The cuisine of the United States reflects its history. The European colonization of the Americas yielded the introduction of a number of ingredients and cooking styles to the latter. The various styles continued expanding well into the 19th and 20th centuries, proportional to the influx of immigrants from many different nations; such influx developed a rich diversity in food preparation throughout the country.
Early Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods in early American Cuisine that have been blended with early European cooking methods to form the basis of American Cuisine. When the colonists came to the colonies, they farmed animals for clothing and meat in a similar fashion to what they had done in Europe. They had cuisine similar to their previous British cuisine. The American colonial diet varied depending on the settled region in which someone lived. Commonly hunted game included deer, bear, buffalo, and wild turkey. A number of fats and oils made from animals served to cook much of the colonial foods. Prior to the Revolution, New Englanders consumed large quantities of rum and beer, as maritime trade provided them relatively easy access to the goods needed to produce these items: rum was the distilled spirit of choice, as the main ingredient, molasses, was readily available from trade with the West Indies. In comparison to the northern colonies, the southern colonies were quite diverse in their agricultural diet and did not have a central region of culture.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans developed many new foods. During the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) food production and presentation became more industrialized. One characteristic of American cooking is the fusion of multiple ethnic or regional approaches into completely new cooking styles. A wave of celebrity chefs began with Julia Child and Graham Kerr in the 1970s, with many more following after the rise of cable channels such as Food Network.
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History
Pre-colonial cuisine
Seafood
Seafood in the United States originated with the Native Americans, who often ate cod, lemon sole, flounder, herring, halibut, sturgeon, smelt, drum on the East Coast, and olachen and salmon on the West Coast. Whale was hunted by Native Americans off the Northwest coast, especially by the Makah, and used for their meat and oil. Seal and walrus were also eaten, in addition to eel from New York's Finger Lakes region. Catfish was also popular among native people, including the Modocs. Crustacean included shrimp, lobster, crayfish, and dungeness crabs in the Northwest and blue crabs in the East. Other shellfish include abalone and geoduck on the West Coast, while on the East Coast the surf clam, quahog, and the soft-shell clam. Oysters were eaten on both shores, as were mussels and periwinkles.
Cooking methods
Early Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods in early American Cuisine that have been blended with early European cooking methods to form the basis of American Cuisine. Grilling meats was common. Spit roasting over a pit fire was common as well. Vegetables, especially root vegetables were often cooked directly in the ashes of the fire. As early Native Americans lacked pottery that could be used directly over a fire, they developed a technique which has caused many anthropologists to call them "Stone Boilers". They would heat rocks directly in a fire and then add the rocks to a pot filled with water until it came to a boil so that it would cook the meat or vegetables in the boiling water. In what is now the Southwestern United States, they also created adobe ovens called hornos to bake items such as cornmeal bread. Other parts of America dug pit ovens; these pits were also used to steam foods by adding heated rocks or embers and then seaweed or corn husks placed on top to steam fish and shellfish as well as vegetables; potatoes would be added while still in skin and corn while in-husk, this would later be referred to as a clambake by the colonists.
Colonial period
When the colonists came to Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or any of the other English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America, their initial attempts at survival included planting crops familiar to them from back home in England. In the same way, they farmed animals for clothing and meat in a similar fashion. Through hardships and eventual establishment of trade with Britain, the West Indies and other regions, the colonists were able to establish themselves in the American colonies with a cuisine similar to their previous British cuisine. There were some exceptions to the diet, such as local vegetation and animals, but the colonists attempted to use these items in the same fashion as they had their equivalents or ignore them entirely if they could. The manner of cooking for the American colonists followed along the line of British cookery up until the Revolution. The British sentiment followed in the cookbooks brought to the New World as well.
In 1796, the first American cookbook was published.
There was a general disdain for French cookery, even with the French Huguenots in South Carolina and French-Canadians. One of the cookbooks that proliferated in the colonies was The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) by Hannah Glasse, who referred to "the blind folly of this age that would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook!" Of the French recipes given in the text, she speaks out flagrantly against the dishes as she "... think[s] it an odd jumble of trash." Reinforcing the anti-French sentiment was the French and Indian War from 1754 to 1764. This created a large anxiety against the French, which influenced the English to force many of the French to move, as in the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana. The Acadians left a French influence in the diet of those settled in Louisiana, and among the Acadian Francophones who settled eastern Maine and parts of what is now northern Vermont at the same time they colonized New Brunswick.
Common ingredients
The American colonial diet varied depending on the settled region in which someone lived. Local cuisine patterns had established by the mid-18th century. The New England colonies were extremely similar in their dietary habits to those that many of them had brought from England. A striking difference for the colonists in New England compared to other regions was seasonality. While in the southern colonies, they could farm almost year-round, in the northern colonies, the growing seasons were very restricted. In addition, colonists' close proximity to the ocean gave them a bounty of fresh fish to add to their diet, especially in the northern colonies.
Wheat, however, the grain used to bake bread back in England was almost impossible to grow, and imports of wheat were far from cost productive. Substitutes in cases such as this included cornmeal. The Johnnycake was a poor substitute to some for wheaten bread, but acceptance by both the northern and southern colonies seems evident.
As many of the New Englanders were originally from England, game hunting was useful when they immigrated to the New World. Many of the northern colonists depended upon their ability to hunt, or upon others from whom they could purchase game. Hunting was the preferred method of protein consumption (as opposed to animal husbandry, which required much more work to defend the kept animals against Native Americans or the French).
Livestock and game
Commonly hunted game included deer, bear, buffalo, and wild turkey. The larger muscles of the animals were roasted and served with currant sauce, while the other smaller portions went into soups, stews, sausages, pies, and pastries. In addition to game, colonists' protein intake was supplemented by mutton. The Spanish in Florida originally introduced sheep to the New World, but this development never quite reached the North, and there they were introduced by the Dutch and English. The keeping of sheep was a result of the English non-practice of animal husbandry. The animals provided wool when young and mutton upon maturity after wool production was no longer desirable. The forage-based diet for sheep that prevailed in the Colonies produced a characteristically strong, gamy flavor and a tougher consistency, which required aging and slow cooking to tenderize.
Fats and oils
A number of fats and oils made from animals served to cook much of the colonial foods. Many homes had a sack made of deerskin filled with bear oil for cooking, while solidified bear fat resembled shortening. Rendered pork fat made the most popular cooking medium, especially from the cooking of bacon. Pork fat was used more often in the southern colonies than the northern colonies as the Spanish introduced pigs earlier to the South. The colonists enjoyed butter in cooking as well, but it was rare prior to the American Revolution, as cattle were not yet plentiful.
Alcoholic drinks
Prior to the Revolution, New Englanders consumed large quantities of rum and beer, as maritime trade provided them relatively easy access to the goods needed to produce these items. Rum was the distilled spirit of choice, as the main ingredient, molasses, was readily available from trade with the West Indies. Further into the interior, however, one would often find colonists consuming whiskey, as they did not have similar access to sugar cane. They did have ready access to corn and rye, which they used to produce their whiskey. However, until the Revolution, many considered whiskey to be a coarse alcohol unfit for human consumption, as many believed that it caused the poor to become raucous and unkempt drunkards. In addition to these alcohol-based products produced in America, imports were seen on merchant shelves, including wine and brandy.
Southern variations
In comparison to the northern colonies, the Southern Colonies were quite diverse in their agricultural diet and did not have a central region of culture. The uplands and the lowlands made up the two main parts of the southern colonies. The slaves and poor of the south often ate a similar diet, which consisted of many of the indigenous New World crops. Salted or smoked pork often supplement the vegetable diet. Rural poor often ate squirrel, opossum, rabbit and other woodland animals. Those on the "rice coast" often ate ample amounts of rice, while the grain for the rest of the southern poor and slaves was cornmeal used in breads and porridges. Wheat was not an option for most of those who lived in the southern colonies.
The diet of the uplands often included cabbage, string beans, and white potatoes, while most avoided sweet potatoes and peanuts at the time. Those who could grow or afford wheat often had biscuits as part of their breakfast, along with healthy portions of pork. Salted pork was a staple of any meal, as it was used in the preparations of vegetables for flavor, in addition to being eaten directly as a protein.
The lowlands, which included much of the French regions of Louisiana and the surrounding area, included a varied diet heavily influenced by the French, Spanish, Acadians, Germans, Native Americans, Africans and Caribbeans. Rice played a large part of the diet in Louisiana. In addition, unlike the uplands, the lowlands subsistence of protein came mostly from coastal seafood and game meats. Much of the diet involved the use of peppers, as it still does to this day. Although the English had an inherent disdain for French foodways, as well as many of the native foodstuff of the colonies, the French had no such disdain for the indigenous foodstuffs, but rather a vast appreciation for the native ingredients and dishes.
Post-colonial cuisine
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans developed many new foods. Some, such as Rocky Mountain oysters, stayed regional; some spread throughout the nation but with little international appeal, such as peanut butter (a core ingredient of the famous peanut butter and jelly sandwich); and some spread throughout the world, such as popcorn, Coca-Cola and its competitors, fried chicken, cornbread, unleavened muffins such as the poppyseed muffin, and brownies.
Modern cuisine
During the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) food production and presentation became more industrialized. Major railroads featured upscale cuisine in their dining cars. Restaurant chains emerged with standardized decor and menus, most famously the Fred Harvey restaurants along the route of the Sante Fe Railroad in the Southwest.
At the universities, nutritionists and home economists taught a new scientific approach to food. During World War I the Progressives' moral advice about food conservation was emphasized in large-scale state and federal programs designed to educate housewives. Large-scale foreign aid during and after the war brought American standards to Europe.
Newspapers and magazines ran recipe columns, aided by research from corporate kitchens, which were major food manufacturers like General Mills, Campbell's, and Kraft Foods. One characteristic of American cooking is the fusion of multiple ethnic or regional approaches into completely new cooking styles. For example, spaghetti is Italian, while hot dogs are German; a popular meal, especially among young children, is spaghetti containing slices of hot dogs. Since the 1960s Asian cooking has played a particularly large role in American fusion cuisine.
