American cuisine

• 1. Introduction

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  American cuisine, the cooking of the United States, stretches across a country more than 3,000 miles wide from east to west, not counting Alaska and Hawaii. It also runs more than 1000 miles from north to south. Along that distance, a single dish can split into rival versions.

  A New York slice of pizza has a thin crust that folds in half. Chicago's pizza has a thicker, taller crust. Some restaurants go so far as to import New York tap water from a thousand or more miles away, just to recreate the New York style in another region.

  That kind of devotion raises a puzzle. Who was cooking on this land before any European ship arrived? What did each wave of newcomers carry in their luggage and their memories? And how did wars, factories, highways and television change what ended up on the dinner table?

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• 2. Native Tables

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  Before 1600, native peoples lived off very different landscapes across the continent, and had done so for thousands of years. Many led a nomadic life in which the menu changed with the seasons. Many also farmed, rotating beans, maize and squash, a trio known as the Three Sisters.

  In the 1620s, William Bradford wrote about this farming in Of Plimoth Plantation. His pages describe Squanto showing the settlers how to bury a fish or eel in a mound along with maize seeds, to enrich the soil. It was one example of the widespread practice of companion planting.

  Deer, elk and bison were staples for nearly every tribe, and so were rabbits and hares. The Cherokee of the Southern Appalachians hunted squirrels with blowguns made from an indigenous kind of bamboo. In the north, the Ojibwe of what is now Michigan and the Wabanaki of what is now Maine stalked moose. Farther south, the Choctaw and Catawba took snapping turtles, possums and young alligators from the swamps of Louisiana and South Carolina. Many tribes dried their meat into pemmican, which fed travelers on long journeys and families through harsh winters.

  The local landscape also decided who ate fish. The Apache and Navajo of the Southwest generally avoided it, because fish was taboo in both cultures. The Navajo believed fish had a part in the story of creation. The Apache tended to fear water, which they linked with thunder, and the dry desert made fish scarce in any case.

  The Lenape, who first lived in what is now New Jersey, along the Delaware River, and around New York City, took the opposite view. Fish and shellfish were a staple, and a harvest dance called the Fish Dance is documented and still practiced. It would originally have celebrated the catch and the smoking that preserved fish for the winter.

  On the Pacific side, the accounts of Lewis and Clark describe chinook salmon being fished in the Columbia River Basin. The fish is named for a family of tribes in the Pacific Northwest, a sign of its importance there. The Makah hunted Pacific gray whales and humpbacks off the Northwest coast for meat and oil. On the East Coast, cod, winter flounder, alewife, shad and Atlantic sturgeon were all on the menu.

  Early native cooks lacked pottery that could sit directly over a fire, so they developed what many anthropologists call stone boiling. They heated rocks in the fire, then dropped them into a pot of water until it boiled and cooked the meat or vegetables. Root vegetables were often buried right in the ashes. In the Southwest, cooks built adobe ovens that the Spanish dubbed hornos, and used them to bake cornmeal bread.

  New England tribes took the pit oven further. They laid seaweed or corn husks over layers of hot stones to steam fish, shellfish and vegetables. By the 18th century, potatoes were added, cooked in their skins beside corn still in the husk. Colonists later gave this feast a name, the clambake.

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• 3. Colonial Kitchens

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  In 1747, Hannah Glasse published an English cookbook called The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, and it proliferated in the colonies. She had no patience for French cooking and called the French recipes in her own book "an odd jumble of trash." Her scorn matched a general disdain for French cookery in the colonies, even with French Huguenot settlers in South Carolina and French-Canadian emigrants in America.

  The English colonists in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and the other eastern colonies first tried to survive on crops they knew from home. They kept animals for clothing and meat. After hardships, and once trade with England and the West Indies was established, they ate much as they had in Britain and Ireland, with local plants and animals added. The first American cookbook appeared in 1796.

  Wheat, the grain behind English bread, was nearly impossible to grow in the north, and imports cost too much. Cornmeal filled the gap. The johnnycake was a poor substitute for wheat bread in some eyes, but both northern and southern colonies accepted it. Seasons also divided the colonies. Southern farmers could grow crops almost year-round, while northern growing seasons were short. Northerners, though, had fresh fish from the nearby ocean.

  Hunting was the preferred way to get protein, because keeping livestock meant defending it against raids. Colonists ate deer, bear, buffalo and wild turkey. The larger muscles were roasted and served with currant sauce. Smaller portions went into soups, stews, sausages, pies and pastries.

