Book Review: There's No Cream in Cream Soda...

 

I got this book on a whim at the library, and it was so fun to read!  Each chapter is about a different beverage.  The information was well told- tons of fun stories about things we interact with all the time.  A great mix of nutrition, history, and culture!

Here are some facts I want to remember.

-"Lead is the eighty-second element on the periodic table and is represented as Pb from the Latin word for lead, plumbum." 

-"Nakazawa Milk from Japan is the most expensive milk in the world.  It comes from cows that are only milked once a week in the morning because that is when melatonin levels are the highest...  Advertised as milk for stressed-out adults, one gallon of Nakazawa Milk costs the same as forty gallons of regular 2 percent milk, around $163 per gallon."

-"All teas come from a tea bush, Camellia sinensis, but it's how the leaves are processed that determines the type of tea.  First, the leaves are spread in the sun to dry, which is known as withering.  Leaves that are going to be black or oolong teas are then cut or crushed to help oxidation.  During the oxidation phase, the leaves are exposed to air, which turns them darker and strengthens the flavor.  Black teas are fully oxidized, oolong teas are partially oxidized, while green teas aren't oxidized at all.  To keep green teas from oxidizing, they are gently heated or steamed instead.  All leaves then go through rolling, shaping, and dehydrating."

-"Many Asian cultures believe that if a teacup is too hot to hold, the tea is too hot to drink.  They use small bowls instead of cups.  But the Brits liked their tea much hotter than the Chinese, so English potters began adding handles to their cups in the late 1700s."  I had always wondered about that when I saw Japanese tea sets!

-It talks about the great trouble with successfully bottling soda.  Jacob Schweppe was the first to manufacture and bottle a carbonated beverage in 1783.  He designed a cool oval bottle so the sodas would be stored on their sides to keep the cork moist and therefore sealed.  But they were expensive bottles to make, being made by a glass blower by hand.  Eventually a machine was made (1904).  To solve the cork problem, "In 1879 Charles G. Hutchinson created a stopper that used a gasket hanging inside the bottle and attached to a wire.  To seal the bottle, a person pulled the gasket up by the wire.  To unseal the stopper, a person smacked the top, which released the pressure and made a loud pop.  If you ever wondered why we call them 'soda pops,' that's why."

-Cola was invented when pharmacist John Pemberton added the extract from a kola nut to a health tonic.  "To cover up the kola's bitter taste, he dumped in a bunch of sugar."  This became Coca-Cola.  Cocaine comes from the Erythroxylum coca plant, but it hasn't been in Coke since 1903.  Coka-Cola had a bottle design competition in 1915.  A glass company in Indiana went to the library to find pictures of the kola nut for inspiration, but he accidentally found a picture of a cocoa pod." 

And here's a photo of a cocoa pod I just took at the botanical garden.

-Here is a wonderful little story about humility and friendship.  "In 1886, two men, Charles Hall in American and Paul Heroult in France, both twenty-two years old, discovered the same method to extract aluminum from ores using electricity.  They didn't know about each other until they applied for patents.  They became friends and shared the credit.  The Hall-Heroult method is still used today.  Coincidentally, they both died in 1914 at the age of fifty-one."

-"Citrus fruits have been around for eight million years and originated in the foothills of the Himalayas.  All citrus fruits that we have today came from three ancestors:  mandarin (Citrus reticulata), pomelo (Citrus maxima), and citron (Citrus medica).  It's believed that lemons are the result of a cross between lime, citron, and pomelo.  Sweet oranges, such as navel and Valencia, came from pomelos and mandarins.  The English word 'orange' is from the French word for gold, or.

-"According to DNA analysis, the first apples (Malus sieversii) came from the mountains of Kazakhstan around fifty million years ago."

-"The word 'punch' is believed to come from the Hindi word panj for five because of the basic ingredients in the old recipes... citrus, sugar, alcohol, water, and spice."

-"Most natural food dyes are plant-based, such as the orangey carotenoids (carrots, pumpkins), the greenish chlorophylls (alfalfa), and the bluesy anthocyanins (grapes, blueberries).  But one, the reddish carminic, is made from crushing the cochineal insect.  Have you been eating bugs?  Check labels for carmine, carminic acid, cochineal, or Natural Red 4.)"

-"Humans have been using straws for over five thousand years, according to an archaeological discovery in 1897.  Three-foot gold and silver tubes were dug up in Maykop, Russia, which were used to sip from a large, shared vessel."

In short, a fun and interesting book!