountains of southern Kazakhstan. Its ancestor, Malus …
Food
US Chicken Soup for the Soul Day
By the time Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen finished assembling their manuscript of 101 short, uplifting true stories in the early 1990s, they …
Food
US Cheese Day
In the spring of 1851, a dairy farmer named Jesse Williams pooled the milk from his own farm in Rome, New York with that of his son’s nearby …
Food
UK National Burger Day
In 2013, an entrepreneur named Jamie Klinger noticed something that mildly annoyed him: the United States had multiple burger holidays scattered …
Food
Swedish National Waffle Day
Sweden’s Waffle Day exists because of a slip of the tongue. The 25th of March is the Feast of the Annunciation, the day on which the angel …
Food
Swedish National Mud Cake Day
There is a tidy origin story that Swedes like to tell about their national chocolate cake, and it begins in 1938 in the city of Örebro, where baking …
Food
Swedish National Cinnamon Bun Day
In 1999 the Home Baking Council, a Swedish trade body called Hembakningsrådet, turned forty, and rather than mark the occasion with a dinner it …
Food
Roast Chestnuts Day
The most famous chestnuts in the English-speaking world were written down during a brutal heatwave. In July 1945, the songwriters Robert Wells and Mel …
Food
Raspberry pie day
The Roman agricultural writer Palladius, working in the fourth century, left one of the earliest written records of raspberries being grown …
Food
Pineapple Upside Down Cake Day
In 1925 the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, the firm run by James Dole that would eventually become known simply as Dole, ran a recipe contest in American …
Food
Pierogi Day
The pierogi is one of very few foods to have a patron saint. According to a legend cherished in Poland, Saint Hyacinth of Kraków, a Dominican friar of …
Food
Oyster Day
A New Yorker in the 1850s ate, on average, around 600 oysters a year. Today the average American eats fewer than three. That collapse, from staple to …
Food
National Wine and Cheese Day
In a limestone cave at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, in the south of France, blue-veined cheeses have been left to ripen in cool, damp draughts for the …
Food
National Tortellini Day
On 7 December 1974 a recipe was lodged with a notary in Bologna, signed by the city’s mayor Renato Zangheri and witnessed by the Prefect of …
Food
National Tempura Day
Sometime in the 1540s, Portuguese ships made landfall in southern Japan, and with the traders and Jesuit missionaries came a habit that would, by a …
Food
National Strawberry Day
In 1714 a French military engineer named Amédée-François Frézier stepped off a ship at Marseille carrying five strawberry plants he had smuggled out …
Food
National Spinach Day
Of all the foods to be rescued from obscurity by a cartoon, spinach has the strangest case. A leaf that had grown quietly in kitchens for some …
Food
National Spanish Paella Day
In October 2016 the British chef Jamie Oliver posted a photograph of his dinner and detonated an international incident. “Good Spanish food …
Food
National Sourdough Bread Day
In 1849, a young baker named Isidore Boudin arrived in San Francisco from Burgundy and noticed that the prospectors crowding into the city already had …
Food
National Shortbread Day
There is a recipe Scottish bakers still recite like a charm: one, two, three. One part sugar, two parts butter, three parts flour. That is the whole …
Food
National Sardines Day
In 1824, a confectioner named Pierre-Joseph Colin opened a cannery in Nantes and began sealing sardines in oil inside soldered tin boxes. It was a …
Food
National S'mores Day
Somewhere in the chapter titled “The Larder”, tucked between instructions for sassafras tea and fish chowder, a 1927 Girl Scout handbook …
Food
National Quesadilla Day
Ask for a quesadilla in a market in Mexico City and you may be asked, with complete seriousness, whether you want one con queso — with cheese. The …
Food
National Pumpkin Day
On 9 October 2023, at the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California, a Minnesota horticulture teacher named Travis Gienger …
Food
National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day
In 1570, the papal cook Bartolomeo Scappi published Opera, a monumental six-volume work of Renaissance cookery, and tucked into its fifth book was a …
Food
National Prosecco Day
In the summer of 1948, in a narrow bar near the Grand Canal in Venice, a barman named Giuseppe Cipriani crushed white peaches into a pulp, mixed them …
Food
National Pound Cake Day
In 1747 a London writer named Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a book aimed squarely at servants rather than …