  Mutton supplemented the game. The Spanish in Florida first brought sheep to the New World, but in the north they were introduced by the Dutch and the English. Sheep gave wool while young and mutton when older. Their forage diet produced a strong, gamy flavor and tough meat, which needed aging and slow cooking.

  Many homes kept a deerskin sack of bear oil for cooking, and solidified bear fat resembled shortening. Rendered pork fat, especially from bacon, was the most popular cooking medium. The South used more of it, since the Spanish brought pigs there earlier. Butter was rare before the American Revolution because cattle were not yet plentiful.

  Before the Revolution, New Englanders drank large quantities of rum and beer. Maritime trade supplied what they needed, and molasses from the West Indies made rum the favorite spirit. Colonists farther inland had no easy access to sugar cane, so they made whiskey from corn and rye. Many considered it coarse and unfit to drink, believing it turned the poor into raucous, unkempt drunkards.

  Enslaved Africans brought to the colonies carried bananas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, yams and coffee with them. Cooking styles reminiscent of West African cuisines survive in many dishes, especially in Southern cooking. Other arrivals shaped the table too. After the expulsion of the Acadians from Acadia, many of them settled in Louisiana and left a French influence on the local diet. Others settled in eastern Maine and parts of northern Vermont.

  In 1654-23 Sephardic Jews arrived in New Amsterdam. Their families had fled the Inquisition in the 15th century, and some had settled in Recife, Brazil and the West Indies. There, molasses, rum, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, peppers, corn, tomatoes, kidney beans, string beans and turkey entered their cooking. Many recipes were tied to holidays and stayed true to their origins, such as beef and bean stews, almond puddings and egg custards. In 1871, Esther Levy published the Jewish Cookery Book in Philadelphia, the first kosher cookbook in America.

  The southern colonies split into two main parts, the Piedmont uplands and the coastal lowlands. Upland tables offered wild game, cabbage, string beans, corn, squashes and white potatoes, with biscuits and plenty of pork at breakfast. The Louisiana lowlands drew on French, Spanish, Acadian, German, Native American, African and Caribbean cooks. Rice played a large part, and seafood supplied most of the protein. Peppers flavored much of the diet then, as they still do today.

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• 4. Farmhouse to Factory

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  On a farm in the 1800s, almost everything came from the land. A few staples such as salt, coffee, sugar and baking soda were bought at the town general store, along with flour for families that grew no wheat. Eggs, butter or other farm food paid the bill. Canned salmon was a luxury, sometimes eaten at Sunday dinner.

  Women did much of the processing. They strained fresh milk, churned butter, boiled molasses from sorghum, ground corn into cornmeal and cleaned whole chickens. Apples were pressed into cider, and some of it was fermented into vinegar. One Michigan writer of the time called October cider season, the time for making apple butter.

  Typical farmhouse fare included fried chicken, simmered green beans, chicken and dumplings, fried ham and coleslaw. In Indiana, Germans made a breakfast called pon haus, much like the scrapple of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Pork scraps and cornmeal were cooked into a thick porridge and molded in loaf pans. Once firm, the loaf was sliced and fried, and in the fall, fried apples or potatoes sometimes replaced the pork.

  In the early 1900s, cast iron cookware was seasoned thoroughly with pork fat. In Appalachia, a dish called killed lettuce combined pokeweed, dandelion and other wild greens, wilted by a pour of hot bacon grease. Pie could appear three times a day. Rhubarb and strawberry came in spring, peach, cherry and elderberry in summer, and apple in fall.

  City cooking looked different. Urban diets leaned on bread, dairy and canned goods, so dinner might be canned tomato bisque topped with cream. With cramped kitchenettes, many people bought food at delicatessens. German delicatessens in New York and Milwaukee sold imported cold cuts, potato salads, schmierkase, wienerwurst and North Sea herring. Jewish immigrants from Germany soon followed, swapping pork for corned beef and pastrami.

  Milk changed from a luxury to a staple. Grain-feeding of cattle kept milk flowing through low-pasture months, and milking machines cut costs. Pasteurization, homogenization and refrigeration made it safe for city buyers. At soda fountains, that milk went into the root beer float and the milkshake, alongside rhubarb-based sundaes such as the Garden Sass Sundae.

