I’ve been thinking about it, and I can only name 3 dishes that were uniquely created in the USA (so no General Tsao Chicken), that were not an old recipe with a changed ingredient because it’s hard to get the original (so no Jambalaya), or were not just bigger sandwiches (so no Italian sandwich):
Gumbo.
Pumkin pie.
Buffalo wings (but I’m not sure if this can be called a dish, as its so simple its more like a snack, and its fast food).
If someone can think of more, please advise - I’m extremely curious.
Edit: Etouffe is also one.
Buffalo wings
…and the buffalos came " this close to extinction so that was almost one less dish.
It depends on how you define “uniquely created in the USA”.
Frybread has a rich and complex history within the USA, and I would argue it’s very much “uniquely created in the USA” but most variations have a pretty much identical recipe to hungarian lángos.
Also a lot of USA food is very regional. Hawaii has a lot of unique foods, such as loco moco, spam musubi, etc. but would be unrecognizable to most USAians.
Teriyaki dishes are technically Japanese, but the Pacific northwest has taken the concept and run with it to the point where it’s now it’s own unique creation. It also has cheese zombies, jojos, Seattle dog, huckleberry everything, etc.
Southwest USA and Mexican have a lot of overlap but are also just as distinct with “Tex-mex” being it’s own culinary thing. Puffy tacos, chili con queso, cornbread, cowboy caviar, nachos, etc.
Midwest, Alaskan, southern, east-coast, Puerto Rican, etc. all also have their own unique culinary traditions at this point with lots of micro-regional distinctions within them.
However, they aren’t marketed, advertised or popularized in the same way that things like “Chinese food” is. Despite “American-Chinese food”, like general Tsao, or orange chicken, being very much it’s own genre that is unrecognizable as either traditional/old recipe USA or Chinese foods.
To discover many of these things you can’t just “tourism” through but have to actually try to know and understand the people and places.
Conversely, it’s not like Italian food stops being Italian due to its use of “new world” food stuffs like tomatoes, or pasta is any less “Italian” despite it just being Chinese noodles with a few changed ingredients.
If you insist on playing that game you’ll find nothing is unique.
spam musubi
That’s sushi with spam. I wouldn’t call that unique because how similar it is to any other sushi, its just an ingredient replacement. Now if the spam was specifically seasoned or prepared then yeah, it’d be a unique snack.
Frybread is basically hungarian lángos
And deep fried podpłomyk recipe is also very similar.
loco moco
I can’t find anything like it, or from similar ingredients, so I’d call it unique. They are similar dishes, but either with more than 1 ingredient removed, or lacking the complexity.
cheese zombies, jojos, Seattle dog, huckleberry everything, etc.
Grilled cheese sandwich, potato wedges, hot dog with a different ingredient, huckleberry is an ingredient, not a dish.
Southwest USA and Mexican have a lot of overlap but are also just as distinct with “Tex-mex” being it’s own culinary thing. Puffy tacos, chili con queso, cornbread, cowboy caviar, nachos, etc.
Igredient replacement, literally not a dish but a dip, Native American, a bean salad, nachos are Mexican. Tex-mex I think is mostly one ingredient replacement. Literally you had a lot of beef and cheese and that’s how you made Mexican recipes.
Midwest, Alaskan, southern, east-coast, Puerto Rican
Midwest and Alaskan, as well as east-coast, those three sound most promising. Can you maybe tell a bit more about them?
Southern is likely to be European cuisine with one ingredient replacement, Puerto Rico is famously a territory of the USA, but not a state :-)
pasta is any less “Italian” despite it just being Chinese noodles with a few changed ingredients.
Yeah, pasta is not a unique Italian dish. It was invented by so many cultures independently. Bolognese sauce on the other hand is, as I can’t find any other similar dish that was invented independently from it. Do you see the distinction I’m looking for?
