How Ketchup Got Its Name (Reheat)

Ketchup started as a far different product from what’s on the shelves today. A lot of its evolution can be traced to an early government agency and a group there called “The Poison Squad” that tested the safety of different chemicals -- by eating them. We hear that story. Then a linguist explains why the name “rocky road” actually makes the ice cream taste better.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:43Dan Pashman?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Podcasts.

• 1:15Dan Pashman?

  Hey, everyone, Dan here. And if you've been listening to this show for a long time, you know that I am a lover of words. Words mean things, they matter. And this week's reheat is a collab with a podcast called Science Diction, all about words and the science stories behind them. This episode brings you two stories from host and reporter Johanna Mayer. She delves into the etymology of ketchup and how it started out as a very different product from the tomatoey condiment we know today. Johanna also digs into the disputed origins of rocky road ice cream. Science Diction stopped producing new episodes, but you can still check out their whole archive in any podcast app. As always, if there's a Sporkful episode you want us to pull out of the deep freezer for a reheat, drop me a line, tell me what it is, I'm at [email protected]. All right, enjoy.

• 2:00Dan Pashman?

  In the early 1900s, there was a strange dining room in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. It had sparse white walls, white china, two round oak tables with white tablecloths, 12 straight backed chairs. And propped up at the entrance, there was a hand painted sign that said, "None but the brave can eat the fair." Every day, 12 young, healthy men would put on their suits and bow ties, march into that dining room, and dig into meals laced with borax, or salicylic acid, or even formaldehyde.

• 2:44Dan Pashman?

  They were called the poison squad, and the meals they ate in that basement dining hall would completely transform America's most iconic condiment: ketchup. This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. This week's episode is a special collaboration with the podcast Science Diction. They do a show about words and the science stories behind them. And they're currently in the middle of a whole season about food words. Later on, we'll hear why the name Rocky Road actually makes that ice cream flavor taste

• 3:29Dan Pashman?