  Science soon entered the kitchen. From 1902 to 1912, Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ran what he called hygienic table trials to test additives and preservatives. Muckraking journalists had alarmed the public about industrial foods, and Wiley's work helped bring about the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. He became the first commissioner of the FDA. During the First World War, state and federal programs taught housewives to conserve food.

  Fortification followed. Commercial food began to be fortified with iodized salt in 1924. In 1932, milk was fortified with viosterol, a purified vitamin D2 product. Synthetic thiamin became available after 1936, and bakers began enriching bread in the late 1930s. In 1943, War Food Order No. 1 made enriched bread the law of the land. Two years earlier, the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences had issued the first Recommended Dietary Allowances.

  The logistics of the Second World War and the Korean War then built a processed food industry. These conflicts called for shelf-stable ingredients made on a vast scale, including powdered milk, powdered eggs, potato flakes and frozen concentrated orange juice. Afterward, cheap, highly processed foods became a foundation of mass prosperity. The TV dinner, a multi-course meal flash frozen in aluminum packaging, was reheated at home to be eaten in front of the television. Betty Crocker's Cookbook arrived in 1950, backed by corporate kitchens at companies such as General Mills, Campbell's and Kraft.

  Novelty ran through the era. Cereals such as Froot Loops were marketed to children with sugar and artificial colors. Tang and Hi-C offered fruit flavor from the lab. Spray cheese came in an aerosol can, and the microwave oven inspired products such as microwave popcorn. Meanwhile, the food system grew dependent on subsidized corn, which feeds livestock and becomes high-fructose corn syrup. One estimate holds that the typical American gets 70 percent of their carbon intake from corn.

  Later innovations drew criticism, including food irradiation, genetically modified organisms, antibiotics and hormones in livestock, and concentrated animal feeding operations. Activists questioned their wholesomeness, safety or humaneness, and recommended organic produce, vegetarianism, veganism and locavore diets.

  The automobile brought its own revolution. Drive-in and drive-through restaurants grew along the highways, and White Castle in 1916 was one of the first standardized examples. A&W Root Beer introduced franchising in 1921, and the McDonald brothers created their Speedee Service System in 1948. Burger King, Wendy's, Pizza Hut, Domino's, Subway, Arby's, KFC, Popeyes and Taco Bell followed.

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• 5. Made in America

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  Spaghetti is Italian and hot dogs are German, yet a popular meal, especially among young children, combines them as spaghetti with sliced hot dogs. That blend is typical. Cooks and chefs have altered dishes so far that burgers and hot dogs, though based on German originals, are now reasonably considered American. Since the 1960s, Asian cooking has played an especially large role in this kind of fusion.

  Some foods that Americans think of as foreign were actually invented here. General Tso's chicken was created by Chinese or Taiwanese chefs working in New York in the early 1970s. It is unknown in China, apart from a distant resemblance to a much spicier Hong Kong dish said to have influenced it. The fortune cookie was invented in California in the early 1900s and is known in Asia only as an American-style food.

  Television then made cooks into stars. In the 1970s, a wave of celebrity chefs began with Julia Child and Graham Kerr, and many more followed once cable channels such as Food Network arrived. Child was probably the best known. Her weekly show, The French Chef, taught French cuisine to American viewers.

  In the 1980s, upscale restaurants began mixing Americanized cooking styles with foreign elements. The result was called New American cuisine, a fusion that sometimes added molecular gastronomy. It drew on the melting pot of traditional American techniques and the flavors of other cultures.

  By the start of the 21st century, regional differences in meat consumption had begun to fade as overall meat eating rose. The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans said people ate too much protein. They asked men and teenage boys to eat more of the foods they underconsumed, such as vegetables. Vegan and vegetarian meals gained popularity, and more restaurants began to cater to them.

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• 6. New England Shores

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  The first European colonists of New England came from East Anglia, whose cooking included suet puddings, soda breads and a few shellfish delicacies. Compared with fare in contemporary London, it was quite simple. Much of it was one-pot cookery, which grew into succotash, chowder and baked beans. Native peoples such as the Abenaki, Narragansett, Niantic, Wabanaki and Wampanoag also shaped the region, along with French, Italian and Portuguese cooks.

  Corn, historically the main crop of New England's tribes, still grows in all six states. It appears in hasty pudding, cornbread and corn chowder. Starches also include Anadama bread, bulkie rolls, Parker House rolls, popovers, ployes and brown bread. Spicing is conservative, partly because of the influence of health reformers, the best known of whom was Sylvester Graham.