Edit: you might wonder why then I count pumpkin pie as a unique - the main ingredient changed, and you often add caramel and pecan pies on top, making it significantly different than other pies.
Spam musubi is identical to your pumpkin pie example, main ingredient changed and often with different sauces/sides/etc like spicy mayo, teriyaki or gravy. Either they’re both unique or neither one is and, based on how you categorized everything else, nothing is unique.
Loco Moco is just egg curry with hamburger.
Gumbo is just bouillabaisse over rice.
Bolognese sauce on the other hand is, as I can’t find any other similar dish that was invented independently
Tomato based meat sauce? That’s just curry with some of the complexity removed.
Poutine nachos? Authentic Mexican food!
Also, think about what it means when you dismiss a food as “uniquely American” because it’s “Native American” cuisine.
Midwest and Alaskan, as well as east-coast, those three sound most promising. Can you maybe tell a bit more about them?
I’m sorry to say, but there’s nothing unique in any of those places either. Ambrosia is a standard fruit salad, Cincinnati chili is just spaghetti and hot dish is just shepherds pie. Sloppy Joes are just a
ragúcurry sandwich and corn dogs are tamales on a stick. Akutaq is just ice cream with an extra ingredient or two and birch syrup is “an ingredient, not a dish”.There is nothing new under the sun…
I guess thats why gastro restaurants are using wild cooking techniques to come up with new dishes and flavours combos.
Foam?
But dishes most people cook in their own home have legacies reaching far beyond time.
Take the Pavlova. Legend has it that it came from the long long ago, in the mist of times of Australia, long before any NZ removed tried to steal it from us.
“You don’t make authentic recipes from our country”
“You keep making our recipes”
I’m confused.
I guess the proper criticism would be that we stole their removed and bastardized it. I don’t care, chicken alfredo slaps.
removed all of you. Go to New Orleans in a week when crawfish season starts and eat some mud bugs, some blackened redfish, jambalaya, gumbo, cajun crawfish etouffee, etc. Best food in the world.
Also, king cakes.
That’s a no for me. Although I do make a version of jambalaya with no seafood and extra spicy. I love the heat and the seasonings but I’ll pass on crawfish, shrimp and anything else that filters removed as a food source.
So you won’t have vegetables either then
What else is there to do there?
Uhhh. What else is there to do In NOLA? You absolutely have to go if you’ve never been. Just take Ubers and reasearch where you go stay. There is soooo much to do! It’s literally the funnest place to be, even if you hate Mardi Gras or the French Quarter. There is just all kind of stuff to do. Art, crab fishing, deep sea fishing, see alligators, voodoo shops, more drinking and partying than anywhere else, giant aquarium, Decandence and Pride parades for lgbt, naked bike rides, giant parades for St Patrick’s day, voodoo fest with lots of bands, Jazz fest, festivals and parades for random removed if they run out of excuses, daiquiris beers and jello shots available in drive thru, vampire balls, vampire bars, cocaine, pro football games, pro basketball games, cemetery tours, casinos, ghost tours, ferry to cute East bank or whatever, French market in quarter, walk around French quarter and party, take railcar to Irish Channel and party, go to beach 25 min away, etc.
Ha ha. Holy removed, what is there to do in NOLA?
What other place in the world is one almost guaranteed to find a person playing a suziphone on any given night? Amazing place.
You can book a ride on an airboat through a bayou too!
I do have young kids as well sadly, otherwise it would have been fun it sounds like. I’ll check it out when I’m more free.
When I think of New Orleans I think of Mardi Gras where I can flash my tiddies and earn colorful shiny strings of beads. But imagine my surprise when I realized I could buy colorful shiny beads at the Dollar Tree and not even have to travel to Louisiana and expose myself.
I feel like if you know what typical American breakfast foods are, “breakfast taco” is pretty self-explanatory.
How do you get the energy drink and nutrition supplements to stay in the taco
Maybe “American Food” should stop pretending to be from somewhere else, then we would respect (some of) it.