  better. But first, ketchup. One of my grandmothers was very short, and she always told the story that for high school graduation, her classmates got her a bottle of ketchup to encourage her to grow, to catch up. But I don't think that's where the word comes from. For the real story, I'll turn it over to Science Diction host, Johanna Mayer.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  At the turn of the century, food regulation in the United States was just not a thing. Manufacturers were making all kinds of, hmm, substitutions, shall we call them? And you could never be completely sure what you were eating. Strawberry jam could be mashed up apple peels, grass seeds, dyed red. And black pepper, that could be anything. Bits of coconut shell, rope, a little bit of floor sweepings. And even if you were getting the food that was on the label, you didn't know what else was in it. Milk, for example.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yes, there was some actual milk in there, but milk producers would often cut it with lukewarm water. Sometimes they would even toss in a squirt of purified cow brains to make it look like there was a layer of cream on top. And if that wasn't bad enough, it was not unusual to spike milk with formaldehyde. They figured, hey, works on dead bodies. It'll probably keep milk from spoiling, too. As for ketchup, all sorts of trashy fillers were blended up in there. Pumpkin rinds, apple trimmings, you name it.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  So this is the sorry state of food regulation. When along came a man named Harvey Wiley. He was the chief chemist at the Agriculture Department. Wiley was absolutely devoted to food purity. He once told a reporter that he ate bread that was bread, meat that was meat, butter that was uncolored and unsalted. And Wiley was appalled at all of these stunts that these food makers were pulling, especially the preservatives. He wanted to show people just how bad they could be.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  So in 1901, he rounded up a group of volunteers, young, healthy men, mostly low-paid clerks in the Agriculture Department, and he fed them. Three meals a day, good quality food, actually. Roast beef, oysters. The catch was that, half the time, they'd be getting the same meal, just with a little borax, or salicylic acid, or whatever preservative they were testing that week.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Wiley's crew quickly became something of a pop culture phenomenon. Newspapers called them "the poison squad." They wrote all about these, quote, "healthy specimens of manhood" who were sacrificing their own stomachs to protect the public. Someone wrote a song about them that oh-so cleverly rhymed "poison squad" with "gruesome wad." Believe me, we tried to find a surviving copy, but alas. These experiments were really just about food additives, getting the bad ones out. But they ended up having an unintended side effect. They forever changed ketchup.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Americans eat $800 million worth of ketchup every year. Hot dogs, burgers, french fries, eggs. In the US, we put that stuff on everything. Except ketchup, and the name itself, didn't come from the US at all. It came from East Asia. And the original ketchup didn't include the one ingredient that we think of as the most integral, defining, essential thing that makes ketchup, ketchup. It had no tomatoes. The original ketchup was fish sauce. It's a little murky precisely when and where ketchup as fish sauce came to be.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And there's no single, original ketchup mother sauce recipe. But we do know that for centuries, people had been making these fish sauces all over East and Southeast Asia, the kinds you'd probably associate with Thai and Vietnamese food. And one of the places that made these sauces was the Fujian province of China, where they speak a dialect called Hokkien. And in Hokkien, fish was keh, sauce was cha.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  I needed a little bit of help with the pronunciation.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  I don't really know the Hokkien pronunciation because it's just not in use anymore.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  This is Alan Lee, a linguist and a native Hokkien speaker. Even though the word for this fish sauce isn't around anymore, Alan gave it his best shot.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  I guess it's something like, uh, ketchup.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Sound familiar? Fish, sauce. Ketchup. Ketchup. Or catsup. Hokkien doesn't use the Roman alphabet, so English speakers just kind of guessed at how to spell it. Catsup and ketchup are two different versions of that. So, theory goes, the word started in Hokkien, and from there, the sauce and the word traveled.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  In Malay, it's ketchup, although in modern Malay, it generally refers to soy sauce. If you go to a supermarket in Malaysia or somewhere around here, you would see words like ketchup masin, which means salty ketchup, which is soy sauce, but you also have other variants like ketchup manis, which is the sweetened soy sauce, and ketchup ikan, which is like fish sauce, literally, and that may have been its origin.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  So in Malay, ketchup can be kind of a soy sauce, sometimes fishy, sometimes kind of sweet, vaguely close to its roots. But here, how did fish sauce turn into a sugary tomato pulp? Well, from China, ketchup traveled the globe, and like a lot of borrowed foods, it changed beyond recognition.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  At some point, British sailors bought it from Chinese merchants in Indonesia, brought it back to the Western world. Probably added a nice little kick to all that bland food they were eating on ships. But it was also an opportunity to sell and market the stuff back home as a fancy delicacy from overseas. And you know what happens when you have a fancy schfancy imported product? Knockoffs. The original fish sauce had this salty, tangy flavor, and what we would call today umami.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  And when ketchup landed in Britain, they swapped in a bunch of Western ingredients to give it a similar punch, just cheaper and more local. And let me tell you, it was nothing like the stuff that we dip our fries into today. If you were to spoon a dollop of ketchup onto your plate in mid-18th century Britain, you'd be looking at a dark, thin, runny sauce. Some versions of ketchup contained beer. Anchovies were a staple for a while. What made ketchup ketchup was the umami kick that all of those ingredients were trying to deliver, like the original fish sauce.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  And you know what else has umami? Tomatoes.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  So eventually, they threw those in, too. In 1812, we see our very first recorded tomato ketchup recipe. A horticulturist named James Mies instructed the ketchup cook to slice the tomatoes thinly, sprinkle on some salt, beat them well, and after a half hour simmer, top it all off with a dash of brandy and cloves. He called this his recipe for love apple catsup. Yet they used to call tomatoes love apples. I kind of wish that name had stuck.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  By the time Harvey Wiley and the Poison Squad hit the scene, ketchup had very much arrived stateside. An article in 1896 called Tomato Ketchup: The National Sauce of America, and the reporter is deeply enthralled with it, like weirdly. He wrote, "The skill of the French cook is surpassed in this instance. If he wants real tomato ketchup, he must buy it in America." And the ketchup business was good. But thanks to Harvey Wiley, manufacturers, like a lot of food manufacturers, were in a bit of a pickle. They needed to get their ketchup to customers without it spoiling.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  But here was this scientist making a big fuss about preservatives possibly poisoning people. And they were especially unhappy when he zeroed in on sodium benzoate.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  It seemed to them that this preservative was harmless enough. Sodium benzoate is a salt of sodium and benzoic acid. Now, benzoic acid might sound scary, but it naturally occurs in cranberries and in some milk products. And the compound, sodium benzoate, seemed like an ideal preservative. It was odorless, mostly tasteless, and it was cheap. But if you think Harvey Wiley is gonna let this one slide, think again. If this preservative was gonna fly, it had to pass the Poison Squad test. And it didn't. Every single member, save for one, had bad side effects: inflamed throats, stomach