New York City is home to a diverse and cosmopolitan demographic, and since the nineteenth century, the city's world class chefs created complicated dishes with rich ingredients like Lobster Newberg, waldorf salad, vichyssoise, eggs benedict, and the New York strip steak out of a need to entertain and impress consumers in expensive bygone restaurants like Delmonico's and still standing establishments like the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Some dishes that are typically considered American have their origins in other countries. American cooks and chefs have substantially altered these dishes over the years, to the degree that the dishes now enjoyed around the world are considered to be American. Hot dogs and hamburgers are both based on traditional German dishes, but in their modern popular form they can be reasonably considered American dishes.
Pizza is based on the traditional Italian dish, brought by Italian immigrants to the United States, but varies highly in style based on the region of development since its arrival. For example, "Chicago" style has focus on a thicker, taller crust, whereas a "New York Slice" is known to have a much thinner crust which can be folded. These different types of pizza can be advertised throughout the country and are generally recognizable and well-known, with some restaurants going so far as to import New York City tap water from a thousand or more miles away to recreate the signature style in other regions.
Many companies in the American food industry developed new products requiring minimal preparation, such as frozen entrees. Many of these recipes have become very popular. For example, the General Mills Betty Crocker's Cookbook, first published in 1950, was a popular book in American homes.
A wave of celebrity chefs began with Julia Child and Graham Kerr in the 1970s, with many more following after the rise of cable channels like Food Network. By the beginning of the 21st century regional variations in consumption of meat began to reduce, as more meat was consumed overall. Saying they eat too much protein, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans asked men and teenage boys to increase their consumption of underconsumed foods such as vegetables.
New American
During the 1980s, upscale restaurants introduced a mixing of cuisines that contain Americanized styles of cooking with foreign elements commonly referred as New American cuisine. New American cuisine refers to a type of fusion cuisine which assimilates flavors from the melting pot of traditional American cooking techniques mixed with flavors from other cultures and sometimes molecular gastronomy components.
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Regional cuisines
Generally speaking, in the present day 21st century, the modern cuisine of the United States is very much regional in nature. Excluding Alaska and Hawaii the terrain spans 3,000 miles West to East and more than a thousand North to South.
Northeast
New England
New England is a Northeastern region of the United States bordering the Maritime Provinces of Canada and portions of Quebec in the north. It includes the six states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, with its cultural capital Boston, founded in 1630. The Native American cuisine became part of the cookery style that the early colonists brought with them. Tribes like the Nipmuck, Wampanoag, and other Algonquian cultures were noted for slashing and burning areas to create meadows and bogs that would attract animals like moose and deer, but also encourage the growth of plants like black raspberries, blueberries, and cranberries. In the forest they would have collected nuts of species like the shagbark hickory, American hazel, and American chestnuts and fruits like wild grapes and black cherries. All of these eventually showed up in the kitchens of colonial New England women and many were sent back to England and other portions of Europe to be catalogued by scientists, collectors, and horticulturalists.
The style of New England cookery originated from its colonial roots, that is to say practical, frugal and willing to eat anything other than what they were used to from their British roots . Most of the initial colonists came from East Anglia in England, with other groups following them over the ages like francophone regions of Canada (this was especially true of Northern New England, where there are still many speakers of a dialect of French), from Ireland, from Southern Italy, and most recently from Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Portugal. The oldest forms of the cuisine date to the early 17th century and in the case of Massachusetts, out of the entire country only the state of Virginia can claim recipes that are older. East Anglian cookery would have included recipes for dishes like suet puddings, wheaten breads, and a few shellfish delicacies, like winkles and would have been at the time of settlement simple Puritan fare quite in contrast to the fineries and excesses expected in London cavalier circles. Most of the cuisine started with one-pot cookery, which resulted in such dishes as succotash, chowder, baked beans, and others. Starches are fairly simple, and typically encompass just a handful of classics like potatoes and cornmeal, and a few native breads like Anadama bread, johnnycakes, bulkie rolls, Parker house rolls, popovers, and New England brown bread. This region is fairly conservative with its spices, but typical spices include nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, especially in desserts, and for savory foods, thyme, black pepper, sea salt, and sage. Typical condiments include maple syrup, grown from the native sugar maple, molasses, and the famous cranberry sauce.
New England is noted for having a heavy emphasis on seafood, a legacy inherited from coastal tribes like the Wampanoag and Narragansett, who equally used the rich fishing banks offshore for sustenance. Favorite fish include cod, salmon, winter flounder, haddock, striped bass, pollock, hake, bluefish, and, in southern New England, tautog. All of these are prepared numerous ways, such as frying cod for fish fingers, grilling bluefish over hot coals for summertime, smoking salmon or serving a whole poached one chilled for feasts with a dill sauce, or, on cold winter nights, serving haddock baked in casserole dish with a creamy sauce and crumbled breadcrumbs as a top so it forms a crust. Clam cakes, a savory fritter based on chopped clams, are a specialty of Rhode Island. Farther inland, brook trout, largemouth bass, and herring are sought after, especially in the rivers and icy finger lakes in upper New England.
Meat is present though not as prominent, and typically is either stewed in dishes like Yankee pot roast and New England boiled dinner or braised, as in a picnic ham; these dishes suit the weather better as summers are humid and hot but winters are raw and cold, getting below 0 °C for most of the winter and only just above it by March. The roasting of whole turkeys began here as a centerpiece for large American banquets, and like all other East Coast tribes, the Native American tribes of New England prized wild turkeys as a source of sustenance and later Anglophone settlers were enamored of cooking them using methods they knew from Europe: often that meant trussing the bird and spinning it on a string or spit roasting. Today turkey meat is a key ingredient in soups, and also a favorite in several sandwiches like the Pilgrim (sandwich). For lunch, hot roast beef is sometimes chopped finely into small pieces and put on a roll with salami and American or provolone cheese to make a steak bomb. Bacon is often maple cured, and it is often the drippings from this bacon that are an ingredient in corn chowder. Veal consumption was prevalent in the North Atlantic States prior to World War II. A variety of linguiça is favored as a breakfast food, brought with Portuguese fisherman and Brazilian immigrants. In contrast with some parts of the United States, lamb (although less so mutton or goat) is a popular roasted or grilled meat across diverse groups in New England. Dairy farming and its resultant products figure strongly on the ingredient list, and homemade ice cream is a summertime staple of the region: it was a small seasonal roadside stand in Vermont that eventually became the world-famous Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Vermont in particular is famous for producing farmhouse style cheeses, especially a type of cheddar. The recipe goes all the way back to colonial times when English settlers brought the recipe with them from England and found the rocky landscape eminently suitable to making the cheese. Today Vermont has more artisanal cheese makers per capita than any other state, and diversity is such that interest in goat's milk cheeses has become prominent.
Crustaceans and mollusks are also an essential ingredient in the regional cookery. Maine is noted for harvesting peekytoe crab and Jonah crab and making crab bisques, based on cream with 35% milkfat, and crabcakes out of them, and often they appear on the menu as far south as to be out of region in New York City, where they are sold to four star restaurants. Squid are heavily fished for and eaten as fried calamari, and often are an ingredient in Italian American cooking in this region. Whelks are eaten in salad, and most famous of all is the lobster, which is indigenous to the coastal waters of the region and are a feature of many dishes, baked, boiled, roasted, and steamed, or simply eaten as a sandwich, chilled with mayonnaise and chopped celery in Maine and Massachusetts, or slathered with melted butter on Long Island and in Connecticut.
Shellfish of all sorts are part of the diet, and shellfish of the coastal regions include little neck clams, sea scallops, blue mussels, oysters, soft shell clams and razor shell clams. Much of this shellfish contributes to New England tradition, the clambake. The clambake as known today is a colonial interpretation of an American Indian tradition. In summer, oysters and clams are dipped in batter and fried, often served in a basket with french fries, or commonly on a wheaten bun as a clam roll. Oysters are otherwise eaten chilled on a bed of crushed ice on the half shell with mignonette sauce, and are often branded on where they were harvested. Large quahogs are stuffed with breadcrumbs and seasoning and baked in their shells, and smaller ones often find their way into clam chowder. Other preparations include clams casino, clams on the half shell served stuffed with herbs like oregano and streaky bacon.
The fruits of the region include the Vitis labrusca grapes used in grape juice made by companies such as Welch's, along with jelly, Kosher wine by companies like Mogen David and Manischewitz along with other wineries that make higher quality wines. Apples from New England include the traditional varieties Baldwin, Lady, Mother, Pomme Grise, Porter, Roxbury Russet, Wright, Sops of Wine, Hightop Sweet, Peck's Pleasant, Titus Pippin, Westfield-Seek-No-Further, and Duchess of Oldenburg. Beach plums a small native species with fruits the size of a pinball, are sought after in summer to make into a jam. Cranberries are another fruit indigenous to the region, often collected in autumn in huge flooded bogs. Thereafter they are juiced so they can be drunk fresh for breakfast, or dried and incorporated into salads. Winter squashes like pumpkin and butternut squashes have been a staple for generations owing to their ability to keep for long periods over icy New England winters and being an excellent source of beta carotene; in summer, they are replaced with pattypan and zucchini, the latter brought to the region by immigrants from Southern Italy a century ago. Blueberries are a very common summertime treat owing to them being an important crop, and find their way into muffins, pies and pancakes. Typical favorite desserts are quite diverse, and encompass hasty pudding, blueberry pie, whoopie pies, Boston cream pie, pumpkin pie, Joe Frogger cookies, hand crafted ice cream, Hermit cookies, and most famous of all, the chocolate chip cookie, invented in Massachusetts in the 1930s.
Southern New England, particularly along the coast, shares many specialties with the Mid-Atlantic, including especially dishes from Jewish and Italian-American cuisine. Coastal Connecticut is known for distinctive kinds of pizza, locally called apizza, differing in texture (thin and slightly blackened) and toppings (such as clams) from pizza further south in the so-called pizza belt, which stretches from New Haven southward through New York, New Jersey, and into Maryland.