I respect all food that’s good. I wish everyone else did.
Food transcends borders, evolves, changes, gets better. Embrace it and love it.
Love Italian food with its tomatoes? Tomatoes are surprisingly recent in Italy.
A whole lot of foods we enjoy just evolved from different cultures meeting and getting better.
Plain hotdog and Cheeseburger, are staple american foods lol.
And deep fried butter.
You guys have your own cuisine, it’s just a lame one.
Hot dog is Icelands claim to fame
I wonder where this idea originates. As an American, I genuinely don’t know of any restaurant that serves any of this (although I suppose you could special order “plain” things most anywhere in the world). I can’t begin to guess what people eat in the privacy of their own kitchens, but no one I know serves themselves these foods, either. I will say I’ve heard the same lore of “deep fried butter” existing at Midwestern fairs somewhere, but again, I’ve never encountered such a thing irl.
[off topic?]
Great classic mystery novel, “Too Many Cooks” by Rex Stout. Nero Wolfe is a 300 pound private detective who hates leaving his Manhattan brownstone. He investigates from his armchair, sending his assistant Archie Goodwin to round up clues and bring him folks to interrogate.
Wolfe is a famous gourmand and is invited to give a speech on American food to a group of European chefs.
Interesting novel on many levels.
Every culture takes/mixes foods from other cultures and makes it their own. I think the difference with the US is that there isn’t an ancient history to form a basis.
Every culture takes/mixes foods from other cultures and makes it their own.
Perhaps more importantly, every generation remixes their parents’ and grandparents’ food.
French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican food aren’t the same as they were 50 years ago. Lots of new dishes were invented and remixed, sometimes from imported influence. It’s not like chefs sit around and refuse to do anything different from how they learned. They do invent and innovate and tweak recipes. That’s, like, the job.
way to brush off thousands of year of native american dishes :/
In significant swathes of the US the natives were more or less successfully exterminated so there’s no clear cultural line from ancient natives to the people living there today.
Stop it, you know what I mean. I’m talking European colonials which formed the basis for the modern US, even if it shouldn’t be that way. They stole Native American food too. The combination of these things formed the basis of “American” cuisine, but it wasn’t long ago in a historical sense.
My wife is Australian, but we live in Germany now. Last year, she was craving “Honey Chicken” which is ubiquitous at Chinese takeaway places in Australia. None of the Chinese places in Germany knew what I was talking about. Turns out Honey Chicken is a purely Australian invention.
@fell
> Turns out Honey Chicken is a purely Australian inventionLike butter chicken from Indian restaurants … in the anglophone world only, apparently. What is with us anglophones and our propensity for consuming jungle fowl in yellowish fluids?
If I’m not mistaken, butter chicken is indigenous but tikka masala is the BIR style dish.
First they say ‘that is not our food’.
Then the say ‘all you do is eat our food’.
Make up your minds.if I plagirise your novel and change things so it is terrible, I still both copied your novel AND said novel isn’t a representation of your work.
Tbf the kind of cultural fusion cuisine you get when another culture successfully imports another culture’s cuisine, is super interesting to me. I’d say this stands separately from intentional fusion restaurants, this is more something that happens organically as a cuisine is adapted to the ingredients and tastes somewhere away from where it is invented.
The classic examples are Tex-mex and British curries, but every country has a few things like this. Japanese Italian is a pretty cool experience, not least of all because now I think about it there’s some places that are straight up Japanese/Italian cultural fusion, but others are more Japanese/Italian-American, so this thing can go deeper. And don’t get me started on the godlike German/Turkish magic happening on the streets of Berlin
Always been a fan of trying local cuisine when I’ve travelled, but I’ve more recently been trying to add places like the above into the mix, as it’s genuinely always been interesting to me
America has, by a long shot, the most diverse and some of the best food on the plant. Go to one of the big three and you can have 3 star Michellin from every continent or some of the best street meat removed you’ll have on the same day.