• 13:26Speaker 02

  pain, weight loss. Only three out of the 12 were able to stick it out through the sodium benzoate experiments. The others got too sick, had to quit. But I don't want to throw sodium benzoate under the bus here, because the dose makes the poison, right? The quantities of sodium benzoate that the Poison Squad were eating were way bigger than what you would find in a regular old squirt of ketchup. And later tests by other researchers just didn't back up the Poison Squad's findings. To this day, the FDA considers sodium benzoate safe in small quantities. But even though sodium benzoate eventually got the green light, back at the turn of

• 14:07Speaker 02

  the century, one ketchup maker took note of Wiley's Poison Squad experiments. And he decided, if that's what it's doing to people, no way, not for my ketchup. You may have heard of him. His name was Henry J. Heinz. Heinz was a businessman through and through. At the tender age of eight, little Henry went door to door with a basket, peddling surplus from his family's garden. By age 10, he'd upgraded to a wheelbarrow. He grew up to look like the absolute classic vision of a 19th century wealthy white dude:

• 14:49Speaker 02

  wispy white hair, big old mustache, three-piece suit. And for a wealthy 19th century businessman, Henry Heinz was ahead of the curve. His employees got free life and death insurance, they had access to on-site cafeterias and medical stations, there were even roof gardens at his factory. And Heinz staked his reputation on purity, cleanliness, and transparency. By cleanliness, I mean he had laundry services for his workers, even an in-house manicurist to keep their nails pristine. But the Heinz company, like pretty much everybody else, had been using preservatives, sodium benzoate included.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  And when Henry Heinz heard about these poison squad experiments, he decided that these additives, they just didn't really vibe with his pure ketchup ethos. So here's Henry's challenge. How do you make a ketchup that stays fresh and red and is equally scrumptious, all without preservatives? Well, there's a concept in food preservation called hurdle technology. If you want to keep food from spoiling, you don't necessarily need one potent preservative in there. Instead, you throw up a bunch of little hurdles, each of which make it tough for microbes to live there.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Like, you make food more acidic, boil it, reduce water activity by adding lots of salt or sugar. Each of these hurdles on their own won't be enough, but all of them together, that's too much for a little microbe. Hurdle technology is a relatively new term, but even without knowing it, people have been using this combination punch approach for centuries. And that's basically what Heinz ketchup was doing. After a whole lot of testing, thousands of experimental batches, Heinz company scientists came up with a brand-new recipe, with a lot more vinegar to boost the acidity and plenty of salt and sugar. And there was one more thing.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Their ketchup's coming a lot smoother than ours does.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  You might remember Heinz's anticipation ads. The ketchup comes out so slow because it's so thick, but it's worth the wait.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Heinz's secret to making thick, slow-moving ketchup was to use fresh, ripe tomatoes. Most manufacturers used unripened ones. Definitely more expensive, but besides sounding more appetizing, fresh tomatoes had more pectins, which are long chains of carbohydrates that help gel food. So whereas ketchups could be kind of runny, Heinz was thick with pectins. Mmm.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Once Heinz reformulated, they launched a major advertising campaign touting their ketchup as pure and wholesome. I think of ketchup as just about the most non-fresh, indestructible condiment that could survive the apocalypse just sitting in my refrigerator. But whatever Heinz was doing, people seemed to dig it. In just a couple of years, they went from selling 5 million bottles a year to 12 million. And although a lot of ketchup brands, honestly, taste pretty much the same these days, Heinz still dominates.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  So here is this thing that so many of us eat every single day, that farts out of squeeze bottles and doubles as fake blood and is sometimes confused for a vegetable. A condiment as American as diners and fast food that started off in East Asia and used to be fish sauce. Ketchup.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  So remember that song that I mentioned earlier that rhymed Poison Squad with Gruesome Wad? It's called "Song of the Poison Squad", and it was written by someone named S.W. Gillian. We just couldn't let the world exist without a copy. So here you go. Oh, we're the merriest herd of hulks that the world has ever seen. We don't shy away from you, rough on rats or pears green. We're on the hut for toxic dope that's certain to kill. But tis a tricky elusive thing and knows we're on its trail. For all the things that could kill, we've downed many a gruesome lard. We're still gaining a pound a day, for we are the Poison Squad.