Delaware Valley & Mid-Atlantic
The mid-Atlantic states comprise the states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Northern Maryland. The oldest major settlement in this area of the country is found in the most populous city in the nation, New York City, founded in 1653 by the Dutch. Today, it is a major cultural capital of the United States. The influences on cuisine in this region are extremely eclectic owing to the fact that it has been and continues to be a gateway for international culture as well as a gateway for new immigrants. Going back to colonial times, each new group has left their mark on homegrown cuisine and in turn the cities in this region disperse trends to the wider United States. In addition to importing and trading the finest specialty foods from all over the world, cities like New York and Philadelphia have had the past influence of Dutch, Italian, German, Irish, British, and Jewish cuisines, and that continues to this day. Baltimore has become the crossroads between North and South, a distinction it has held since the end of the Civil War.
A global power city, New York City is internationally known for its extremely diverse and cosmopolitan dining scene and possesses the entire world spectrum of dining options within its city limits. Some of the most exclusive and prestigious restaurants and nightclubs in the world are headquartered in New York City and compete fiercely for good reviews in the Food and Dining section of The New York Times, online guides, and Zagat's, the last of which is widely considered the premier American dining guide, published yearly and headquartered in New York City.
Many of the more complicated dishes with rich ingredients like Lobster Newberg, waldorf salad, vichyssoise, eggs benedict, and the New York strip steak were born out of a need to entertain and impress the well to do in expensive bygone restaurants like Delmonico's and still standing establishments like the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and today that tradition remains alive as some of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants in the country are found in this region. Modern commercial American cream cheese was developed in 1872, when William Lawrence, from Chester, New York, while looking for a way to recreate the soft, French cheese Neufchâtel, accidentally came up with a way of making an "unripened cheese" that is heavier and creamier; other dairymen came up with similar creations independently.
Since the first reference to an alcoholic mixed drink called a cocktail comes from New York State in 1803, it is thus not a surprise that there have been many cocktails invented in New York and the surrounding environs. Even today New York City bars are noted for being highly influential in making national trends. Cosmopolitans, Long Island iced teas, Manhattans, Rob Roys, Tom Collins, Aviations, and Greyhounds were all invented in New York bars, and the gin martini was popularized in New York in speakeasies during the 1920s, as evidenced by its appearance in the works of New Yorker and American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like its neighbor Philadelphia, many rare and unusual liquors and liqueurs often find their way into a mixologist's cupboard or restaurant wine list. New York State is the third most productive area in the country for wine grapes, just behind the more famous California and Washington. It has AVA's near the Finger Lakes, the Catskills, and Long Island, and in the Hudson Valley has the second most productive area in the country for growing apples, making it a center for hard cider production, just like New England. Pennsylvania has been growing rye since Germans began to emigrate to the area at the end of the 17th century and required a grain they knew from Germany. Therefore, overall it is not unusual to find New York grown Gewürtztraminer and Riesling, Pennsylvania rye whiskey, or marques of locally produced ciders like Original Sin on the same menu.
Since their formative years, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore have welcomed immigrants of every kind to their shores, and all three have been an important gateway through which new citizens to the general United States arrive. Traditionally natives have eaten cheek to jowl with newcomers for centuries as the newcomers would open new restaurants and small businesses and all the different groups would interact. Even in colonial days this region was a very diverse mosaic of peoples, as settlers from Switzerland, Wales, England, Ulster, Wallonia, Holland, Gelderland, the British Channel Islands, and Sweden sought their fortune in this region. This is very evident in many signature dishes and local foods, all of which have evolved to become American dishes in their own right. The original Dutch settlers of New York brought recipes they knew and understood from the Netherlands and their mark on local cuisine is still apparent today: in many quarters of New York their version of apple pie with a streusel top is still baked, while originating in the colony of New Amsterdam their predilection for waffles in time evolved into the American national recipe and forms part of a New York City brunch, and they also made coleslaw, originally a Dutch salad, but today accented with the later 18th century introduction of mayonnaise. The internationally famous American doughnut began its life originally as a New York pastry that arrived in the 18th century as the Dutch olykoek.
Crab cakes were once a kind of English croquette, but over time as spices have been added they and the Maryland crab feast became two of Baltimore's signature dishes; fishing for the blue crab is a favorite summer pastime in the waters off Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware where they may grace the table at summer picnics . Other mainstays of the region have been present since the early years of American history, like oysters from Cape May, the Chesapeake Bay, and Long Island, and lobster and tuna from the coastal waters found in New York and New Jersey, which are exported to the major cities as an expensive delicacy or a favorite locavore's quarry at the multitude of farmer's markets, very popular in this region. Philadelphia Pepper Pot, a tripe stew, was originally a British dish but today is a classic of home cooking in Pennsylvania alongside bookbinder soup, a type of turtle soup.
In the winter, New York City pushcarts sell roasted chestnuts, a delicacy dating back to English Christmas traditions, and it was in New York and Pennsylvania that the earliest Christmas cookies were introduced: Germans introduced crunchy molasses based gingerbread and sugar cookies in Pennsylvania, and the Dutch introduced cinnamon based cookies, all of which have become part of the traditional Christmas meal.Scrapple was originally a type of savory pudding that early Pennsylvania Germans made to preserve the offal of a pig slaughter. The Philadelphia soft pretzel was originally brought to Eastern Pennsylvania in the early 18th century, and later, 19th century immigrants sold them to the masses from pushcarts to make them the city's best-known bread product, having evolved into its own unique recipe.
After the 1820s, new groups began to arrive and the character of the region began to change. There had been some Irish from Ulster prior to 1820, however largely they had been Protestants with somewhat different culture and (often) a different language than the explosion of emigrants that came to Castle Garden and Locust Point in Baltimore in their masses starting in the 1840s.
The Irish arrived in America in a rather woeful state, as Ireland at the time was often plagued by some of the worst poverty in Europe and often heavy disenfranchisement among the masses: many of them arrived barely alive having ridden coffin ships to the New World, sick with typhus and starvation. In addition, they were the first to face challenges other groups did not have: they were the first large wave of Catholics. They faced prejudice for their faith and the cities of Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore were not always set up for their needs. For example, Catholic bishops in the U.S. mandated until the 1960s that all Catholics were forbidden from eating red meat on Fridays and during Lent, and attending Mass sometimes conflicted with work as produce and meat markets would be open on holy days; this was difficult for Irishmen supporting families since many worked as laborers. Unsurprisingly, many Irishmen also found their fortunes working as longshoremen, which would have given their families access to fish and shellfish whenever a fisherman made berth, which was frequent on the busy docks of Baltimore and New York. Though there had been some activity in Baltimore in founding a see earlier by the Carroltons, the Irish were the first major wave of Catholic worship in this region, and that meant bishops and cardinals sending away to Europe for wine. Part of the Catholic mass includes every parishioner taking a sip of wine from the chalice as part of the Eucharist. Taverns had existed prior to their emigration to America in the region, though the Irish brought their particular brand of pub culture and founded some of the first saloons and bars that served stout and red ale; they brought with them the knowledge of single malt style whiskey and sold it. The Irish were the first immigrant group to arrive in this region in massive millions, and these immigrants also founded some of the earliest saloons and bars in this region, of which McSorley's is an example.
It was also in this region that the Irish introduced something that today is a very important festival in American culture that involves a large amount of food, drink, and merry making: Halloween. In England and Wales, where prior immigrants had come from, the feast of All Hallows Eve had died out in the Reformation, dismissed as superstition and excess having nothing to do with the Bible and often replaced with the festival of Guy Fawkes Night. Other immigrant groups like the Germans preferred to celebrate October 31 as Reformation Day, and after the American Revolution all of the above were less and less eager to celebrate the legacy of an English festival when they had fought a very bloody war to leave the British Empire. The Catholicism of the Irish demanded attendance at church on November 1 and charity and deeds, not just faith, as a cornerstone of dogma, and many of their older traditions survived the Reformation and traveled with them. Naturally, they went door-to-door to collect victuals for masked parties as well as gave them out, like nuts to roast on the fire, whiskey, beer, or cider, and barmbracks; they also bobbed for apples and made dumb cakes. Later in the century they were joined by Scots going guising, children going door-to-door to ask for sweets and treats in costume. From the Mid Atlantic this trend spread to be nationwide and evolved into American children trick-or-treating on October 31 wearing costumes and their older counterparts having wild costume parties with lots of food and drink like caramel apples, candy apples, dirt cakes, punch, cocktails, cider (both alcoholic and non,) pumpkin pie, candy corn, chocolate turtles, peanut brittle, taffy, tipsy cake, and copious buckets full of candy; children carving jack-o-lanterns and eating squash derived foods derive from Halloween's heritage as a harvest festival and from Irish and Scottish traditions of carving turnips and eating root vegetables at this time of year. Their bobbing for apples has survived to the present day as a Halloween party classic game, as has a variation on the parlor game of trying to grab an apple hanging from the ceiling blindfolded: it has evolved into trying to catch a donut in one's teeth.
Immigrants from Southern Europe, namely Sicily, Campania, Lazio, and Calabria, appeared between 1880 and 1960 in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Eastern Maryland hoping to escape the extreme poverty and corruption endemic to Italy; typically none of them spoke English, but rather dialects of Italian and had a culture that was more closely tied to the village they were born in than the high culture only accessible to those who could afford it at this time; many could not read or write in any language. They were employed in manual labor or factory work but it is because of them that dishes like spaghetti with meatballs, New York-style pizza, calzones, and baked ziti exist, and Americans of today are very familiar with semolina based pasta noodles. Their native cuisine had less of an emphasis on meat, as evidenced by dishes they introduced like pasta e fagioli and minestrone, but the dishes they created in America often piled it on as a sign of wealth and newfound prosperity since for the first time even cheap cuts of it were affordable: the American recipe for lasagna is proof of this, as mostly it is derived from the Neapolitan version of the dish with large amounts of meat and cheese.
