A Harte Appetite

I’m grateful to Roman Catholic nuns for their role in inventing and perfecting some of the most heavenly pastries on earth. Collectively called convent sweets because they originated in the convents of Italy, Spain, and particularly Portugal as far back as the 15th century, they ultimately made their way far beyond the Iberian peninsula.

Over the Millennia civilization has progressed and so has breakfast cereal. Among the earliest of modern cereals was granola, still a staple today, although these days you have to be careful with granola because some of it is little more than cookies masquerading as health food.

Though candy corn is available year round, 75% of its annual sales occur around Halloween. Thus each Halloween Americans buy some 35 million pounds of candy corn which works out to about 9 billion kernals.

You might expect as much from a cheese made in a country with a long tradition of cheese making. In the Netherlands, but the practice can be traced back at least as far as 800 B.C.

The Ritz cracker was a considerable improvement over previous crackers. Not pale or square but golden and round the Ritz was the result of leaving out the leavening and adding more shortening to make a crisper, more buttery product.

Cake mixes have some real advantages over home made. For instance, they’re much more forgiving. Over-beat the batter and they still bake up fine. Under-beat it and the result is nonetheless perfectly acceptable. Take a box cake out of the oven sooner than you should and all will be well.

Butter is to the Irish what olive oil is to the Italians. They cook almost everything with it and though they might occasionally be cowed into using a butter substitute like margarine, they would never think of insulting guests by offering it to them lest it bring shame upon the house.

It’s hard enough to keep your hands out of the cookie jar, but what’s really difficult is keeping your fingers out of the mixing bowl. In fact, the practice of eating raw cookie dough has become so popular that many people buy packaged cookie dough from the grocery store with absolutely no intention of ever baking it.

A trifle is the perfect showstopper for any table.

Though it was not part of the last Olympics, olive oil wrestling is the national sport of Turkey, where an annual tournament has been held since 1346, making it the oldest continuously running, sanctioned sporting competition in the world.