• 19:44Dan Pashman?

  So that's the story of ketchup. Coming up...

• 19:49Dan Pashman?

  Rocky Road? Who came up with the name of this iconic ice cream flavor? Well, that turns out to be a subject of great debate. Johanna looks into it and explores the science of why certain words make foods taste better. Stick around.

• 20:19Speaker 05

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• 23:32Speaker 07

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• 24:16Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat. I'm Dan Pashman. Want to watch me walking my dog while ranting about some food-related issue that's on my mind? Want to see what I'm cooking? Want to see what I'm eating? The best way to do that is to follow me on Instagram. My kids make occasional appearances. There's a lot of fun to be had, so please follow me on Instagram, at the Sporkful. Again, that's at the Sporkful. Thanks. Now, back to this week's reheat.

• 24:41Dan Pashman?

  Now, reasonable people can disagree over what ice cream flavor is best. I can never pick just one. I mean, it really depends on more factors than I have time to list right now. But I think one ice cream flavor name does reign supreme. Rocky Road. For the story of that name, here again is Science Dictions' Johanna Mayer.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  A few years ago, Alyssa Greenberg was sharing an ice cream sundae with some friends at Fenton's Creamery in Oakland, California.

• 25:11Speaker 08

  They have the kind of sundaes that are dripping down the sides and are covered in fudge and whipped cream and that are almost obscene.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Fenton's, as an Oakland institution, leans really hard into the nostalgia factor. Vinyl booths, an old-fashioned soda fountain, black-and-white photos hanging on the wall. So Alyssa picked up the menu.

• 25:37Speaker 08

  And on the little blurb in the back of the menu for Fenton's, it says, "The birthplace of Rocky Road. Rocky Road was invented here." And I was like, "Wait, what?"

• 25:50Speaker 02

  The Rocky Road. Chocolate ice cream, nuts, mini marshmallows. Inventing this American classic, truly a claim to fame.

• 26:00Speaker 08

  And then I Googled it and Google said that Dryers invented Rocky Road. And I was like, ooh, the game is afoot.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  So it's Dryers, this major ice cream brand now owned by Nestle versus Little Fenton's Creamery, both claiming that they were the ones who invented Rocky Road. And I get why companies would want to claim Rocky Road is their own. It's not just the flavor because anyone could take nuts, chocolate, marshmallows, throw them all together in an ice cream and call it Muddy Street or Poorly Paved Driveway. But it probably wouldn't inspire the same devotion. There's something about that name, Rocky Road. It is just that good. Both Fenton's and Dryers have pretty straightforward stories for how they invented Rocky Road.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  In Dryer's version, it was William Dryer himself, who one day in 1929, decided to make an ice cream with nuts, chocolate, and marshmallows.