New York-style hot dogs came about with German speaking emigrants from Austria and Germany, particularly with the frankfurter sausage and the smaller wiener sausage. Today, the New York-style hot dog with sauerkraut, mustard, and the optional cucumber pickle relish is such a part of the local fabric, that it is one of the favorite comestibles of New York City. Hot dogs are a typical street food sold year round in all by the most inclement weather from thousands of pushcarts. As with all other stadiums in Major League Baseball they are an essential for New York Yankees and the New York Mets games though it is the local style of preparation that predominates without exception. Hot dogs are also the focus of a televised eating contest on the Fourth of July in Coney Island, at Nathan's Famous, one of the earliest hot dog stands opened in the United States in 1916.
A summertime treat, Italian ice, began its life as a lemon flavored penny lick brought to Philadelphia by Italians; its Hispanic counterpart, piragua, is a common and evolving shaved ice treat brought to New York City by Puerto Ricans in the 1930s. Unlike the original dish which included flavors like tamarind, mango, coconut, piragua is evolving to include flavors like grape, a fruit not grown in Puerto Rico. Taylor ham, a meat delicacy of New Jersey, first appeared around the time of the Civil War and today is often served for breakfast with eggs and cheese on a kaiser roll, the bread upon which this is served was brought to the area by Austrians in the second half of the nineteenth century and is a very common roll for sandwiches at lunchtime, usually tipped with poppyseeds. This breakfast meat is generally known as pork roll in southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, and Taylor ham in northern New Jersey.
Other dishes came about during the early 20th century and have much to do with delicatessen fare, set up largely by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who came to America incredibly poor. Most often they were completely unable to partake in the outdoor food markets that the general population utilized as most of the food for sale was not kosher. The influence of European Jewry before their destruction in the Holocaust on modern mid Atlantic cooking remains extremely strong and reinforced by their many descendants in the region. American-style pickles were brought by Polish Jews, now a common addition to hamburgers and sandwiches, and Hungarian Jews brought a recipe for almond horns that now is a common regional cookie, diverting from the original recipe in dipping the ends in dark chocolate. New York-style cheesecake has copious amounts of cream and eggs because animal rennet is not kosher and thus could not be sold to a large number of the deli's clientele. New York inherited its bagels and bialys from Jews, as well as Challah bread. Pastrami first entered the country via Romanian Jews, and is a feature of many sandwiches, often eaten on marble rye, a bread that was born in the mid Atlantic. Whitefish salad, lox, and matzoh ball soup are now standard fare made to order at local diners and delicatessens, but started their life as foods that made up a strict dietary code.
Like other groups before them, many of their dishes passed into the mainstream enough so that they became part of diner fare by the end of the 20th century, a type of restaurant that is now more numerous in this region than any other and formerly the subject matter of artist Edward Hopper. In the past this sort of establishment was the haven of the short order cook grilling or frying simple foods for the working man. Today typical service would include regional staples like beef on weck, manhattan clam chowder, the club sandwich, Buffalo wings, Philadelphia cheesesteak, the black and white cookie, shoofly pie, snapper soup, Smith Island cake, grape pie, milkshakes, and the egg cream, a vanilla or chocolate fountain drink with a frothy top and fizzy taste. As in Hopper's painting from 1942, many of these businesses are open 24 hours a day.
Midwest
Midwestern cuisine today covers everything from barbecue to the Chicago-style hot dog, though many of its classics are very simple, hearty fare. Mostly this region was completely untouched by European and American settlers until after the American Civil War, and excepting Missouri and the heavily forested states near the Great Lakes was mainly populated by interwarring nomadic tribes like the Sioux, Osage, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. As with most other Native American tribes, these tribes consumed the Three Sisters of beans, maize, and squash, but also for thousands of years followed the herds of bison and hunted them first on foot and then, after the spread of mustangs from the Southwest due to the explorations of conquistadors, on horseback, typically using bow and arrow. There are buffalo jumps dating back nearly ten thousand years and several photographs and written accounts of trappers and homesteaders attesting to their dependence on the buffalo and to a lesser degree elk. After nearly wiping out the elk and bison to nothingness, this region has taken to raising bison alongside cattle for their meat and at an enormous profit, making them into burgers and steaks.
This region today comprises the states near the Great Lakes and also the Great Plains; much of it is prairie with a very flat terrain where the blue sky meets a neverending horizon. Winters are bitterly cold, windy, and wet. Often that means very harsh blizzards especially near the Great Lakes where Arctic winds blow off of Canada and where the ice on rivers and lakes freezes reliably thick enough for ice hockey to be a favorite pastime in the region and for ice fishing for pike and muskies to be ubiquitous in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where they often there after become part of the local tradition of the fish fry. Population density is extremely low away from the Great Lakes and very small towns dominated by enormous farms are the rule with larger cities being the exception. Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and her twin sister city across the river St. Paul dominate the landscape in wealth and size, owing to their ties with manufacturing, finance, transportation, and meatpacking. Smaller places like Omaha, Tulsa, and Kansas City make up local capitals, but the king of them all is Chicago, third largest city in the country.
The Upper Midwest includes the states of Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Non-Native American settlement began here earlier than anywhere else in the region, and thus the food available here ranges from the sublime to the bizarre. As with all of the Midwest, the primary meats here are beef and poultry, since the Midwest has been raising turkeys, chickens, and geese for over a hundred and fifty years; chickens have been so common for so long that the Midwest has several native breeds that are prized for both backyard farming and for farmer's markets, such as the Buckeye and Wyandotte; one, Billina, appears as a character in the second book of the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. Favorite fruits of the region include a few native plants inherited from Native American tribes like the pawpaw and the American persimmons are also highly favored. As with the American South, pawpaws are the region's largest native fruit, about the size of a mango, and are often found growing wild in the region come September, whereafter they are made into preserves and cakes and command quite a price at farmer's markets in Chicago. The American persimmon is often smaller than it is Japanese cousin, about the size of a small plum, but in the Midwest and portions of the East it is the main ingredient in a steamed pudding called persimmon pudding, topped with crème anglaise. Other crops inherited from the Native Americans include wild rice, which grows on the banks of lakes and is a local favorite for fancy meals and today often used in stuffing for Thanksgiving.
Typical fruits of the region are cold weather crops. Once it was believed that the region had winters that were far too harsh for apple growing, but then a breeder in Minnesota came forth with the Wealthy apple and thence came forth the third most productive region for apple growing in the land, with local varieties comprising Wolf River, Enterprise, Melrose, Paula Red, Rome Beauty, Honeycrisp, and the world-famous Red Delicious. Cherries are important to Michigan and Wisconsin grows many cranberries, a legacy of early 19th century emigration of New England farmers. Crabapple jelly is a favorite condiment of the region.
The influence of German, Scandinavian, and Slavic peoples on the northern portion of the region is very strong; many of these emigrated to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois in the 19th century to take advantage of jobs in the meatpacking business as well as being homesteaders. Bratwurst is a very common sausage eaten at tailgate parties for the Green Bay Packers or Detroit Lions football teams and is often served boiled in lager beer with sauerkraut, different than many of the recipes currently found in Germany. Polish sausage, in particular a locally invented type of kielbasa, is an essential for sporting events in Chicago: Chicago today has approximately 200,000 speakers of Polish and has had a population of that description for over a hundred years. When Poles came to Chicago and surrounding cities from the Old World, they brought with them long ropes of kielbasa, cabbage rolls, and pierogis. Poles that left Poland after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the descendants of earlier immigrants still make all of the above and such comestibles are common in local diners and delis as result. Today alongside the pierogi, the sausage is served on a long roll with mustard like a hot dog or as a Maxwell Street Polish, a sandwich that has caramelized onions as an essential ingredient. In Cleveland, the same sausage is served in the form of the Polish boy: this is a weird but tasty sandwich made of french fries, spicy barbecue sauce, and coleslaw; unlike cities in the East where the hot dog alone is traditional fans of the Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Chicago Cubs, and Milwaukee Brewers favor at least two or three different kinds of sausage sold in the little pushcarts outside the stadium; the hot dogs themselves tend to follow the Chicago style, which is loaded with mustard, and pickled vegetables. In Cincinnati, where the Cincinnati Reds play, the predilection for sausage has a competitor in Cincinnati chili, invented by Macedonian immigrants: this bizarre but tasty dish includes spaghetti as its base, chili with a Mediterranean-inspired spice mix, and cheddar cheese; the chili itself is often a topping for local hot dogs at games.
In the Midwest and especially Minnesota, the tradition of the church potluck has become a gathering in which local foods reign, and so it has been since the era of the frontier: pioneers would often need to pool resources together to have a celebration in the 19th century and that simply never changed. Nowhere is this more clear than with the ever famous hotdish: this is a type of casserole believed to have derived somehow from a Norwegian recipe, and it is usually topped with potatoes or tater tots. Next to the hotdish at the potlucks usually is where the glorified rice is found: this is a dish made of a kind of rice pudding mixed with crushed pineapple and maraschino cherries. Next to that is the booyah, a thick soup made of a number or combinations of meat, vegetables, and seasonings that is meant to simmer on the stove for up to two days. Lefse, traditionally a Scandinavian flatbread, has been handed down to descendants for over a hundred years and is common on the table. Behind that is the venison, a popular meat around the Great Lakes and often eaten in steaks, sandwiches, and crown roasts for special events. If in North or South Dakota, tiger meat, a dish similar to steak tartare, is present. Last on the table are the dessert bars and most especially the brownies: this confection was created originally in 1898 in Chicago and has gone on to become a global food.
