FOOD HISTORY: Cheese Doodles

After World War II, Morry Yohai took over the Old London Foods business.The company, founded by Yohai's father in the 1920's as King Kone, made ice cream cones, melba toast, cheese crackers and caramel popcorn. In the 1950's, Yohai and his partners, working at the company's Old Melba Toast factory building in the Bronx, NY, were looking for a new product. They found a machine that extruded corn meal that "popped" almost  like popcorn. Yohai decided to cut the cornmeal product into child-like pieces, to coat them with cheddar cheese and bake them, rather than fry them, to make this new food product  more healthy. Because the popped cornmeal tubes, which in those days were very thin, looked to Yohai and his parthers like "doodles", the new snack food was christened "Cheese Doodles". The rest, as is said, is history!