• 27:01Speaker 08

  But at the time, marshmallows did not yet come in small versions.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  They came in sheets.

• 27:08Speaker 08

  So he took his wife's pinking shears and cut the marshmallows into four pieces and then stuffed them in the ice cream and tada, Rocky Road was born.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Dryer says the name was meant to, quote, "give folks something to smile about in the face of the Great Depression." According to Fenton's, it was a candy maker on staff who came up with it. Story goes, one day he was making a candy bar with, you guessed it, nuts, chocolate, and marshmallows.

• 27:39Speaker 08

  And he was like, you know what would be a great idea is if I put this candy bar in the ice cream. And he did it and it was a hit and the end of the rest is history.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  For over two years, Alyssa tried to find out whose story was true. She turned up an alleged confession, a denial of that confession, just a whole lot of ice cream fueled drama. More on that from Alyssa later because it turns out that people have a lot of feelings about Rocky Road.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Would Weird Al do a tribute to Vanilla?

• 28:19Speaker 02

  No, because vanilla is the definition of boring, and it has a boring name to go with it. But rocky road sounds fun, playful, even somehow delicious, which it shouldn't. It is a road with rocks in it.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  But when it comes to food names, it's not just what the word means, it's how it sounds. It's something that linguists and food marketing types seem to understand very well.

• 28:50Speaker 09

  I was at my little grocery store here in San Francisco in my little neighborhood of Bernal Heights.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Dan Jarofsky is a linguist. He wrote a book called The Language of Food.

• 29:00Speaker 09

  And I was just scanning the cracker aisle, and I noticed that every single cracker name had an "it" in it. And I was like, something's going on here. So I started really from the cracker side. And then I thought, well, what's the opposite of crackers? Well, that would be ice cream.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Dan decided to run a little experiment. He went online, downloaded 81 ice cream flavors from brands like Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs. Then he went to a diet website, downloaded 600 cracker brand names, and he noticed a pattern. It had to do with the vowels.

• 29:33Speaker 09

  I just counted how many of these ice creams versus crackers, you know, which one had more front vowels, like "e" or "i", and which one had more back vowels, like "oo" or "aw". And there was a striking difference.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  All right, so front vowels. The "e" in cheese, the "i" in mint. Feel how your tongue moves when you make those sounds. You're kind of lifting it toward the front of your mouth. Cheese, mint. Now say chocolate, mousse. Those words are full of back vowels. Pay attention to your tongue again. Chocolate, mousse. This time, it's pulled more towards the back. Dan discovered that the cracker names had nearly all front vowels, full of E's and I's.

• 30:24Speaker 09

  So that's your Cheez-Its and Wheat Thins and crispy Triscuit crisps and chicken in a biscuit.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  But the ice creams?

• 30:31Speaker 09

  That's your back vowels. That's your Jamoca almond fudge, your chocolate, your caramel, your cookie dough, your coconut, and your rocky road.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  So why would marketers choose to give back vowels to ice cream names and front vowels to crackers? Well, people seem to have these vowel taste associations in their brains.

• 30:53Speaker 09

  You present people with hypothetical ice creams either named like Frish or Frosh, and you see which one people like better. And they all seem to like the O one better than the I one for ice creams.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  So Dan thinks we have this association. Back vowels, rich, creamy, perfect for ice cream. Front vowels, light and airy, just like crackers. Researchers have turned up all kinds of weird associations like this. That lemonade named Bilad sounds more bitter than one named Bolad. Or that words with the Z just sound like they taste kind of bad, according to some studies, anyway. This phenomenon, it's called sound symbolism, where particular sounds conjure up particular meanings. And it doesn't just happen with sound and taste. It can happen with sound and vision. The most famous case is called the Booba Kiki effect,