Further South, barbecue has its own style in places in Kansas and St. Louis that are different to the South and the American West. Kansas City and St. Louis were and remain important hubs for the railroad that connected the plains with the Great Lakes and cities farther east, like Philadelphia. At the turn of the 19th century, the St. Louis area, Omaha, and Kansas City had huge stockyards, waystations for cattle and pigs on their way East to the cities of the coast and North to the Great Lakes. They all had large growing immigrant and migrant populations from Europe and the South respectively, so this region has developed unique styles of barbecue. St. Louis-style barbecue favors a heavy emphasis on a sticky sweet barbecue sauce. Its standbys include the pork steak, a cut taken from the shoulder of the pig, grilled, and then slowly stewed in a pan over charcoal, crispy snoots, a cut from the cheek and nose of the pig that is fried up like cracklin and eaten dipped in sauce, pork spare ribs, and a mix of either beer boiled bratwurst or grilled Italian derived sausage, flavored with fennel. Dessert is usually something like gooey butter cake, invented in the city in the 1930s. Kansas City-style barbecue uses several different kinds of meat, more than most styles of American barbecue- turkey, mutton, pork, and beef just to name a few- but is distinct from St. Louis in that the barbecue sauce adds molasses in with the typical tomato based recipe and typically has a more tart taste. Traditionally, Kansas City uses a low-and-slow method of smoking the meat in addition to just stewing it in the sauce. It also favors using hickory would for smoking and continual watering or layering of the sauce while cooking to form a glaze; with burnt ends this step is necessary to create the "bark" or charred outer layer of the brisket.
The American South
When referring to the American South as a region, typically it should indicate Southern Maryland and the states that were once part of the Old Confederacy, with the dividing line between the East and West jackknifing about 100 miles west of Dallas, Texas, and mostly south of the old Mason-Dixon line. Cities found in this area include New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Charleston, and Charlotte with Houston, Texas being the largest. These states are much more closely tied to each other and have been part of US territory for much longer than states much farther west than East Texas, and in the case of food, the influences and cooking styles are strictly separated as the terrain begins to change to prairie and desert from bayou and hardwood forest.
This section of the country has some of the oldest known foodways in the land, with some recipes almost 400 years old. Native American influences are still quite visible in the use of cornmeal as an essential staple and found in the Southern predilection for hunting wild game, in particular wild turkey, deer, woodcock, and various kinds of waterfowl; for example, coastal North Carolina is a place where hunters will seek tundra swan as a part of Christmas dinner; the original English and Scottish settlers would have rejoiced at this revelation owing to the fact that such was banned amongst the commoner class in what is now the United Kingdom, and naturally, their descendants have not forgotten. Native Americans also consumed turtles and catfish, specifically the snapping turtle and blue catfish, both important parts of the diet in the South today. Catfish are often caught with one's bare hands, gutted, breaded, and fried to make a Southern variation on English fish and chips and turtles are turned into stews and soups. Native American tribes of the region such as the Cherokee or Choctaw often cultivated or gathered local plants like pawpaw, maypop,spicebush,sassafras, and several sorts of squash and maize, and the aforementioned fruits still are cultivated as food in a Southerner's back garden. Maize is to this day found in dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the form of grits, hoecakes, baked cornbread, and spoonbread, and nuts like the hickory, black walnut and pecan are commonly included in desserts and pastries as varied as mince pies, pecan pie, pecan rolls and honey buns (both are types of sticky bun), and quick breads, which were themselves invented in the South during the American Civil War.
Early history
European influence began soon after the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the earliest recipes emerging by the end of the 17th century. Specific influences from Europe were quite varied, and remain traditional and essential to the modern cookery overall. To the upper portion of the South, French Huguenots brought the concept of making rouxs to make sauces and soups, and later French settlers hunted for frogs in the swamps to make frog's legs. German speakers often settled in Appalachia on small farms or in the backcountry away from the coast, and invented an American breakfast delicacy that is now nationally beloved, apple butter, based on their recipe for apfelkraut, and later introduced red cabbage and rye. From the UK, an enormous amount of influence was bestowed upon the South, specifically foodways found in 17th and 18th century Ulster, the borderlands between England and Scotland, the Scottish Highlands, portions of Wales, the West Midlands and Black Country. Settlers bound for America fled the tumult of the Civil War and troubles in the plantation of Ireland and the Highland Clearances, and often ships manifests show their belongings nearly always included their wives' cookpots or bakestones and seed stock for plants like peaches, plums, and apples to grow orchards, which they planted in their hundreds: today, the biggest fruit crop of the region is the yellow peach, and noted apple varieties include Carolina Red June, Arkansas Black, Carter Blue, Magnum Bonum, and the infamous Golden Delicious. Each group brought foods and ideas from their region. Settlers from Ireland and Scotland were well known for creating peatreak and poitÃn, strong hard liquor based on fermenting potatoes or barley, but when they settled in the Appalachians and portions of the piedmont, they found sugar and maize were the only things available. In time they came up with a method where the brew is distilled once using a maize mash with added sugar and the charcoal of sugar maple, which created a whiskey with a high proof and a need for aging in barrels from local species of oak rather than English oak. In time this gave birth in time to American whiskey and Kentucky bourbon, and its infamous later cousins moonshine and Everclear.
Closer to the coast, 18th century recipes for English trifle turned into tipsy cakes, replacing the sherry with whiskey and their recipe for pound cake, brought to the South around the same time, still works with American baking units: 1 pound sugar, one pound eggs, one pound butter, one pound flour. All of the above groups made the staple meat of the South pork, to this day the meat no Southerner can cook without.
Common features
With the exception of Kentucky, where mutton is a common choice, or Southern Maryland, where the custom is to take the carcass of an entire bull and roast it over coals for many hours, pork is the popular choice of Southern style barbecue and features in other preparations like sausages and sandwiches. Among both African-Americans and European-Americans in the antebellum period, corn and pork were a staple of the diet. For breakfast, it is a feature of country sausage, which in turn are an ingredient in the Southern breakfast dish of biscuits and gravy. Head cheese is a popular sliced meat of the region, taken from the pig's head, and pickled pig's feet have always been a cheap snack since they were introduced by Scotch-Irish settlers; today they are often served in bars.. Baby back ribs, hog maw, cracklins, and even whole pig roasts in specially constructed ovens are found in all parts of the South, as are its two best known condiments, barbecue sauce and hot sauce, with hundreds of local variations. In Virginia and the Appalachians, the mainstay for special occasions is the country ham, often served for Christmas and cured with salt or hickory, with the Virginia recipe often feeding the hogs peanuts for finishing and giving the ham a distinct taste, and red pepper flakes in ham cured in Tennessee. Accompanying many meals is the southern style fluffy biscuit, where the leavening agent is sodium bicarbonate and often includes buttermilk, and for breakfast they often accompany country ham, grits, and scrambled eggs.
Desserts
Desserts in the South tend to be quite rich and very much a legacy of entertaining to impress guests, since a Southern housewife was (and to a degree still is) expected to show her hospitality by laying out as impressive a banquet as she is able to manage. Desserts are vast and encompass Lane cake, sweet potato pie, peach cobbler, pecan pie, hummingbird cake, Jefferson Davis pie, peanut brittle, coconut cake, apple fritters, peanut cookies, Moravian spice cookies, chess pie, doberge cake, Lady Baltimore cake, bourbon balls, and caramel cake. American style sponge cakes tend to be the rule rather than the exception as is American style buttercream, a place where Southern baking intersects with the rest of the United States. Nuts like pecan and hickory tend to be revered as garnishes for these desserts, and make their way into local bakeries as fillings for chocolates.
Cajun cuisine
In the parts of the South which face the Atlantic Ocean, French influences often were dictated by where French Huguenots settled, however it is Louisiana that got the lion's share of older French cooking methods from Poitou and Normandy via Nova Scotia, most of which are foodways that pre-date the codification of haute cuisine during the reign of Louis XIV and have more in common with rustic cuisines of the 17th and 18th century than anything ever found at the French court in Versailles or the bistros of 19th and 20th century Paris; this is especially true of Cajun cuisine. Louisiana is a state named for Louis XIV and to this day French is still a commonly spoken tongue in the areas west of New Orleans, in Acadiana. The Cajuns and their dialect have occupied Southern Louisiana since the 1700s owing to Le Grande Dérangement, an event in which they were forcibly evicted by the English Crown from their lands in Canada and made to occupy more marginal lands on the bayou.
Cajun French is more closely related to dialects spoken in Northern Maine, New Brunswick, and to a lesser degree Haiti than anything spoken in modern France, and likewise their terminology, methodology, and culture concerning food is much more closely related to the styles of these former French colonies even today. Unlike other areas of the South, Cajuns were and still are largely Catholics and thus much of what they eat is seasonal; for example pork is an important component of the Cajun boucherie (a large community event where the hog is butchered, prepared with a fiery spice mix, and eaten snout to tail) but it is never consumed in the five weeks of Lent, when such would be forbidden. Cajun cuisine tends to focus on what is locally available, historically because Cajuns were often poor, illiterate, independent farmers and not plantation owners but today it is because such is deeply imbedded in local culture. Boudin is a type of sausage found only in this area of the country, and it is often by far more spicy than anything found in France or Belgium. Chaudin is unique to the area, and the method of cooking is comparable to the Scottish dish haggis: the stuffing includes onions, rice, bell peppers, spices, and pork sewn up in the stomach of a pig, and served in slices piping hot. Crayfish are a staple of the Cajun grandmother's cookpot, as they are abundant in the bayous of Southern Louisiana and a main source of livelihood, as are blue crabs, shrimp, corn on the cob, and red potatoes, since these are the basic ingredients of the Louisiana crawfish boil.
Since the end of the Civil War, New Orleans has had a thriving fine dining scene that predates the much younger 20th century metropoli of Atlanta and Miami. It was here that cocktails like the sazerac and hurricane were invented as well as the liqueur Southern Comfort. New Orleans has been the capital of Creole culture since before Louisiana was a state; this culture is that of the colonial French and Spanish that evolved in the city of New Orleans, which was and still is quite distinct from the rural culture of Cajuns and dovetails with what would have been eaten in antebellum Louisiana plantation culture long ago. Cooking to impress and show one's wealth was a staple of Creole culture, which often mixed French, Spanish, Italian, German, African, Caribbean and Native American cooking methods, producing rich dishes like oysters bienville, pompano en papillote, and even the muffaletta sandwich. However, Louisiana Creole cuisine tends to diverge from the original ideas brought to the region in ingredients: profiteroles, for example, use a near identical choux pastry to that which is found in modern Paris but often use vanilla or chocolate ice cream rather than custard as the filling, pralines nearly always use pecan and not almonds, and bananas foster came about when New Orleans was a key port for the import of bananas from the Caribbean Sea. Gumbos tend to be thickened with okra, or the leaves of the sassafrass tree. Andouille is often used, but not the andouille currently known in France, since French andouille uses tripe whereas Louisiana andouille is made from a Boston butt, usually inflected with pepper flakes, and smoked for hours over pecan wood. Other ingredients that are native to Louisiana and not found in the cuisine of modern France would include rice, which has been a staple of both Creole and Cajun cooking for generations, and sugarcane, which has been grown in Louisiana since the early 1800s.