Food
National Potato Chip Day
In the summer of 1853, at a lakeside resort near Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, a cook named George Speck was, according to the most repeated …
Food
National Peppermint Bark Day
In 1998, after roughly twenty rounds of recipe testing, Chuck Williams and the test kitchen of the homeware company he had founded settled on a …
Food
National Pecan Day
In the winter of 1846, on the Oak Alley plantation in Louisiana, an enslaved gardener known only by the name Antoine succeeded at something the …
Food
National Peach Melba Day
In 1892 the Australian soprano Nellie Melba sang the title role in Wagner’s Lohengrin at Covent Garden, and the performance was triumphant …
Food
National Peach Cobbler Day
The first published recipe for peach cobbler appeared in Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife in 1839, a cookbook written for the kitchens of …
Food
National Pasta Day
In 1154 the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, working at the court of the Norman king Roger II in Palermo, described a town called Trabia on the Sicilian …
Food
National Oreo Day
On 6 March 1912 a wholesale order of a new sandwich biscuit left the National Biscuit Company’s factory on Ninth Avenue in the Chelsea district …
Food
National Mojito Day
According to the legend most often told, the mojito’s distant ancestor was mixed in 1586 off the coast of Havana, when the English privateer Sir …
Food
National Milk Day
On 11 January 1878, a man named Alexander Campbell, working for the New York Dairy Company, sent out milk in sealed glass pint bottles to …
Food
National Lemonade Day
In twelfth-century Cairo, merchants were already bottling sweetened lemon juice and shipping it as a luxury good, which means that the drink most …
Food
National Lemon Drop Day
Pop a lemon drop on your tongue and there is a half-second of warning before the acid lands — a brief, sugary calm, then the cheeks tighten, the eyes …
Food
National Ice Cream Day
On 9 July 1984, Ronald Reagan sat down in the Oval Office and signed Proclamation 5219, declaring July to be National Ice Cream Month and the third …
Food
National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day
In 1887, on Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a Lithuanian kosher butcher named Sussman Volk is said to have received a recipe for …
Food
National Hot Chocolate Day
Long before it became a fireside comfort, the chocolate drink was bitter, frothed, often spiced with chilli, and valued so highly by the Aztecs that …
Food
National Hard Candy Day
Around 1670, the choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral, exasperated by fidgeting children during the long Christmas services, is said to have asked a local …
Food
National Gummy Worm Day
In 1981, a German confectioner called Trolli looked at the gummy bear, an established and entirely respectable sweet, and decided what the world …
Food
National Gumbo Day
In 1803, at a gubernatorial reception in New Orleans, gumbo was set before the guests, and the following year, in 1804, it appeared at a Cajun …
Food
National Frozen Food Day
Sometime between 1912 and 1915, an American naturalist named Clarence Birdseye stood on the frozen flats of Labrador and watched Inuit fishermen pull …
Food
National Fried Clam Day
On the back of their wedding certificate, Lawrence and Bessie Woodman wrote a single proud line: “We fried the first fried clam — in the town of …
Food
National French Fry Day
In March 2003, the cafeterias of the United States House of Representatives quietly struck the word “French” from their menus. Bob Ney, …
Food
National Fettuccine Alfredo Day
In 1908, in a small restaurant off the Piazza Rosa in Rome, a cook named Alfredo di Lelio watched his wife refuse to eat. Ines had just given birth to …
Food
National English Toffee Day
In 1825 a new word slipped into the Oxford English Dictionary: toffee, set down in print for the first time, though the sticky sweet it described had …
Food
National Empanada Day
Carved into the Pórtico de la Gloria, the great Romanesque doorway of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela completed around 1188, there is a small …
Food
National Custard Day
A recipe for daryols appears in The Forme of Cury, an English cookery roll compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II: cream, eggs, …
Food
National Croissant Day
In 1839, an Austrian artillery officer named August Zang opened a bakery at 92 rue de Richelieu in Paris and called it the Boulangerie Viennoise. He …
Food
National Cream Puff Day
In the kitchens of the early nineteenth century, a Parisian pastry chef named Marie-Antoine Carême, the man his admirers called the chef of kings and …
