Coffee ... Probably the only food discovered by a monk and officially approved by a pope. According to legend, coffee was discovered more than a thousand years ago when a friar in an Arabian convent noticed his goats prancing on their hind legs after eating berries from a wild coffee plant. He tried the beans himself; soon afterwards a new medicine was born.

Drinking coffee for the sheer pleasure of it didn't come until years later ... and it didn't come without a fight. Sold in popular coffeehouses known as "penny universities" and "seminars of sedition," coffee was denounced by devout Christians as "the devil's brew" and outlawed by secular authorities who saw it as an intoxicating beverage that led to "discussions of rebellion and slander of those in power." Church opposition finally ended in 1594 when Pope Clement VIII tried a copy and liked it so much that he baptized it. "We will not let coffee remain the property of Satan," he announced. "As Christians, our power is greater than Satan's; we shall make coffee our own." (Thank God!)

Pretzels ...Salted breads have been around for thousands of years - but it wasn't until about 610 A.D. that an Italian monk twisted them into their distinctive crisscross shape, which is supposed to look like two arms folded in prayer. The monk created these pretioles, or "little gifts" to give as a reward to children who memorized their prayers. By 1200 A.D. they were popular all over Europe.

McDonald's Filet-O-Fish Sandwich ... Remember meatless Fridays? They were the inspiration for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich, which was developed in 1962 by Louis Groen, owner of the burger chain's franchises in Cincinnati, Ohio. His restaurants made money every day except Friday when the city's huge Catholic population skipped McDonald's in favour of competitors offering fish and other nonmeat entrees.

Hot Cross Buns ... First baked by the pagan Saxons, who called them bouns (Saxon for "sacred ox" - and an ancestor of the word "bun") and baked them with X marks representing ox horns. The rolls were so popular that when the Christians began converting the Saxons to Christianity, rather than abolish the rolls they just rotated them forty-five degrees, reinterpreted the pagan X mark as a Christian cross ... and passed them out during Mass to win converts.

Champagne ... Invented by accident when Dom Perignon, a 17th century Benedictine monk from the Champagne region of France, began stuffing corks into the bottles of wine produced at his abbey. Unlike traditional cloth rag stoppers, which allowed carbon dioxide to escape, corks were airtight and caused bubbles to form. Amazingly, Dom Perignon thought the bubbles were a sign of poor quality - and devoted his entire life to removing them; but he never succeeded. Louis XIV took such a liking to champagne that he began drinking it exclusively; thanks to his patronage, by the 1700s champagne was a staple of French cuisine.