Ground cayenne pepper is a key spice of the region, as is the meat of the American alligator, something settlers learned from the Choctaws and Houma. The maypop plant has been a favorite of Southerners for 350 years; it gives its name to the Ocoee River in Tennessee, a legacy of the Cherokees, and in Southern Louisiana it is known as liane de grenade, indicating its consumption by Cajuns. It is a close relative of the commercial passionfruit, similar in size, and is a common plant growing in gardens all over the South as a source of fresh summertime fruit.
African influences
African influences came with slaves from Ghana, Benin, Mali, Ivory Coast, Angola, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and other portions of West Africa, and the mark they and their descendants have made on Southern food is strong today. Crops like okra, sorghum, sesame seeds, eggplant, chili peppers, and many different kinds of melons were brought with them from West Africa along with the incredibly important introduction of rice to the Carolinas and later to Texas and Louisiana, whence it became a staple grain of the region and still remains a staple today, found in dishes like Hoppin John, purloo, and Charleston red rice. Other crops, like sugar cane, kidney beans, and certain spices would have been familiar to slaves through contact with British colonies in the Caribbean. Like the poorer indentured servants that came to the South, slaves often got the leftovers of what was slaughtered for the consumption of the master of the plantation and so many recipes had to be adapted for offal, like pig's ears and fatbacks though other methods encouraged low and slow methods of cooking to tenderize the tougher cuts of meat, like braising, smoking, and pit roasting, the last of which was a method known to West Africans in the preparation of roasting goat. Other recipes certainly brought by Africans involve peanuts, as evidenced by the local nickname for the legume in Southern dialects of American English: goober, taken from the Kongo word for peanut, nguba. The 300-year-old recipe for peanut soup is a classic of Southern cuisine that has never stopped being eaten, handed down to the descendants of Virginia slaves and adapted to be creamier and less spicy than the original African dish. Boiled peanuts are a common food served at bars as a snack and have been eaten in the South for as long as there have been pots to boil them.
Florida cuisine
Certain portions of the South often have their own distinct subtypes of cuisine owing to local history and landscape: though Cajun cuisine is more famous, Floridian cuisine, for example, has a distinct way of cooking that includes ingredients her other Southern sisters do not use, especially points south of Tampa and Orlando. The Spanish Crown had control of the state until the early 19th century and used the southern tip as an outpost to guard the Spanish Main beginning in the 1500s, but Florida kept and still maintains ties with the Caribbean Sea, including the Bahamas Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. South of Tampa, there are and have been for a long time many speakers of Caribbean Spanish, Haitian French, Jamaican Patois, and Haitian Creole and each Caribbean culture has a strong hold on cooking methods and spices in Florida. In turn, each mixes and matches with the foodways of the Seminole tribe and Anglophone settlers. Thus, for almost 200 years, Floridian cooking has had a more tropical flavor than any other Southern state. Allspice, a spice originally from Jamaica, is an ingredient found in spice mixes in summer barbecues along with ginger, garlic, scotch bonnet peppers, sea salt, and nutmeg; in Floridian cooking this is often a variant of Jamaican jerk spice. Coconuts are grown in the areas surrounding Miami and are shipped in daily through its port for consumption of the milk, meat, and water of the coconut. Bananas are not just the yellow Cavendish variety found in supermarkets across America: in Florida they are available as bananitos, colorados, plátanos, and maduros. The first of these is a tiny miniature banana only about 4-5 inches (10-13 cm) in length and it is sweet. The second has a red peel and an apple like after taste, and the third and fourth are used as a starch on nearly every Caribbean island as a side dish, baked or fried: all of the above are a staple of Florida outdoor markets when in season and all have been grown in the Caribbean for almost 400 years. Mangoes are grown as a backyard plant in Southern Florida and otherwise are a favorite treat coming in many different shapes in sizes from Nam Doc Mai, brought to Florida after the Vietnam War, to Madame Francis, a mango from Haiti. Sweetsop and soursop are popular around Miami, but nearly unheard of in other areas of the South.
Citrus is a major crop of Florida, and features at every breakfast table and every market with the height of the season near the first week of January. Hamlin oranges are the main cultivar planted, and from this crop the rest of the United States and to a lesser extent Europe gets orange juice. Other plantings would include grapefruits, tangerines, clementine oranges, limes, and even a few more rare ones, like cara cara navels, tangelos, and the Jamaican Ugli fruit. Tomatoes, bell peppers, habañero peppers, and figs, especially taken from the Florida strangler fig, complete the produce menu. Blue crab, conch, Florida stone crab, red drum, dorado, and marlins tend to be local favorite ingredients. Dairy is available in this region, but it is less emphasized due to the year round warmth. Traditional key lime pie, a dessert from the islands off the coast of Miami, is made with condensed milk to form the custard with the eye wateringly tart limes native to the Florida Keys in part because milk would spoil in an age before refrigeration. Pork in this region tends to be roasted in methods similar to those found in Puerto Rico and Cuba, owing to mass emigration from those countries in the 20th century, especially in the counties surrounding Miami. Orange blossom honey is a specialty of the state, and is widely available in farmer's markets.
Other small game
Ptarmigan, grouse, crow blackbirds, dove, ducks and other game fowl are consumed in the United States. In the American state of Arkansas, beaver tail stew is consumed in Cotton town. Squirrel, raccoon, possum, bear, muskrat, chipmunk, skunk, groundhog, pheasant, armadillo and rabbit are also consumed in the United States.
Cuisine in the West
Cooking in the American West gets its influence from Native American and Hispanophone cultures, as well as later settlers that came in the 19th century: Texas, for example, has some influence from Germany in its choice of barbecue by using sausages. Another instance can be found in the Northwestern region, which encompasses Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. All of the aforementioned rely on local seafood and a few classics of their own. In New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, West Texas, and Southern California, Mexican flavors and influences are extremely common, especially from the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Baja California, and Sonora.
Northwest
The Pacific Northwest as a region generally includes Alaska and the state of Washington near the Canada-US border and terminates near Sacramento, California. Here, the terrain is mostly temperate rainforest on the Coast mixed with pine forest as one approaches the Canada-US border inland. One of the core favorite foodstuffs is Pacific salmon, native to many of the larger rivers of the area and often smoked or grilled on cedar planks. In Alaska, wild game like ptarmigan and moose meat feature extensively since much of the state is wilderness. Fresh fish like steelhead trout, Pacific cod, Pacific halibut, and pollock are fished for extensively and feature on the menu of many restaurants, as do a plethora of fresh berries and vegetables, like Cameo apples from Washington state, the headquarters of the U.S. apple industry, cherries from Oregon, blackberries, and marionberries, a feature of many pies. Hazelnuts are grown extensively in this region and are a feature of baking, such as in chocolate hazelnut pie, an Oregon favorite, and Almond Roca is a local candy.
This region is also heavily dominated by some notable wineries producing a high quality product, with Sonoma found within this region as well as the newer vinicultural juggernauts of Washington State, like the Yakima Valley. The first plantings of vineyards in the United States began many miles to the South on the Pacific coast in what is now San Diego, because the Franciscan friars that settled Alta California required wines they could use for their table and for the Eucharist, and the variety they planted, the mission grape, is still available on a limited basis. Today, French, Spanish, and Italian varietals are sold by the hogshead, and much of the area directly north of San Francisco is under vine, in particular Pinot noir, Garnacha, and Ruffina and several Tuscan varietals.
Like its counterpart on the opposite coast to the East, there is a grand variety of shellfish in this region. Geoducks are a native species of giant clam that have incredibly long necks, and they are eaten by the bucket full as well as shipped to Asia for millions of dollars as they are believed to be an aphrodisiac. Gaper clams are a favorite food, often grilled or steamed in a sauce, as is the native California abalone, which although protected as a food source is a traditional foodway predating settlement by whites and today features heavily in the cooking of fine restaurants as well as in home cooking, in mirin-flavored soups (the influence of Japanese cooking is strong in the region) noodle dishes and on the barbecue. Olympia oysters are served on the half shell as well as the Kumamoto oyster, introduced by Japanese immigrants and a staple at dinner as an appetizer. California mussels are a delicacy of the region, and have been a feature of the cooking for generations: there is evidence that Native American tribes consumed them up and down the California coast for centuries in their masses.
Crabs are a delicacy, and included in this are Alaskan king crab, red crab, yellow crab, and the world-famous Dungeness crab. Californian and Oregonian sportsmen pursue the last three extensively using hoop nets, and prepare them in a multitude of ways. Alaska king crab, able to get up to 10 kg, is often served steamed for a whole table with lemon butter sauce or put in chunks of salad with avocado, and native crabs are the base of dishes like the California roll, cioppino, a tomato based fisherman's stew, and Crab Louie, another kind of salad native to San Francisco. Favorite grains are mainly wheat, and the region is famous for sourdough bread. Cheeses of the region include Humboldt Fog, Cougar Gold and Teleme.
