Would you have survived the Great Molasses Flood of 1919?

In the Grimm Brothers’ tale, Sweet Porridge, a magic kettle, run amok, drowns a town in porridge. In Tomie dePaola’s Strega Nona, an out-of-control pasta pot inundates a village with noodles. In real life, however, food floods aren’t all that common – which perhaps is why, after they occur, we remember them in capital letters.

There was, for example, the London Beer Flood of 1814, in which an exploding vat of beer at Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery sent a tsunami of beer through the streets of London. The estimated one million pints of porter toppled walls and houses and drowned eight people. The vat, 21-feet high and 60 feet