55 Incredible Facts About Global Cuisine You’ll Think Are Made Up

Originally, the Yorkshire pudding was served as a first course with thick gravy to dull the appetite with the low-cost ingredients so that the diners would not eat so much of the more expensive meat in the next course.

2. Although corned beef was originally produced in Ireland it was mostly consumed by Britain and America as the Irish raising the beef were too poor to afford it.

3. The Chocolate Chip Cookie didn’t exist prior to 1938, when it was invented by the owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts named Ruth Wakefield. She sold the idea to Nestlé in return for a lifetime supply of chocolate.

4. Oklahoma’s state meal is chicken-fried steak, barbecued pork, fried okra, squash, cornbread, grits, corn, sausage with biscuits and gravy, black-eyed peas, strawberries, and pecans.

5. In Peru, guinea pigs are such a large part of the traditional cuisine that the Cathedral Basilica has a rendition of the last supper that depicts Jesus dining on a guinea pig.

The Scottish 'Munchy Box' is a pizza box containing up to 3000 calories of chips, donner meat, fried chicken, onion rings, garlic bread, pizza, pakora, and more. It is sold from takeaway restaurants, primarily in the West of Scotland and Glasgow.

7. Pad Thai, the national dish of Thailand, is actually not a traditional dish, but was invented, standardized and promoted by the Thai government, and imposed upon the people, as part of a broad cultural effort to establish a sense of national identity.

8. Wounded Viking warriors were always given strong onion soup. After a few minutes, someone would smell the wounds and if onions could be detected it meant that there were serious abdominal injuries and that death was inevitable.

9. Lobsters used to be considered “cockroaches of the sea.” It was fed to prisoners and apprentices, and was used as fish bait. They would actually grind up whole boiled lobsters so the prisoners would have to pick through the little bits of shell and meat. It was considered cruel and inhumane and some groups fought to have it put to an end.

10. Kiviak is a traditional wintertime Inuit food from Greenland that is made of little birds stuffed inside a seal skin to be fermented. In 2013, 2 people in Greenland died of botulism after eating poorly prepared Kiviak. The family of the first victim not knowing that the meal caused his death served it at his funeral, leading to the death of his daughter.

When curry was introduced in Japan it was considered a British dish, not an Indian one, because of its popularity among British sailors.

12. The Scots had a tradition of deep-frying chicken in fat. Scottish immigrants to America continued this frying chicken tradition and are responsible for the introduction of it to African slaves.

13. Spam (the canned meat) is considered a delicacy in South Korea. It's common for people to give each other large Spam gift packages for special holidays.

14. Though sweet baked beans may come across as excessively sugary or a product of the processed food industry, it is actually a traditional Native American dish. It was originally sweetened using maple syrup, also a native product.

15. A songbird named Ortolan is a French delicacy. It involves blinding this small bird and force-feeding it before you drown in Cognac. It is then eaten whole (save for feet) in one bite with a napkin over the face to preserve its aroma.

Nearly 200 years before turducken became popular, a Parisian gastronomist invented the Rôti Sans Pareil, a warbler stuffed inside a bunting, inside a lark, inside a thrush, inside a quail...lapwing, plover, partridge, woodcock, teal, guinea fowl, duck, chicken, pheasant, goose, turkey, bustard. It is a 17-bird stuffed meal.

17. Dandelions are not only completely edible raw and cooked but also packed with nutrients and may have many other benefits to their consumption.

18. Alcatraz had some of the best food in the federal prison system including chili dogs, butter-drenched potatoes, pork chops, biscuits, and gravy & banana pudding because the warden believed “most trouble in prison is caused by bad food.” The prison staff ate the same food as the prisoners.

19. Francesinha, Portugal's national sandwich has steak, ham, dry sausage, fresh sausage, cheese and then it's covered in melted cheese and beer sauce.

20. Cassowary meat is so tough that people were told to cook it with a stone in the pot. “When the stone is ready to eat, so is the Cassowary.”

The origin of French Fries is a hotly contested issue between Belgium and France. Belgium claims a 1781 family manuscript proves they were invented there, while France claims Paris street vendors invented the dish just before the French revolution.

22. Campbell’s Green Bean Casserole is so popular that Campbell’s estimates 40% of their Cream of Mushroom Soup is used to make the dish.

23. Baked beans started with a bean native to the Americas exported to France/Italy in the 1500s. They were brought back to America with European colonization, then exported to the UK as an "American delicacy" in the late 1800s, and are now reimported to the US as “UK Baked Beans.”

24. Pozole, a traditional Mexican soup, was originally made with human flesh by the Aztecs. When cannibalism was banned, pork was used as it “tasted very similar.”

25. Budae-jjigae, a Korean soup dish which is a fusion of common soup ingredients in Korea and scavenged foods from US bases had a period of "illegality"; as spam smuggling was punishable by death under President Park in the 1960-70s.