Southwest and Southern California
The states of the Four Corners (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah) plus Nevada, Southern California, and West Texas make up a large chunk of the United States and there is a distinct Hispanic accent to the cookery here, with each having a cultural capital in Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, and Los Angeles. This region was part of the Spanish Empire for more than two centuries before California's statehood in the 1830s, and today is the home of a large population of immigrants from Mexico and Central America; Spanish is a commonly spoken secondary language here and the state of New Mexico has its own distinct dialect. With the exception of Southern California, the signature meat is beef, since this is one of the two regions in which cowboys lived and modern cattle ranchers still eke out their living today. High quality beefstock is a feature that has been present in the region for more than 200 years and the many cuts of beef are unique to the United States. These cuts of meat are different from the related Mexican cuisine over the border in that certain kind of offal, like lengua (tongue) cabeza (head) and tripas (tripe) are considered less desirable and are thus less emphasized. Typical cuts would include the ribs, brisket, sirloin, flank steak, skirt steak, and t-bone.
Historically, Spanish settlers that came to the region found it completely unsuitable to the mining operations that much older settlements in Mexico had to offer as the technology of the age was not yet advanced enough to get at the silver that would later be found in the region. They had no knowledge of the gold to be discovered in California, something nobody would find until 1848, and knew even less about the silver in Nevada, something nobody would find until after the Civil War. Instead, in order to make the pueblos prosper, they adapted the old rancho system of places like Andalusia in Spain and brought the earliest beefstock, among these were breeds that would go feral and become the Texas longhorn, and Churro sheep, still used as breeding stock because they are easy to keep and well adapted to the extremely arid and hot climate, where temperatures easily exceed 38 °C. Later, cowboys learned from their management practices, many of which still stand today, like the practical management of stock on horseback using the Western saddle.
Likewise, settlers learned the cooking methods of those who came before and local tribes as well: for example, portions of Arizona and New Mexico still use the aforementioned beehive shaped clay contraption called an horno, an outdoor wood fired oven both Native American tribes like the Navajo and Spaniards used for roasting meat, maize, and baking bread. Other meats that see frequent use in this region are elk meat, a favorite in crown roasts and burgers, and nearer the Mexican border rattlesnake, often skinned and stewed. The taste for alcohol in this region tends toward light and clean flavors found in tequila, a staple of this region since the days of the Wild West and a staple in the bartender's arsenal for cocktails, especially in Las Vegas. In Utah, a state heavily populated by Mormons, alcohol is frowned upon by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints but still available in area bars in Salt Lake City, mainly consumed by the populations of Catholics and other Protestant denominations living there.
Introduction of agriculture was limited prior to the 20th century and the development of better irrigation techniques, but included the addition of peaches, a crop still celebrated by Native American tribes like the Havasupai, and oranges; today in Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico the favored orange today is the Moro blood orange, which often finds its way into the local cuisine, like cakes and marmalade. Pine nuts are a particular regional specialty and feature often in fine dining and cookies; indeed in Nevada the Native American tribes that live there are by treaty given rights to exclusive harvest. From Native Americans, Westerners learned the practice of eating cactus fruit from the myriad species of opuntia that occupy the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave desert lands. In California, Spanish missionaries brought with them the mission fig: today this fruit is a delicacy.
Cuisine in this region tends to have certain key ingredients: tomatoes, onions, black beans, pinto beans, rice, bell peppers, chile peppers, and cheese, in particular Monterey Jack, invented in Southern California in the 19th century and itself often further altered into pepperjack where spicy jalapeño peppers are incorporated into the cheese to create a smoky taste. Chili peppers play an important role in the cuisine, with a few native to the region (Anaheim pepper, Hatch pepper); these still grown by Spanish speakers in New Mexico. In New Mexico, chile is eaten on a variety of foods, such as the green chile cheeseburger, made popular by fast food chains such as Blake's Lotaburger. Indeed, even national fast food chains operating in the state, such as McDonald's, offer locally grown chile on many of their menu items. In the 20th century a few more recent additions have arrived like the poblano pepper, rocoto pepper, ghost pepper, thai chili pepper, and Korean pepper, the last three especially when discussing Southern California and its large population from East and South Asia. Cornbread is consumed in this area, however the recipe differs from ones in the East in that the batter is cooked in a cast iron skillet. Outdoor cooking is popular and still utilizes an old method settlers brought from the East with them, in which a cast iron dutch oven is covered with the coals of the fire and stacked or hung from a tripod: this is different from the earthenware pots of Mexico. Tortillas are still made the traditional way in this area and form an important component of the spicy breakfast burrito, which contains ham, eggs, and salsa or pico de gallo. They also comprise the regular burrito, which contains any combination of marinated meats, vegetables, and piquant chilis; The smothered burrito, often both containing and topped with New Mexico chile sauces; the quesadilla, a much loved grilled dish where cheese and other ingredients are stuffed between two tortillas and served by the slice, and the steak fajita, where sliced skirt steak sizzles in a skillet with caramelized onions.
Unlike Mexico, tortillas of this region also may incorporate vegetable matter like spinach into the flatbread dough to make wraps, which were invented in Southern California. Food here tends to use pungent spices and condiments, typically chili verde sauce, various kinds of hot sauce, sriracha sauce, chili powder, cayenne pepper, white pepper, cumin, paprika, onion powder, thyme and black pepper. Nowhere is this fiery mix of spice more evident than in the dishes chili con carne, a meaty stew, and cowboy beans, both of which are a feature of regional cookoffs. Southern California has several additions like five spice powder, rosemary, curry powder, kimchi, and lemongrass, with many of these brought by recent immigration to the region and often a feature of Southern California's fusion cuisine, popular in fine dining.
In Texas, the local barbecue is often entirely made up of beef brisket or large rib racks, where the meat is seasoned with a spice rub and cooked over coals of mesquite, and in other portions of the state they smoke their meat and peppery sausages over high heat using pecan, apple, and oak and served it with a side of pickled vegetables, a legacy of German and Czech settlers of the late 1800s. California is home to Santa Maria-style barbecue, where the spices involved generally are black pepper, paprika, and garlic salt, and grilled over the coals of coast live oak.
Native American additions may include Navajo frybread and corn on the cob, often roasted on the grill in its husk. A typical accompaniment or appetizer of all these states is the tortilla chip, which sometimes includes cornmeal from cultivars of corn that are blue or red in addition to the standard yellow of sweetcorn, and is served with salsa of varying hotness. Tortilla chips also are an ingredient in the Tex Mex dish nachos, where these chips are loaded with any combination of ground beef, melted Monterey Jack, cheddar, or Colby cheese, guacamole, sour cream, and salsa, and Texas usually prefers a version of potato salad as a side dish. For alcohol, a key ingredient is tequila: this spirit has been made on both sides of the US-Mexican border for generations, and in modern cuisine it is a must have in a bartender's arsenal as well as an addition to dishes for sauteeing.
Southern California is located more towards the coast and has had more contact with immigration from the West Pacific and Baja California, in addition to having the international city of Los Angeles as its capital. Here, the prime mode of transportation is by car. Drive through fast food was invented in this area, but so was the concept of the gourmet burger movement, giving birth to chains like In and Out Burger, with many variations of burgers including chili, multiple patties, avocado, special sauces, and angus or wagyu beef; common accompaniments include thick milkshakes in various flavors like mint, chocolate, peanut butter, vanilla, strawberry, and mango. Smoothies are a common breakfast item made with fresh fruit juice, yogurt, and crushed ice. Agua fresca, a drink originated by Mexican immigrants, is a common hot weather beverage sold in many supermarkets and at mom and pop stands, available in citrus, watermelon, and strawberry flavors; the California version usually served chilled without grain in it.
The weather in Southern California is such that the temperature rarely drops below 12 °C in winter, thus, sun loving crops like pistachios, kiwifruit, avocadoes, strawberries, and tomatoes are staple crops of the region, the last often dried in the sun and a feature of salads and sandwiches. Olive oil is a staple cooking oil of the region and has been since the days of JunÃpero Serra; today the mission olive is a common tree growing in a Southern Californian's back garden; as a crop olives are increasingly a signature of the region along with Valencia oranges and Meyer lemons. Soybeans, bok choy, Japanese persimmon, thai basil, Napa cabbage, nori, mandarin oranges, water chestnuts, and mung beans are other crops brought to the region from East Asia and are common additions to salads as the emphasis on fresh produce in both Southern and Northern California is strong. Other vegetables and herbs have a distinct Mediterranean flavor which would include oregano, basil, summer squash, eggplant, and broccoli, with all of the above extensively available at farmers' markets all around Southern California. Naturally, salads native to Southern California tend to be hearty affairs, like Cobb salad and Chinese chicken salad, and dressings like green goddess and ranch are a staple. California-style pizza tends to have disparate ingredients with an emphasis on vegetables, with any combination of chili oil, prawns, eggs, chicken, shiitake mushrooms, olives, bell pepper, goat cheese, and feta cheese. Peanut noodles tend to include a sweet dressing with lo mein noodles and chopped peanuts.
Fresh fish and shellfish in Southern California tends to be expensive in restaurants, but by no means out of reach of the masses. Every year since the end of WWII, the Pismo clam festival has taken place where the local population takes a large species of clam and bakes, stuffs, and roasts it to their heart's content as it is a regional delicacy. Fishing for pacific species of octopus and the Humboldt squid are common, and both are a feature of East Asian and other L.A. fish markets.Lingcod is a coveted regional fish that is often caught in the autumn off the coast of San Diego and in the Channel Islands and often served baked. California sheephead are often grilled and are much sought after by spear fishermen and the immigrant Chinese population, in which case it is basket steamed. Most revered of all in recent years is the California spiny lobster, a beast that can grow to be 20 kg, and is a delicacy that now rivals the fishery for Dungeness crab in its importance.
