Did you know?

Fish has been served with a slice of lemon since the middle ages, when people believed that the lemon juice would dissolve accidentally swallowed bones. Both chocolate and ketchup were sold as medicine in the 18th and 19th centuries – chocolate to stop stomach aches and fevers, ketchup to cure all ailments from baldness to cancer. The can opener was invented 48 years after cans were introduced. The first product to use a barcode was a packet of Wrigley's chewing gum. When Marco Polo came home to Italy from his travels in China in 1295, he returned with a recipe for a dessert called milk ice. Europeans substituted cream for the milk, and the ice-cream was born. Honey may be the only food that practically never goes off. Archaeologists have found vats of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs and found it to be in surprisingly good condition. Doughnuts originally had a nut in the middle to avoid the problem of undercooked centres. You can actually make humble pie – 'umble' was the name once given to venison offal.