Foods tend to get their names from their appearance or ingredients, but not all are so clear-cut. Take, for instance, the egg cream, a beverage that has delighted the taste buds of New Yorkers (and other diner patrons) since the 1890s. If you’ve never sipped on the cool, fizzy drink known for its chocolate flavor and foamy top, you should know: There are neither eggs nor cream in a traditional egg cream drink.

The first milkshakes had no ice cream.

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Frosty milkshakes are diner standards, served with a side of burgers and fries, though the earliest version of the drink didn’t include ice cream. Invented in the late 1800s, the first milkshakes were a blend of eggs, cream, and whiskey.

According to culinary lore, the first egg cream was the accidental invention of Louis Auster, a candy shop owner on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Auster’s sweet treat arrived in the 1890s, at a time when soda fountains had started selling fancier drinks, and it was a hit — the enterprising inventor reportedly sold upwards of 3,000 egg creams per day by the 1920s and ’30s. However, Auster kept his recipe well guarded; the confectioner refused to sell his formula and eventually took his recipe to the grave. The origins of the drink’s name have also been lost to time. Some believe the name “egg cream” came from Auster’s use of “Grade A” cream, which could have sounded like “egg cream” with a New York accent. Another possible explanation points to the Yiddish phrase “echt keem,” meaning “pure sweetness.” 

Regardless of the misleading name, egg creams are once again gaining popularity in New York, though you don’t have to be a city dweller to get your hands on the cool refreshment. Egg creams can be easily made at home with just three ingredients: milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup.

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Jiggly, wiggly, and inexpensive — Jell-O has a reputation for being the ultimate affordable and fun dessert. But the moldable treat we’re familiar with today wasn’t always affordable fare for the masses. At one time, its key ingredient — gelatin — was difficult to come by, making any gelatin-rich dish a symbol of wealth and social standing. What’s more, the earliest gelatin dishes weren’t post-dinner treats; in medieval Europe, cooks used gelatin to preserve meats in aspics, making savory jellies similar to modern head cheeses. Extracting gelatin back then was time-intensive: Cooks spent days boiling animal bones and byproducts, then straining the liquid before letting it set into its gelatinous state. This lengthy, involved process meant that gelatin dishes were rarely served at the dinner tables of everyday folks who didn’t employ kitchen staff.

Gelatin is a common ingredient in vaccines.

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If you’ve been vaccinated against measles, chickenpox, or rabies, chances are your shot contained gelatin. The jiggly preservative is used in some vaccines to stabilize ingredients, protecting them from extreme temperatures during storage and transport.

Gelatin’s status as a high-class delicacy would last only a few centuries. Peter Cooper, an inventor who also designed the first American steam locomotive, created a “portable gelatin” in 1845 that was easily reconstituted with hot water. But Cooper was uninterested in marketing his invention, and his gelatin was largely ignored despite its potential success with cooks who yearned for an easier method for making gelatin — such as suffragette and cookbook author Mary Foote Henderson, whose 1876 Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving footnoted her gelatin recipe by saying she’d never again undertake the arduous task of making the stuff. Cooper’s creation was eventually sold to a New York cough syrup manufacturer, who added fruit flavors and branded it with its Jell-O name in 1897. By the early 20th century, Jell-O ads promoted the dessert as a low-cost, high-society wonder, and the Great Depression and World War II solidified Jell-O’s versatility as a budget and rations stretcher — a reputation that has carried on for more than 100 years.

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In our everyday language, berries are typically small, juicy fruits. But in botany, a berry is a fruit that develops from the single ovary of an individual flower and has seeds throughout its fleshy interior. By that definition, each segment of a pineapple begins as a berry. As dozens of these berries grow and fuse together, they form the fruit we know as a pineapple.

The tiny seeds on the outside of a strawberry are not actually seeds.

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Those tiny dots are called “achenes”; each one is technically an entire one-seeded fruit itself.

Pineapples grow as a cluster of flowers arranged around a central stalk. Each flower produces its own small fruit; as the fruits grow, they press together and eventually merge into a single structure. Botanists classify this type of structure as a multiple fruit. That’s why the rough exterior of a pineapple has a diamond-shaped pattern: Each section marks the location of a separate flower — and a separate berry — that became part of the finished fruit. Figs and mulberries also fit the multiple-fruit bill; both form from clusters of flowers that combine as they develop. 

Surprisingly, bananas and tomatoes are true botanical berries, too, while the most common fruits that have the label — strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries — are not. The latter three qualify as aggregate fruits, botanically speaking. Unlike a multiple fruit, which develops from multiple flowers, an aggregate fruit develops from multiple ovaries inside a single flower. This results in a cluster of tiny fruitlets that form the larger “berry.”

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