By Brian Boone

Certain foods are just synonymous with the summertime. Corn on the cob and watermelon? We eat those during these months because they’re seasonal, and because they can grow all over the country. Other summer dishes have stories twistier than those noodles in your famous pasta salad you bring to every neighborhood gathering.

Caprese salad

That fresh, clean, and simple combination of sliced mozzarella, tomatoes, basil leaves, and olive oil really did originate in the place mentioned in its name: the southern Italian island of Capri. In 1926, Capri’s luxurious Grand Hotel Quisisana hosted a futurism conference headlined by the concept’s purveyor and namer, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In his honor, the hotel kitchen served up a “Dinner of the Future” that aligned with Marinetti’s call for Italians to reject meat, foods originating elsewhere, and dried pasta. Cheese, veggies, and herbs worked under those guidelines, and it’s no accident that the white, green, and red color palette matches that of the Italian flag. 

Three-bean salad

Plenty of Americans whose names and recipes are lost to history who came up with the idea to create a summer side dish by adding a tangy salad dressing to cheap and plentiful canned beans. The official origin of three-bean salad comes from a 1950s-era recipe printed on the labels of cans of beans sold by Stokely-Van Camp. Like green bean casserole and Rice Krispies treats, a recipe doled out for free on packaged foods was enough to get a dish entrenched in millions of Americans’ kitchens at the time. The original recipe developed by the bean canner involved kidney, waxed, and green beans, as well as chopped bell pepper and onion, all drowned in a dressing of oil, vinegar, and sugar. 

Hot dogs

As early as the 13^th century, butchers in the German city of Frankfurt were making Franken Wurstchen, a smoked pork sausage. By the early 1800s, it had inspired variants across Europe, such as Frankfurt-trained but Vienna-based butcher Johann Georg Lahner’s Frankfurter, which added beef to the pork and was finely blended and encased. As that food’s popularity spread through Europe, it took on the name of Wiener — as Wien was the German name for Lahner’s home city of Vienna. When around three million German immigrants settled in the United States in the 19^th century, they brought the sausage known as both the Frankfurter and the Wiener with them. The first documented case of someone thinking to stick the thing in a bun: In 1859, when German immigrant Charles Feltman started selling a Frankfurter on a roll he called the Coney Island Red Hot. But why call them “hot dogs”? After the sausage-on-bread version was popularized at the 1893 World’s Fair, someone connected the supposedly mysterious meat used in the food with how they resembled the Dachshund, a German breed of dog, and it took off. 

Deviled eggs

The term “deviled” as it pertains to food came about in the 1700s, and it meant to prepare a dish with has much spice and heat as possible. Deviled eggs consist of egg yolks, mayonnaise, mustard, and paprika served in a halved hardboiled egg white and they aren’t very spicy beyond the paprika, but that was apparently spicy enough for the time. The dish itself as we know it today, as developed back then, was a derivative of a recipe served at parties in ancient Rome. Wealthy folks would begin their feasts with boiled and whipped eggs served with various hot and spicy dipping sauces.