Food
National Coquilles St. Jacques Day
Walk any of the medieval routes that converge on the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela and you will see the same emblem cut into milestones, …
Food
National Coconut Cream Pie Day
In 1895 a Philadelphia flour miller named Franklin Baker accepted an unusual settlement for a debt he was owed: a shipload of coconuts from Cuba. It …
Food
National Cocoa Day
When the Spanish broke into the storerooms of Tenochtitlan in 1519, they found one chamber stacked with what they took for shrivelled almonds. There …
Food
National Cocktail Day
On 13 May 1806, a reader of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper published in Hudson, New York, wrote in to complain. The paper had …
Food
National Chocolate Mousse Day
In 1750, a French author writing under the name Menon published La Science du Maître d’Hôtel Confiseur, a professional manual for confectioners, …
Food
National Cheesesteak Day
In 1930, at a hot-dog cart standing where 9th Street meets Wharton Street and Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia, two Italian-American brothers …
Food
National Cheddar Fries Day
In 1978, a new bar called Snuffer’s opened on Lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas, Texas, and a group of students from nearby Southern Methodist …
Food
National Cereal Day
In 1894, in the kitchens of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a batch of boiled wheat dough was left out too long and began to go stale. Rather …
Food
National Carbonara Day
On 22 September 1944, in the newly liberated seaside town of Riccione, a young Italian cook named Renato Gualandi was asked to feed the officers of …
Food
National Cake Day
Long before anyone thought to pipe a rose of buttercream or wish over a candle, the cooks of ancient Egypt were sweetening their dense, round loaves …
Food
National Bundt Day
In 1950, a group of women from the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah, the Jewish women’s organisation, approached a metal-spinning manufacturer …
Food
National Bloody Mary Day
In 1934, a young French bartender named Fernand Petiot stepped behind the bar of the King Cole Room at the St. Regis Hotel in New York and began …
Food
National Biscuit Day
In 1998, a physicist named Len Fisher published a serious piece of research, funded by the biscuit maker McVitie’s, on the optimal way to dunk a …
Food
National Beer Day
At one minute past midnight on 7 April 1933, the doors of American breweries opened for the first time in over thirteen years, and the crowds that had …
Food
National Banana Split Day
During the Christmas break of 1904, a group of students from Saint Vincent College wandered into Tassell Pharmacy at 805 Ligonier Street in Latrobe, …
Food
National Bacon Day
In 1997, two friends named Danya Goodman and Meff Leonard decided the year needed one more reason to gather and eat well before the calendar turned …
Food
National Apricot Day
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, described a kind of early-ripening fruit he called armeniaca, believing it to have …
Food
National Ambrosia Day
In 1867, two years after the end of the American Civil War, a Southern cookbook called Dixie Cookery set down a recipe of almost monastic simplicity: …
Food
Martini Day
In 1887, the third edition of Jerry Thomas’s The Bar-Tender’s Guide printed a recipe for a “Martinez”: a dash of Boker’s …
Food
Irish Coffee Day
On a filthy winter night in 1943, a transatlantic flying boat lumbered out of the airbase at Foynes, on the Shannon estuary in County Limerick, only …
Food
Iranian National Pie Day
Somewhere around the tenth century, an Abbasid court poet named Ishaq al-Mawsili wrote verses praising a small triangular pastry filled with meat, …
Food
Iranian National Cheeseburger Day
In 1994, an Iranian entrepreneur opened what he hoped would be the country’s first McDonald’s since the 1979 revolution. Within …
Food
International Tea Day
In 1848 the East India Company hired a Scottish botanist named Robert Fortune to commit one of history’s great acts of industrial espionage. …
Food
International Sushi Day
Here is a fact that quietly demolishes most people’s idea of sushi: the word does not mean raw fish at all. It refers to the rice, specifically …
Food
International Eat An Apple Day
Somewhere in the Tian Shan mountains, on the border of Kazakhstan and China, there are forests where apples grow wild. The trees are the surviving …
Food
International Coffee Day
On 1 October 2015, on the opening day of International Coffee Day, the crowds at Expo Milano gathered around stands run by Illy and Lavazza, where the …
Food
International Chocolate Day