• 31:48Speaker 02

  discovered by a psychologist in the 20s. So when you show people two different shapes, one blobby and amoeba-like, the other kind of spiky, sort of like the pow symbol in cartoons, and then you ask them to say which one of those two shapes is booba and which one is kiki, upwards of 90% of people will say that the blobby one is booba and the spiky one is kiki. The results are astonishingly consistent, even in cross languages. We're not sure why our brains make these kinds of connections. Maybe we all have a little bit of synesthesia, that neurological phenomenon where the lines between our senses become kind of blurry,

• 32:30Speaker 02

  like some people see musical notes as colors. But whatever the reason, our brains do this kind of thing pretty often.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  So do companies think about sound symbolism when coming up with enticing product names? Absolutely. They can't help but.

• 32:50Speaker 10

  It has totally ruined my ability to look at names in the way that a normal person does.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  I talked to Will Laban. He used to teach linguistics at Stanford. He's also the former director of linguistics at a company called Lexicon Branding. And Will's company is responsible for some of the biggest household names. BlackBerry, Febreeze, Swiffer.

• 33:17Speaker 10

  So you know what? Swiffer is a sweeping product.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  I am very familiar with Swiffer.

• 33:23Speaker 10

  Just think about the sounds of it.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  First, Swiffer sounds like sweeping. Swift, swift, swift. If you swapped out the F for, say, a V?

• 33:34Speaker 10

  It doesn't work, okay? It just has the wrong sound for the name.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Swiver? Yeah, no, that is not going to clean my floors. Or you know Dasani Water? Lexicon Branding named that, too. And they chose it in part because it just sounds relaxing.

• 33:50Speaker 10

  And it's just totally smooth. And it's one of the smoothest sounds in the language.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Will and I talked about all kinds of sounds. Zippy sounds, daring sounds, sounds that are luxurious, and sounds that are somehow insecure. And I had to know, what did Will think of the name Rocky Road?

• 34:12Speaker 10

  Rocky Road's a really amazing name for a bunch of reasons.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  First, those creamy back vowels. Then there's the hard K, interrupting the flow.

• 34:22Speaker 10

  It almost sounds like a bump in the road. Rocky.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  And road sounds smooth. So those two words together capture that combination of crunchy nuts and smooth creamy base.

• 34:35Speaker 10

  They chose really well. They were daring. They made a choice that caught on very quickly and has lasted almost a century.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  But who was this daring genius? Alyssa Greenberg was determined to get to the bottom of these two competing claims. Who invented Rocky Road? Was it Fenton's, the beloved Oakland creamery? Or was it Dryers, the beloved corporate ice cream behemoth? Which one was the marketing genius who came up with this mouthwatering name? Well, it was neither of them. Remember Fenton's story was that their in-house candy maker invented it by basically sticking a candy bar in ice cream? That candy bar was called Rocky Road. You can still buy it today. It's made by a company called Annabelle's, and they say that their founder invented

• 35:28Speaker 02

  it as early as 1918. Annabelle's, by the way, seems to be steering totally clear of this whole ice cream drama.

• 35:37Speaker 08

  I think they're just like, whatever you guys, you know, do whatever you need to do, we'll, we'll just be over here making delicious candy bars.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  And you know what? I'm not so sure they can claim the name Rocky Road either, because in Australia, there's a popular dessert also called Rocky Road. It's a chocolate bark with nuts and marshmallows, and according to completely unverified internet lore, Australians invented it in 1853. So really, neither Fenton's nor Dryers can claim credit for the name Rocky Road. But Rocky Road ice cream was admittedly a pretty brilliant invention. At the time, ice cream just came in three old flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Might seem obvious in retrospect, but back then, throwing in crunchy chocolatey gooey bits, truly a stroke of genius. And Alyssa Greenberg really, really wanted to find out just whose genius it was. The two alleged inventors were long gone, and tracking down an original, dated, forensically authenticated recipe from the 20s just didn't quite pan out. Investigative ice cream journalism is just woefully underfunded. But she forged ahead, and in her research, it seemed that all roads led to a guy named Ken Cook, who became president of Dryers. Pretty flashy fellow.

