According to the Candy Professor, Chicken Dinner Candy Bars were introduced by the Sperry Candy Company of Milwaukee in 1923. They soon became one of the best selling candy bars of their day. Despite the name, they had nothing to do with chicken or dinner. The bar was a chocolate-covered nut roll. (Sounds pretty good!)
Wikipedia claims the name was a reference to President Herbert Hoover's promise of a "chicken in every pot." But that can't be right if the bars were introduced in 1923. The Candy Professor argues that the name was just an advertising gimmick to get people's attention.
Wikipedia also says that early TV commercials for Chicken Dinner Candy had a jingle that went, "Chick - Chick - Chick - Chick - Chicken Dinner" -- in the cadence of a rooster crowing.
The image of the Chicken Candy advertisement comes from an eBay auction. The seller wants $175 for the vintage cardboard advertisement, which seems a lot, though perhaps not if that's the kind of thing you collect.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Tue Jan 03, 2012 | Comments (4)
Category: Food, Candy
Scientists have a history of accomplishing what was once thought impossible, be it walking on the moon, splitting the atom or alleviating pain and disease. But now they may have discovered something that will eclipse all that has come before; scientists are on the verge of making chocolate better! A team lead by Dr. Siela Maximova from Pennsylvania State University has pieced together the genetic code of the cacao tree, and not just any cacao tree but the Criollo variety that is widely recognised to produce the very best chocolate. Because of its poor disease resistance, Criollo is almost entirely ignored in favour of hybrid varieties that yield more – if inferior – beans, but Maximova et al hope their work will enable the development of new, elite strains of cacao (News.com.AU).
Meanwhile, here is someone who is taking the chocolate maker’s art way too literally. Jean Zaun of Fredericksburg in Pennsylvania uses a mixture of dark and white chocolate, food colouring and confectioner’s glaze to recreate famous works of art, including the frames, in a deliciously edible form. Her subjects have included the works of Van Gogh, Munch and Da Vinci, as well as a portrait of Ozzy Osborne commissioned by his wife. While the chocolate artworks are edible, Zaun believes they should be souvenirs rather than snacks. “They are meant to be consumed by the eye, not the stomach.” Zaun Explained (Daily Mail).
And the misuse of materials won’t stop there, at least not if Dr. Peter Eisner of the Fraunhofer Institute gets his way. Concerned that meat consumption is both unhealthy and bad for the environment, Dr. Eisner has started looking for ways to supplement or replace animal products with vegetable equivalents. His first success is a milk substitute derived from lupins that can even be used to make cheese, meanwhile co-worker Daniela Sussmann has extracted a protein from the seeds gives low-fat sausages more of the sensation of their unadulterated competition. Eisner reckons that our ever growing appetite for meat could one day be disastrous, arguing that the resources needed to produce 1 kilo of meat could instead yield 80 to 100 kilos of fruit or vegetables (Softpedia).
If your love-life needs a lift, pork is as effective as Viagra, or so said Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner last week at a press meeting to announce cheaper pork prices. In a surprise boon to local political comedy writers, President Kirchner claimed to know from personal experience that “pork consumption improves sexual activity,” before adding “I’m a pork fanatic.” Her comments were unsurprisingly echoed by Juan Uccelli, who heads up the Argentinean association of pork producers, who claimed Denmark and Japan’s “more harmonious sexual lives” were down to their high pork consumption. No word yet as to how tender Cristina likes her pork, but this surely brings a whole new layer of meaning to “baby’s got back!” (AFP).
Of course this is just another string for the bow of the world’s greatest all around superfood, bacon. And it’s not the only new talent to come to light, bacon also makes you smarter. At least it does if your mother ate it. Scientists from the University of North Carolina are claiming the micronutrient choline, which is abundant in pork products, is vital in helping foetal brain development (Telegraph).
Clearly then, the British are not eating enough bacon. Not only do they have to put up with a reputation for being lousy lovers but in a recent study for the UK’s National Farmers Union, 26% of under-16s polled said that bacon came from sheep, and 29% thought that oats grew on trees (Daily Mail).
So it is perhaps a small consolation that an English sparkling wine trounced traditional French champagnes to be crowned Champion of Worldwide Sparkling Wines in an annual competition held by Italian wine magazine Euposia. Nyetimber's Classic Cuvée 2003 beat off entries from Bollinger and Louis Roederer in a blind tasting, despite costing less than £30 per bottle (Telegraph).
Also sure to win awards is the newest attraction in Beijing, China. The “World Chocolate Wonderland” is a 20000 square metre theme park devoted to the food and boasts life-size replicas of terracotta warriors, a BMW and a basketball player caught mid-leap, all made of chocolate. The centrepiece must be an array of chocolate fountains that endlessly propel 1.5 tonnes of melted chocolate in all directions. The park is open to April, but plans to reopen next January with all new exhibits (Movie Channel).
Perhaps they’d like to bid for the chocolate and sweet reproduction of a statue of Lenin currently on display in Bucharest, Romania? The statue, which stands on the plinth that once held the real thing, is to be auctioned off to raise money for a museum of statuary from the country’s Nazi and Communist past, with “pride” of place going to a 62 foot granite bust of Lenin (Daily Express).
Category: Furries, Candy