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Copper & Heat Copper & Heat is an independent digital studio specializing in creative, human-focused food content.

We are the team behind the two-time James Beard Award-winning Copper & Heat Radio, which explores the forces that shape our meals through narrative, sound-rich podcasts. Our production studio, Copper & Heat Creative, helps brands engage food-curious audiences with unique and thoughtful content. With over a decade of combined experience in journalism, marketing, and the food and restaurant industry, we are a team passionate about crafting content that challenges preconceived notions.

20/12/2025

Was Gingerbread Really Banned for Witchcraft?⁠
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Gingerbread was not always a cozy holiday treat. In early modern Europe, gingerbread carried deep superstition and fear, including beliefs that witches used gingerbread men to harm their enemies. These fears escalated to the point where some Dutch magistrates made gingerbread illegal. Long before gingerbread houses and holiday cookies, it was tied to witchcraft, fertility myths, and political hysteria.⁠
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Its comeback came in the 1800s, when Christmas began to take shape as a national holiday, and Queen Victoria helped reintroduce German Christmas traditions to England. Gingerbread was transformed from a feared object into a festive symbol of domestic warmth and holiday nostalgia.

19/12/2025

Is Eggnog Really an American Tradition?⁠
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Eggnog is considered a classic American holiday drink, but its origins are tied directly to colonial economics and the transatlantic slave trade. While the English aristocracy drank a similar beverage called posset, eggnog became distinctly American through the addition of rum and sugar, both products of the Triangle Trade.⁠
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As milk and eggs became cheaper in the colonies, eggnog shifted from an elite drink to an everyday tavern staple. What we now associate with holiday cheer is deeply connected to systems of exploitation that shaped early American food culture.

18/12/2025

Why do we eat turkey on Christmas? 🦃⁠
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Turkey became the centerpiece of the Christmas table through British imperialism, industrialization, and assimilation politics. First introduced to England in the 1500s, turkey was an exotic status symbol reserved for the upper class and quickly associated with Christmas feasts.⁠
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By the early 1900s, advances in farming, refrigeration, and transportation made turkey cheaper and more accessible. At the same time, turkey dinners were used as tools of cultural indoctrination, especially for immigrants arriving through Ellis Island. Christmas celebrations and turkey dinners were staged to model what it meant to be American, reinforcing a single version of tradition through food.

26/11/2025

Share this with someone who needs to know more about this “traditional” marshmallow-covered side dish.⁠
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Sweet potatoes themselves have been part of American foodways for a long time. Native folks roasted them whole on open flames and enslaved Africans cooked with them extensively in the South. ⁠
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But who decided to top them with marshmallow?⁠
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In 1917, Angelus Marshmallows (which eventually became Campfire) commissioned Janet McKenzie Hill, founder of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, to write a booklet full of marshmallow-based recipes. And one of the first recipes was mashed sweet potatoes topped with marshmallow. A lot of marshmallows.⁠
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By the middle of the 20th century, marshmallow companies had done their jobs so well that magazines and cookbooks reprinted the recipe as if it had always existed and it became a shorthand for a classic American Thanksgiving.

25/11/2025

Share this with someone who lives to debate cranberry sauce.

The history of the cranberry industry is littered with controversy: indigenous land loss, immigrant labor, industrial agriculture, antitrust loopholes, corporate engineering, and a national food safety scandal that nearly destroyed the industry.⁠
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Cranberries are one of the only commercially grown fruits Native to the U.S., and as the country was colonized and fruit became more popular, the growing cranberry industry took control of the land where cranberries grew.⁠
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As the industry grew in the following decades, a co-op of growers was created to sidestep antitrust laws so they could set prices and control supply without legally being considered a monopoly. ⁠
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That cooperative eventually became Ocean Spray, which today accounts for roughly 70% of U.S. cranberry production. By 1941, Ocean Spray had copyrighted its signature jellied cranberry sauce. ⁠
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In 1959, a massive cranberry food safety scare turned cranberry sauce into a symbol, not just of Thanksgiving, but of the messy political relationship between public safety, government intervention, food and agriculture corporations, and trust.

24/11/2025

Stove Top Stuffing (the instant version that cooks in five minutes) was developed in the mid-20th century by a badass woman who deserves more recognition.⁠
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The company General Foods wanted a stuffing product that appealed to the convenience-minded postwar American public. Ruth Siems, who was a home economist at General Foods, is listed on the patent as the inventor who came up with the breakthrough to make this possible: VERY specific breadcrumb size. ⁠
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It was rare for a woman working as a home economist to contribute to a patent, a privilege usually reserved for male food technologists. In response to her breakthrough, General Foods gave Ruth a $125 bonus, and she remained levels down from her male peers on the corporate ladder until Ruth was forced into early retirement following a corporate acquisition. ⁠
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Share this video with someone who loves the comfort and convenience of Ruth’s Stove Stop Stuffing.

23/11/2025

Pumpkin pie wasn’t always part of Thanksgiving. In the 1800s, writers and activists in New England used the pumpkin as a symbol of morality and national identity, especially during the rise of abolition. Sarah Josepha Hale promoted Thanksgiving — and pumpkin pie — as part of a cultural vision rooted in Protestant values and Northern ideals.⁠
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Many Southern states rejected that vision and embraced sweet potato pie instead, a dessert created by formerly enslaved Black Americans.⁠
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Share this with a relative who insists Thanksgiving food is “apolitical.”

22/11/2025

Turkey isn’t on the Thanksgiving table because of a 1621 feast. It’s there because one woman — Sarah Josepha Hale — spent decades pushing her conservative Protestant vision of America into national culture.

Through her editor role, her fiction, and her political lobbying, she mythologized Thanksgiving, shaped its menu, and turned turkey into the “lordly” centerpiece she believed reflected the ideals of a white Protestant nation.

Share this with someone who thinks turkey was chosen because it’s “traditional.” Tradition has a PR team.

Last week the Michelin guide released its guide to the American South. Here's a look at a breakdown of the locations and...
19/11/2025

Last week the Michelin guide released its guide to the American South. Here's a look at a breakdown of the locations and cuisines that the guide highlighted with stars and Bib Gourmand awards.

As the guide expands in the states beyond major cities should their approach change? What do you think about this guide?

31/10/2025

How did trick-or-treating become so popular in America? Turns out is has a lot to do with marketing and candy companies looking for a way to sell more candies in the fall.

-or-treat

30/10/2025

Trick-or-treating as we know it today came about because of a fascinating history involving Christianity, treason in Britain, Irish folklore, generational wars, and of course, American marketing.⁠

-or-treating

21/10/2025

When the prep is this fun, you know the event is going to be great.🎉⁠
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Working with such a fantastic crew really makes everything easier—shoutout to , , , and ! Big thanks to everyone who made it happen and to all the folks who showed up!

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Copper & Heat is a James Beard Award-winning podcast exploring the unspoken rules and traditions of restaurant kitchens through the stories of people that work in them.