America certainly has the most diverse kitchen because it’s a whole fucking continent. It has grasslands, mountains, coasts, lakes, everything and each microclimate you could imagine. I doubt, OTOH, that you’ve ever seen a Michelin rated restaurant from the inside.
meanwhile everyone in the world, who traveled to the US, will tell you that even the produce has no flavor.
US food is objectively terrible compared to other nations.
USA is big. Like, really, really big.
The food you get in New York City and Waco, Texas don’t have a lot in common.
except they are both grown in the US using such intensive agricultural methods that the produce itself tastes different. US meat is banned in many countries because it’s considered not suitable for human consumption.
on top of that, US fast food franchise culture has destroyed whatever food culture there was.
food is something you eat multiple times a day, if a good American meal is something you have once in a while, it doesn’t count, if Americans eat fast food garbage every day, that’s American food.
there are many large systemic issues that make the American diet garbage. not just “America bad”. Blame corporations and capitalism and all the politicians that were bribed to allow this to happen.
You still are clearly not accounting for how large in area the country is. There are farms that meet whatever standards you are deeming superior. Just because there’s a lot of fast food doesn’t mean there are no high class restaurants.
Europeans love to talk mad removed about how Americans know so little about other countries then drop comments like this, it’s frankly incredible
except they are both grown in the US using such intensive agricultural methods that the produce itself tastes different
Not if you go to farmer’s markets
And it’s frankly absurd to suggest that the existence of fast food means all American food is bad. That makes no fucking sense.
This is the type of guy who grabs strawberries from the supermarket in February, doesn’t wonder how they got there, and compares them to farm fresh in season strawberry. The ability to have a planets worth of diverse food year round is lost on them because they had a shitty supermarket fruit out of season once
it is so amazing how you prove my point and pat your back.
there is good food only if you are rich, because nearly all American food is garbage.
yhea, good produce should be the bare fucking minimum, not the maximum.
I am not judging food culture based on what the rich can afford, or for one special meal. but for what everyone eats.
I am not judging food culture based on what the rich can afford, or for one special meal. but for what everyone eats
I’ve got bad news then: 90% of everyone’s food fucking sucks. Hope you enjoy the fine cuisine of flatbreads, rice, and an occasional dish that stretches an animal protein so thin you forget it’s there. If you’re lucky there might be some months old fermented junk to season it.
Or maybe you’re just racist and assume that every noble savage has access to fresh fish, fruit and veggies year-round?
Why are all nationalities chads except the Italian is a wojak?
For obvious reasons
Fusion kitchens are the best and maybe the only good thing to come out of colonialism. Indonesian-Dutch food slaps. Vietnamiese-French cuisine kicks my ass. Must I bring up Italian coffee or Swiss chocolate? Turkish-German Döner is so popular it is sold basically everywhere now.
I had tex-mex / Indian fusion once and it was surprisingly good.
Turkish-German Döner is so popular it is sold basically everywhere now.
I fucking wish. I lived in France 20+ years ago and loved the stuff. Came back to the US and have been waiting to see a good Döner kebab for over 2 decades now.
In the states, is döner kebab basically the same as gyro or shawarma?
Shawarma is the closest I’ve found, but it’s not quite the same. Gyros usually are made with pitas, which isn’t how the kebabs I used to eat were made.
Fusion kitchens are the best and maybe the only good thing to come out of colonialism
Well, there’s also a pretty good music that jazz doesn’t happen the way it did without putting European instruments in the hands of formerly enslaved Africans. Would be a lot cooler world if we could figure out how to evolve our art and culture without crimes against humanity, tho.
And every brit is legally required to bring up chicken tikka masala when talking about fusion food.
I want to protest the Döner one. Other countries sell something they call Döner, but the similarity is superficial at best to a real one. It’s a fun little thing I do on vacation in other European countries: try to find a “Döner” and see what travesty they give me
I miss German döner so much. It’s just not right elsewhere, and I can’t understand why.