On 13 September 1857, in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, a boy was born who would do more than almost anyone to put chocolate within reach of ordinary …
Food
International Carrot Day
In 2003 a small group of carrot enthusiasts in Sweden decided that the most ubiquitous vegetable in the greengrocer’s deserved a day of its own, …
Food
International Beer Day
In 2007, in the coastal town of Santa Cruz, California, a man named Jesse Avshalomov and a small group of friends decided the world needed a day to …
Food
Ice Cream Sandwich Day
In the summer of 1900, a reporter for the New York Tribune watched an unnamed pushcart vendor on the Bowery doing a roaring trade in a novelty so …
Food
Homemade soup day
In a cave in Jiangxi province, in southern China, archaeologists found cooking pots roughly 18,000 years old, charred with the residue of meals long …
Food
Gingerbread House Day
In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published a tale about two abandoned children who stumble through a dark forest and find a cottage made of bread, with a …
Food
Gin day
In 2009, a gin lover named Neil Houston gathered a handful of friends in a back garden in Birmingham to drink gin and talk about gin, and called it …
Food
German National Soup Day
By the middle of November the light in northern Germany is already failing by four in the afternoon, the markets have turned to root vegetables and …
Food
German Beer Day
On 23 April 1516, at a meeting of the Bavarian estates in the town of Ingolstadt, Duke Wilhelm IV and his co-regent brother issued an ordinance …
Food
German Apples Day
Stand in the Altes Land marshes south-west of Hamburg in early May and you are surrounded by one of the largest contiguous fruit-growing regions in …
Food
Fresh Veggies Day
In 1893 the Supreme Court of the United States sat down to decide what a tomato is. The case, Nix v. Hedden, turned on the Tariff Act of 1883, which …
Food
Extra Virgin Olive Oil Day
In the village of Ano Vouves on the Greek island of Crete stands an olive tree so old that its trunk has twisted itself into something more like rock …
Food
Drink wine day
In 2007, archaeologists working in the Areni-1 cave in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia uncovered something that pushed the story of wine deeper …
Food
Curried Chicken Day
In 1747 a London author who signed herself simply “A Lady” — the cookery writer Hannah Glasse — printed a recipe “To make a Currey …
Food
Chocolate Covered Cashews Day
Sometime between 1560 and 1565, Portuguese colonists carried seeds of a curved, kidney-shaped nut from the coast of Brazil to their trading post at …
Food
Cherry pie day
In 1806, a travelling bookseller and part-time clergyman named Mason Locke Weems slipped a small story into the fifth edition of his bestselling …
Food
Carrot cake day
In 1814, Antoine Beauvilliers, who had once cooked for Louis XVI and ran one of the first true restaurants in Paris, published the second volume of …
Food
Brazilian National Tomato Day
Somewhere around 500 BC, in the warm valleys of central Mexico, growers were already coaxing a small, sprawling, yellow-and-red berry into something …
Food
Brazilian National Pizza Day
In 1985, Caio Luiz de Carvalho, then the tourism secretary for the state of São Paulo, ran a competition to pick the city’s ten best mussarela …
Food
Brazilian National Honey Day
In October 1957, at an agricultural research station near Rio Claro in the state of São Paulo, a visiting beekeeper noticed that some queen excluders …
Food
Brazilian Coffee Day
In 1727, a Portuguese officer named Francisco de Melo Palheta crossed into French Guiana on what was officially a diplomatic errand: settling a border …
Food
Bittersweet Chocolate Day
Break a square of fine bittersweet chocolate and listen for the snap. That clean, brittle crack is the sound of a well-made bar, and the faint …
Food
Beer and Pizza Day
In June 1889 a Neapolitan baker named Raffaele Esposito was summoned to make pizzas for Queen Margherita of Savoy, who was visiting Naples. He sent up …
Food
Baked Alaska day
In March 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia for around seven million dollars, and a good part of the country thought it a ridiculous …
Food
Bacon day
The September version of Bacon Day was born, as so many good ideas are, among hungry students with a long weekend ahead of them. Around 2004, a group …
Food
Australian National Burger Day
Order a burger “with the lot” at an old-fashioned Australian takeaway and you will be handed something that startles most foreign …
Food
Almond day
The almond you ate this morning is, in evolutionary terms, a domesticated mistake — and a lucky one. Its wild ancestors are loaded with amygdalin, a …