These days, fried mozzarella sticks are a standard item on the menus of Italian restaurants all over the United States. Actually, you'd have a hard time finding a menu at most American restaurants that doesn't feature mozzarella sticks in their appetizers section. What's funny is that this deep-fried snack isn't even from Italy, despite being so commercially attached to that cuisine.

The first mention of frying and breading slices of cheese actually appeared in "Le Ménagier de Paris," a cookbook published in France in 1393. The original medieval recipe for what were then known as "pipefarces" doesn't mention any particular kind of cheese: The author only mentions using an egg wash and breading before frying pieces of cheese (they also suggest beef marrow as an alternative for cooking oil -- brr). In the United States however, breaded sticks of mozzarella didn't start making waves until the 1970s and '80s.