  Three foods native to the region stand out, namely maple syrup, cranberries and blueberries. Maine is the only state with a commercial wild blueberry industry, and it harvested 105 million pounds in 2021. Cranberries are gathered in autumn from huge flooded bogs, then juiced or dried. Beach plums, a native fruit the size of a pinball, are sought each summer for jam. Zucchini arrived about a century ago with immigrants from Southern Italy.

  Apples have been a staple here since at least the 1640s, and the region holds a high number of heirloom varieties. The original 13 colonies were once major producers of hard cider. That changed because immigrants from Western and Central Europe preferred beer, especially lagers. Cider has since made a roaring comeback, and Angry Orchard, a brand that began in New Hampshire, has skyrocketed in sales.

  Desserts include whoopie pies, Boston cream pie, Joe Frogger cookies and the chocolate chip cookie, invented in Massachusetts in the 1930s. Dairy matters too. Ben and Jerry's grew from a small seasonal roadside stand in Vermont, which now has more artisanal cheese makers per capita than any other state. English settlers brought a cheddar recipe to Vermont in colonial times and found the rocky landscape well suited to it.

  Seafood is the region's great legacy from coastal tribes like the Wampanoag and Narragansett. Rhode Island is known for clam cakes, a fritter made from chopped clams. It is also home to the quahog, a hard-shell clam used in clear chowders. Lobster is indigenous to these waters. It is eaten chilled with mayonnaise and chopped celery in Maine and Massachusetts, or slathered with melted butter on Long Island and in Connecticut.

  Peekytoe and Jonah crabs were once overlooked as bycatch in fishermen's lobster pots. In the past 30 years, their popularity has made them a staple, and they are sold to four-star restaurants in New York as cocktail claws. The clambake as known today is a colonial interpretation of an American Indian tradition. Whole roast turkey as a centerpiece for large banquets began here, and a variety of linguiça, introduced by Portuguese fishermen and Brazilian immigrants, is a favorite breakfast food.

  Farther south along the coast, Connecticut shares specialties with the Mid-Atlantic. A so-called pizza belt stretches from New Haven through New York and New Jersey into Maryland. Coastal Connecticut makes its own kind of pizza, called apizza and pronounced abeetz. It is thin and slightly blackened, and some versions carry clams as a topping.

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• 7. Mid-Atlantic Gateway

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  The Dutch founded New York in 1625, and ever since, the Mid-Atlantic has been a gateway for new immigrants and for the cuisines they brought. Baltimore has been a crossroads between North and South since the end of the Civil War. Even in colonial days, settlers came from Switzerland, Wales, England, Ulster, Wallonia, Holland, Gelderland, the British Channel Islands and Sweden.

  The Dutch left marks that are still visible. Streusel-topped apple pie is still baked in many corners of New York. Waffles, favored in New Amsterdam, became a part of New York brunch. Coleslaw was originally a Dutch salad, and the doughnut began as the Dutch olykoek, later joined by the Italian zeppole, the Polish pączki and the German Berliner.

  Wealth also made dishes. Lobster Newberg, waldorf salad, vichyssoise, eggs benedict and the New York strip steak were born from the need to impress the well-to-do at places like Delmonico's and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Modern commercial cream cheese was developed in 1872. The first reference to a mixed drink called a cocktail comes from New York State in 1803. Cosmopolitans, Manhattans and Long Island iced teas all came from New York bars, and speakeasies in the 1920s popularized the gin martini, which appears in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  In Pennsylvania, Germans who emigrated at the end of the 17th century brought a taste for rye, and Pennsylvania rye whiskey followed. They also made scrapple to preserve the offal after a pig slaughter. The Philadelphia soft pretzel reached eastern Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. Pushcart sellers later carried it to the masses.

  After the 1820s, new groups arrived. Irish emigrants poured into Castle Garden in New York and Locust Point in Baltimore from the 1840s on. Many came on coffin ships, sick with typhus and gaunt from starvation. They were the first large wave of Catholics, and they faced prejudice for their faith. Catholic bishops in the United States forbade red meat on Fridays and during Lent until the 1960s. Many Irishmen worked as longshoremen, which gave their families access to fish and shellfish. They also founded some of the earliest saloons, including McSorley's, which is still operating.

