LogFAQs > #975591348

MabusIncarnate posted...

Every nation has good and shit food. We deep fry twinkies and oreos ffs.

In fairness, we got the idea to deep fry everything from Britain (specifically, from Scotland). In particular, deep-fried Mars bars (the "Mars" brand of candy is marketed as "Milky Way" here, in case you wanted to try it for yourself) originated from Scotland in the early '90s, predating both the deep-fried Twinkie and the deep-fried Oreo by about a decade. In general, much of modern America's obsession with deep-fried food in general stems from the South, which in turn got it from Scottish immigrants to the region throughout the 17th to 19th Centuries.

Deep frying itself, however, dates back to at least 4000 years ago in the Southern Levant, and it spread pretty much everywhere. Classical Greece deep-fried food in olive oil around the 5th Century BCE. Northern Europe had funnel cakes and Spain and Portugal had fried fish, both around the 1200s CE, while Falafel made its way to Egypt from the Middle East about a century later. Japan got tempura from Portuguese missionaries in the late 1500s, but even before then, they'd been deep-frying food on their own (either by just dipping the food straight into the oil without any cover, or with a coating of rice flour; the Portuguese introduced the idea of using a blend of flour and eggs). And that's just a small sample of what the world has done with the concept.