• 37:10Speaker 08

  Italian suits, alligator shoes, a miniature golf course in his backyard that he named after Rocky Road, and a Cadillac with a vanity plate that read R-C-Y-R-D.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  And the story goes that one day, Cook decided to share something with the guy who now owns Fenton's, Scott Witten.

• 37:33Speaker 08

  Witten says that Cook came to him and said, again, all alleged, "Fenton's invented Rocky Road, and I capitalized on it in our marketing because Fenton's was not capitalizing."

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Which sounds like an astounding confession. The dryers did steal credit for this legendary ice cream. But Witten himself doesn't actually see it that way. He was great friends with Ken Cook. The way he sees it, Cook was just a showman telling a good story, even if that story happened to be untrue. Cook died in 1991, so he can neither confirm nor deny. But when Alyssa asked some former Dryers employees about this, hmm, not a great reaction. When she called up one guy?

• 38:21Speaker 08

  He said, "He's full of [bleep]." He said, "I knew Ken Cook as well as anyone in his career, and he had too much respect for Bill Dryer to do something like that," basically. And then, not long after that, he hung up the phone on me. Yeah, he was not pleased.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  And that was it. Alyssa never got her answer. Maybe she just didn't care enough. Because Rocky Road, she doesn't get it.

• 38:49Speaker 08

  Uh, I mean, it is good. I guess I don't, I don't love nuts in ice cream. I think I love a good sort of ripple more than like, I feel like if it were...

• 39:02Speaker 02

  What, Alyssa? Are you not hearing that irresistible combination of creamy back bells, crunchy case, and playful alliteration? Rocky Road is scientifically, linguistically delicious.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  See? He gets it.

• 39:42Dan Pashman?

  That's Johanna Mayer, host of the podcast Science Diction. Remember, they're doing a whole season on food words and the science stories behind them. They got a new one up right now about umami and a bunch of other great episodes that go beyond food. It's made by the same folks who make the excellent radio show and podcast, Science Friday. So check out Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts. One final note from me. Years ago, I had Weird Al here on the show and I asked him about one key line in this song. "Chocolates gettin' old, vanilla just leaves me cold." Do you stand by those lyrics today?

• 40:15Speaker 11

  No, I never, you know, and not every lyric that I write is autobiographical. In fact, I like Rocky Road. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I love it. I don't think I've actually had Rocky Road ice cream since 1982 because that's, or 83 was when the song came out. And as part of the promotion for that song, I had to participate in so many Rocky Road ice cream eating contests that I think I've gotten my lifetime's share of Rocky Road ice cream.

• 40:51Dan Pashman?

  My thanks to Johanna Mayer and everyone at Science Diction, Ella Fetter, Nathan Toby, Daniel Peterschmidt, Michelle Harris, Danya Abdelhamid, and Chris Wood. This episode is produced by me, along with senior producer- Emma Morgenstern- and producer- Andre Sojero. Our editor is-

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Tracy Samuelson.

• 41:10Dan Pashman?

  The show is mixed by- Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Daisy Rosario. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 41:21Speaker 12

  And I'm Alicia in Vermont, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 41:44Dan Pashman?

  This reheat was produced by Gianna Palmer. The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app, all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by

• 42:26Dan Pashman?

  going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 42:37Speaker 13

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• 43:07Speaker 07

  Hey, this is Will Ornate, host of Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week one of us reveals a mystery guest to the other two. We dive deep with guests that you love, like Bill Hader, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Kristen Stewart, and tons more. So join us for a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the smartless mind. Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app. Download it today.