Burnt Toast

The banana peel is so synonymous with slipperiness that we know how this joke ends right when it starts—why? And why a banana? We trace down the origins of the gag, and land in a surprising place.

After our episode about the vintage rotisserie machine that still has a cult following, we received an email from the son-in-law of the inventor, Leon Klinghoffer. Today’s episode is his story.

(It's true!) Kyle MacLachlan swings by the Food52 offices to make a cherry pie with us, and we sit down to ask him about Agent Dale Cooper's approach to food, his own, and how he got into winemaking.

The story of a 22-foot tall fried chicken mascot that became the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles—and one artist’s decades-long quest to find him a new home.

Throughout history, the same thing we eat with our morning cereal has inspired myth, magic, and superstition—like the fact that if you don't sit still after drinking a glass, it'll turn to cheese in your stomach. We speak with historian Deborah Valenze to dig into our complicated relationship with milk, sparing none of the strangest misconceptions.

One presidential term goes down in history as serving borderline inedible food to the thousands of guests who dined there. What was on the menu, who was responsible, and the revenge theory behind it all.

This episode of Burnt Toast was produced by Gabrielle Lewis and Kenzi Wilbur. Thanks also to Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the founders of Food52— and to Laura Mayer and Andy Bowers at Panoply. 

We talk to Professor Charles Spence about the science behind how what you hear when you eat affects the whole multi-sensory experience.

This countertop rotisserie has a lively cult following for producing the juiciest, spit-roasted birds. Our reason to be suspicious? It was made in the 1950s. We put one to the test to find out if this machine *really* makes the best chicken,

We ask—and then we try to change emoji history. Learn how an emoji gets made as we submit our pie emoji proposal to Unicode.

We track down the composer of one of the catchiest jingles of all time—the jingle that opened new factories it was so popular—to learn its surprising origin story.