“Tang” Menu Mystery Solved

You are listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. And Martha, we finally solved a word mystery.

Yes, we did.

In October of last year, we had a call from Lynn in Plano, Texas.

She called about a menu that a friend of hers had inherited from his mother.

His mother was in Jackson, Mississippi. The menus were dated September 1947.

On these menus was an entree called Tang.

Tang served with molasses. Tang served with K-Ro syrup, right?

Right.

You remember this. We got a lot of calls.

A lot of people speculated that it was this or that.

We were able to eliminate some of this stuff right away.

We knew that it wasn’t Tang the powdered space drink, the orange-flavored space drink,

because that didn’t come along until 10 years later.

Right.

You and I eliminated Tang the fish because Tang the fish was never cultivated for mass consumption,

was unlikely to appear 250 miles inland, and furthermore did not go with the rest of the menu,

which was very ordinary.

Yeah, yeah, it wasn’t in the recipe.

The rest of the menu was things like pineapple salad, butterscotch pudding, baked potato, greens, tea, and the like, right?

Right.

And we found no recipe book at all anywhere that included recipes on how to make Tang the fish.

So we were pretty much stumped.

We put the word out to you, and we re-aired that call recently, and we got even more email from people with their ideas.

This time, we had the correct answer.

Yes. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Wonderful stuff. Came in from Berry Lynn in Casa de Oro, California.

This is just outside of San Diego where we record the show.

Barry sent us pictures of an antique button, the kind you pin on your shirt.

It says, try Cudahy’s Tang, delicious, economical.

That’s Cudahy, C-U-D-A-H-Y.

And I’ll tell you why we pronounce it that way in a minute.

On the pin, next to those words is the cartoon of a fat-bellied boy.

And next to him is a metal tin that looks exactly like a tin of Spam.

And it turns out that if you Google Cudahy’s Tang, you find out that Cudahy’s Tang was a knockoff of Spam.

Yep.

Now, there were more than 100 knockoffs at the time.

Spam came around in 1937.

The Tang product came around a few years later.

It turns out that you can find it advertised in Life magazine and in newspapers across the country

and the Wednesday circulars and where have you in the grocery section and so forth.

So the Tang that was on this menu was a Spam-like product.

We’re talking the pork, heavily salted, mildly spiced, squeezed into a canned product,

you know, the stuff that lasts for seven years on the shelf.

I’m grimacing, but…

I loved it as a kid.

Slice that up, fry that, serve it with some greens and cornbread.

Well, it fits with those menus, right?

It does. It does indeed.

So it turns out, as far as we’re concerned, that Barry Lynn has solved this problem.

I think there’s 100% likelihood that Barry has it right

and that the Tang on these menus was a Spam-like product, this processed meat in a can.

It fits.

A little side note, Martha.

There are a number of people around the country, well, in two places exactly, who are jumping up and down right now.

And they live in Cudahy, Wisconsin and Cudahy, California.

It’s because these two cities were named after two members of the Cudahy family.

And this family had many members who were involved in the meat processing and meat packing businesses over the last 100 plus years.

And so these two cities take their name from the factories that used to make this product,

and many other products, by the way.

And there’s still a Patrick Cudahy factory in Wisconsin, I believe.

Bring us your stumpers.

It may take a while, but we can crowdsource the answer sometimes.

877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.