Pacific and Hawaiian cuisine
Hawaii is often considered to be one of the most culturally diverse U.S. states, as well as being the only state with an Asian majority population and being one of the few places where United States territory extends into the tropics. As a result, Hawaiian cuisine borrows elements of a variety of cuisines, particularly those of Asian and Pacific-rim cultures, as well as traditional native Hawaiian and a few additions from the American mainland. American influence of the last 150 years has brought cattle, goats, and sheep to the islands, introducing cheese, butter, and yogurt products, as well as crops like red cabbage. Just to name a few, major Asian and Polynesian influences on modern Hawaiian cuisine are from Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China (especially near the Pearl River delta,) Samoa, and the Philippines. From Japan, the concept of serving raw fish as a meal with rice was introduced, as was soft tofu, setting the stage for the popular dish called poke. From Korea, immigrants to Hawaii brought a love of spicy garlic marinades for meat and kimchi. From China, their version of char siu baau became modern manapua, a type of steamed pork bun with a spicy filling. Filipinos brought vinegar, bagoong, and lumpia, and during the 20th century immigrants from American Samoa brought the open pit fire umu and the Vietnamese introduced lemongrass and fish sauce. Each East Asian culture brought several different kinds of noodles, including udon, ramen, mei fun, and pho, and today these are common lunchtime meals.
Much of this cuisine mixes and melts into traditions like the infamous lu'au, whose traditional elaborate fare was once the prerogative of kings and queens but today is the subject of parties for both tourists and also private parties for the 'ohana (meaning family and close friends.) Traditionally, women and men ate separately under the Hawaiian kapu system, a system of religious beliefs that honored the Hawaiian gods similar to the Maori tapu system, though in this case had some specific prohibitions towards females eating things like coconut, pork, turtle meat, and bananas as these were considered parts of the male gods. Punishment for violation could be severe, as a woman might endanger a man's mana, or soul, by eating with him or otherwise by eating the forbidden food because doing so dishonored all the male gods. As the system broke down after 1810, introductions of foods from laborers on plantations began to be included at feasts and much cross pollination occurred, where Asian foodstuffs mixed with Polynesian foodstuffs like breadfruit, kukui nuts, and purple sweet potatoes.
Some notable Hawaiian fare includes seared ahi tuna, opakapaka (snapper) with passionfruit, Hawaiian island-raised lamb, beef and meat products, Hawaiian plate lunch, and Molokai shrimp. Seafood traditionally is caught fresh in Hawaiian waters, and particular delicacies are 'ula poni, papaikualoa, 'opihi, and 'opihi malihini, better known as Hawaiian spiny lobster, Kona crab, Hawaiian limpet, and abalone, the last brought over with Japanese immigrants. Some cuisine also incorporates a broad variety of produce and locally grown agricultural products, including tomatoes, sweet Maui onions, taro, and macadamia nuts. Tropical fruits equally play an important role in the cuisine as a flavoring in cocktails and in desserts, including local cultivars of bananas, sweetsop, mangoes, lychee, coconuts, papayas, and lilikoi (passionfruit). Pineapples have been an island staple since the 19th century and figure into many marinades and drinks.
Common dishes found on a regional level
Ethnic and immigrant influence
The demand for ethnic foods in the United States reflects the nation's changing diversity as well as its development over time. According to the National Restaurant Association,
Restaurant industry sales are expected to reach a record high of $476 billion in 2005, an increase of 4.9 percent over 2004... Driven by consumer demand, the ethnic food market reached record sales in 2002, and has emerged as the fastest growing category in the food and beverage product sector, according to USBX Advisory Services. Minorities in the U.S. spend a combined $142 billion on food and by 2010, America's ethnic population is expected to grow by 40 percent.
A movement began during the 1980s among popular leading chefs to reclaim America's ethnic foods within its regional traditions, where these trends originated. One of the earliest was Paul Prudhomme, who in 1984 began the introduction of his influential cookbook, Paul Prodhomme's Louisiana Kitchen, by describing the over 200-year history of Creole and Cajun cooking; he aims to "preserve and expand the Louisiana tradition." Prodhomme's success quickly inspired other chefs. Norman Van Aken embraced a Floridian type cuisine fused with many ethnic and globalized elements in his Feast of Sunlight cookbook in 1988. The movement finally gained fame around the world when California became swept up in the movement, then seemingly started to lead the trend itself, in, for example, the popular restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Examples of the Chez Panisse phenomenon, chefs who embraced a new globalized cuisine, were celebrity chefs like Jeremiah Tower and Wolfgang Puck, both former colleagues at the restaurant. Puck went on to describe his belief in contemporary, new style American cuisine in the introduction to The Wolfgang Puck Cookbook:
Another major breakthrough, whose originators were once thought to be crazy, is the mixing of ethnic cuisines. It is not at all uncommon to find raw fish listed next to tortillas on the same menu. Ethnic crossovers also occur when distinct elements meet in a single recipe. This country is, after all, a huge melting pot. Why should its cooking not illustrate the American transformation of diversity into unity?
Puck's former colleague, Jeremiah Tower became synonymous with California Cuisine and the overall American culinary revolution. Meanwhile, the restaurant that inspired both Puck and Tower became a distinguished establishment, popularizing its so called "mantra" in its book by Paul Bertolli and owner Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Cooking, in 1988. Published well after the restaurants' founding in 1971, this new cookbook from the restaurant seemed to perfect the idea and philosophy that had developed over the years. The book embraced America's natural bounty, specifically that of California, while containing recipes that reflected Bertoli and Waters' appreciation of both northern Italian and French style foods.
Early ethnic influences
While the earliest cuisine of the United States was influenced by Native Americans, the thirteen colonies, or the antebellum South; the overall culture of the nation, its gastronomy and the growing culinary arts became ever more influenced by its changing ethnic mix and immigrant patterns from the 18th and 19th centuries unto the present. Some of the ethnic groups that continued to influence the cuisine were here in prior years; while others arrived more numerously during "The Great Transatlantic Migration" (of 1870--1914) or other mass migrations.
Some of the ethnic influences could be found across the nation after the American Civil War and into the continental expansion for most of the 19th century. Ethnic influences already in the nation at that time would include the following groups and their respective cuisines:
- Select nationalities of Europe and the respective developments from early modern European cuisine of the colonial age:
- British-Americans and on-going developments in New England cuisine, the national traditions founded in cuisine of the thirteen colonies and some aspects of other regional cuisine.
- Spanish Americans and early modern Spanish cuisine, as well as Basque-Americans and Basque cuisine.
- Early German-American or Pennsylvania Dutch and Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine
- French Americans and their "New World" regional identities such as:
- Acadian
- Cajun and Cajun cuisine
- Louisiana Creole and Louisiana Creole cuisine. Louisiana Creole (also called French Créole) refers to native born people of the New Orleans area who are descended from the Colonial French and Spanish settlers of Colonial French Louisiana, before it became part of the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.
- The various ethnicities originating from early social factors of Race in the United States and the gastronomy and cuisines of the "New World," Latin American cuisine and North American cuisine:
- Indigenous Native Americans in the United States and American Indian cuisine
- African Americans and "Soul food."
- Puerto Rican cuisine
- Mexican Americans and Mexican-American cuisine; as well as related regional cuisines:
- Tex-Mex (regional Texas and Mexican fusion)
- Cal-Mex (regional California and Mexican fusion)
- Tex-Jex (regional Texas, Jewish and Mexican fusion)
- Some aspects of "Southwestern cuisine."
- Cuisine of New Mexico
Later ethnic and immigrant influence
Mass migrations of immigrants to the United States came in several waves. Historians identify several waves of migration to the United States: one from 1815 to 1860, in which some five million English, Irish, Germanic, Scandinavian, and others from northwestern Europe came to the United States; one from 1865 to 1890, in which some 10 million immigrants, also mainly from northwestern Europe, settled, and a third from 1890 to 1914, in which 15 million immigrants, mainly from central, eastern, and southern Europe (many Austrian, Hungarian, Turkish, Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, Greek, Italian, and Romanian) settled in the United States.
Together with earlier arrivals to the United States (including the indigenous Native Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans, particularly in the West, Southwest, and Texas; African Americans who came to the United States in the Atlantic slave trade; and early colonial migrants from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere), these new waves of immigrants had a profound impact on national or regional cuisine. Some of these more prominent groups include the following:
Italian, Mexican and Chinese (Cantonese) cuisines have indeed joined the mainstream. These three cuisines have become so ingrained in the American culture that they are no longer foreign to the American palate. According to the study, more than nine out of 10 consumers are familiar with and have tried these foods, and about half report eating them frequently. The research also indicates that Italian, Mexican and Chinese (Cantonese) have become so adapted to such an extent that "authenticity" is no longer a concern to customers.
Contributions from these ethnic foods have become as common as traditional "American" fares such as hot dogs, hamburgers, beef steak, which are derived from German cuisine, (chicken-fried steak, for example, is a variation on German schnitzel), cherry pie, Coca-Cola, milkshakes, fried chicken (Fried chicken is of Scottish and African influence) and so on. Nowadays, Americans also have a ubiquitous consumption of foods like pizza and pasta, tacos and burritos to "General Tso's chicken" and fortune cookies. Fascination with these and other ethnic foods may also vary with region.
Notable American chefs
American chefs have been influential both in the food industry and in popular culture. An important 19th Century American chef was Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico's Restaurant in New York City. American cooking has been exported around the world, both through the global expansion of restaurant chains such as T.G.I. Friday's and McDonald's and the efforts of individual restaurateurs such as Bob Payton, credited with bringing American-style pizza to the UK.
The first generation of television chefs such as Robert Carrier and Julia Child tended to concentrate on cooking based primarily on European, especially French and Italian, cuisines. Only during the 1970s and 1980s did television chefs such as James Beard and Jeff Smith shift the focus towards home-grown cooking styles, particularly those of the different ethnic groups within the nation. Notable American restaurant chefs include Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, Grant Achatz, Alfred Portale, Paul Prudhomme, Paul Bertolli, Frank Stitt, Alice Waters, Patrick O'Connell and celebrity chefs like Mario Batali, David Chang, Alton Brown, Emeril Lagasse, Cat Cora, Michael Symon, Bobby Flay, Ina Garten, Todd English, Anthony Bourdain, and Paula Deen.
Regional chefs are emerging as localized celebrity chefs with growing broader appeal, such as Peter Merriman (Hawaii Regional Cuisine), Jerry Traunfeld, Alan Wong (Pacific Rim cuisine), Norman Van Aken (New World Cuisine - fusion Latin, Caribbean, Asian, African and American), and Mark Miller (American Southwest cuisine).
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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