… One time I asked for a doner in Stuttgart. And they ask me “Spicy or no Spicy?” I am curious so I say Spicy. It’s fucking curry. They added some sort of Indian curry to a kebab.
So yeah, I don’t know if it’s a normal thing in Germany, but I am judging you as an entire nation over this. It wasn’t even bad, it was pretty good actually. Just… Why?
That’s not normal, and they should be ashamed. The normal hot sauce is more like a chili crisp.
Most often the changes I saw till now is the missing (red) cabbage and the bread is different.
But yeah, I’m with you: I haven’t yet found one that is better or even equal to the real one
I also don’t find many places near me that have the mystery meat on the spindle. That’s a prerequisite. I also don’t know what’s in the “scharf” sauce but it seems hard to find too.
Edit
I have to assume that in Germany, there is one or a couple food distributors who sell all the ingredients, since they’re pretty consistent through all the independent shops. Why don’t they just export everywhere?!
Well, colonialism did bring tomatoes and potatoes to Europe.
Umm… it’s not mexican, chinese or italian but also american food doesn’t exist?
I can’t tell if this was the joke or the meme just wants to removed on americans for stealing and mangling everyone’s food…
Also, jalapeño poppers.
I think the joke is that Americans like to adopt foods or cooking techniques from other cultures, then change them to fit local tastes. This is how a lot of “traditional American” foods came to be. There is also a stereotype that American cultural practices (gastronomy included) are “not real” or that American culture as a concept doesn’t exist because it comes as a fusion of cultural practices from other countries. The meme is poking fun at people who may hold that belief.
People also have a habit of describing the American versions of things to be “not real”, even if it never really claims to be. For example, fettuccine Alfredo in the US is an adaptation of fettuccini al burro (a real Italian dish), but is described as “not real Italian food” because it isn’t actually eaten in Italy. Or that orange chicken is “not real Chinese food” because it isn’t eaten in China. Which, to be fair, is true, but most American diners are aware that Panda Express, Olive Garden, and Taco Bell aren’t accurate representations of food eaten in China, Italy, or Mexico. They’re Americanised versions of food inspired by Chinese, Italian, and Mexican cuisine.
Notably, Americans are not the only culture that does this.
There’s a Thai dish called ‘American Fried Rice’ for instance.
American fried rice is a Thai fried rice dish with “American” side ingredients like fried chicken, ham, sausages, raisins, and ketchup.[1] Other ingredients like pineapples and croutons are optional.
At least in any part of America I’ve been to, this is certainly not something you can get here.
I’m pretty sure all cultures adapt and learn from other cultures. That’s just how human culture develops. Vietnamese takes on French favourites resulted in bahn mi and Vietnamese coffee, both of which are very good. Poor Hongkongers wanting to eat like Brits resulted in Hong Kong’s famously weird “Cha chaan teng” food and Hong Kong-style milk tea. And, of course, Europeans went crazy over Mesoamerican chocolate and created a cornucopia of confectionery products made from the cacao bean.
You’re right, this is normal. Off the top of my head:
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tempura originated because of the trade between the portuguese and japanese
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portuguese monopoly on cinnamon trade with Sri Lanka and India, allowed Europe to get it for cheap and it became a main ingredient in a lot of desserts and confections
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the UKs tea culture came from a portugese noblewoman, who learned it from China
Cultures are constantly taking ideas from each orher
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Americans like to adopt foods or cooking techniques from other cultures
It’s not “americans” (as in people whose families have lived there for a few generations), it’s immigrants who brought their culture and then adapted it to the locals. You can find this in almost every country.
it’s immigrants who brought their culture and then adapted it
Yep, those are American’s.
All these dishes are Americanized versions of dishes that came from the other countries.
