  The Irish brought Halloween too. In England and Wales, All Hallows Eve had died out during the Reformation and was often replaced by Guy Fawkes Night. After the American Revolution, few wanted to celebrate an English festival anyway. Irish tradition kept going door to door for treats such as nuts, barmbracks and drinks, and bobbing for apples. Scots later added the practice of guising, in which children in costume went door to door asking for sweets. From the Mid-Atlantic, the custom spread nationwide into trick-or-treating.

  Immigrants from Sicily, Campania, Lazio and Calabria arrived between 1880 and 1960. Many spoke only Italian dialects and could not read or write in any language. Their cuisine used less meat, as in pasta e fagioli and minestrone. In America, even cheap cuts were affordable for the first time, so they piled on meat as a sign of newfound prosperity. Spaghetti with meatballs, calzones, baked ziti and the American version of lasagna came from them.

  German-speaking emigrants from Austria and Germany brought the frankfurter and the smaller wiener sausage. Jews added a kosher version made of beef instead of pork. In 1916, Nathan Handwerker opened Nathan's Famous, one of the earliest hot dog stands in the United States. He had emigrated from what is now Ukraine in 1912. Today the stand hosts a televised hot dog eating contest at Coney Island every Fourth of July.

  Puerto Ricans brought piragua, a shaved-ice treat, to New York in the 1930s. Its grape and cherry flavors are fruits that cannot grow in the tropical Puerto Rican climate, and they are exported back to the island from New York. In New Jersey, Taylor Ham first appeared around the time of the Civil War. It is known as pork roll in southern New Jersey and Philadelphia.

  Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, often fluent only in Yiddish, built the delicatessen. Polish Jews brought the American-style pickle. New York cheesecake is rich with cream and eggs because animal rennet is not kosher. New York also inherited bagels, bialys and challah, and marble rye originated in the region.

  By the end of the 20th century, many of these dishes were standard fare at diners, the most common restaurant in the region. Edward Hopper painted one in 1942, and many such businesses are still open 24 hours a day. Their menus run from Buffalo wings and Philadelphia cheesesteak to shoofly pie and the egg cream, a vanilla or chocolate fountain drink with a frothy top and a fizzy taste.

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• 8. Midwest Plains

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  For nearly 10,000 years, buffalo jumps on the plains have shown how much people depended on bison. Until after the American Revolutionary War, the Midwest was mostly untouched by European and American settlers, except in Missouri. Nomadic tribes such as the Sioux, Osage, Arapaho and Cheyenne ate the Three Sisters and followed the bison herds, hunting on foot and later on horseback. After nearly wiping out elk and bison, the region now raises bison alongside cattle for burgers and steaks at an enormous profit.

  Winters here are bitterly cold, windy and wet, with Arctic winds off Canada. Ice on rivers and lakes freezes thick enough for ice hockey, and ice fishing for pike, walleye and panfish is ubiquitous. In Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, the catch often becomes part of a local fish fry. The primary meats are beef and poultry, since the Midwest has raised turkeys, chickens and geese for over 150 years. Native breeds include the Buckeye and Wyandotte. Another hen, Billina, appears as a character in the second Oz book by L. Frank Baum.

  Pawpaws, the region's largest native fruit, are about the size of a mango and grow wild around September. In Chicago they command a high price at farmers' markets. American persimmons, about the size of a small plum, go into steamed persimmon pudding topped with crème anglaise. Wild rice, an inheritance from Native Americans, often ends up in Thanksgiving stuffing today.

  Once, people thought the winters were too harsh for apples. Then a Minnesota breeder produced the Wealthy apple, and the region became the third-most productive in the country for apples. Cherries matter in Michigan and Wisconsin. Both states also grow cranberries, a legacy of early-19th-century emigration by New England farmers.

  German, Scandinavian and Slavic immigrants shaped the north of the region. In the 19th century, many moved to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois for meatpacking jobs or to homestead. Bratwurst, boiled in lager with sauerkraut, is a tailgate favorite for the Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions. Chicago has about 200,000 Polish speakers and has had a similar population for over 100 years. They brought kielbasa, cabbage rolls and pierogi, and Chicago's Maxwell Street Polish is topped with caramelized onions. In Cleveland, the same sausage becomes the Polish boy, served with French fries, spicy barbecue sauce and coleslaw.

  Cincinnati chili, invented by Macedonian immigrants, puts spaghetti under a Mediterranean-spiced chili and cheddar cheese. Fans at Cincinnati Reds games also use it to top local hot dogs. Nowhere do these local foods gather more than at the church potluck, especially in Minnesota. Since the frontier era, pioneers pooled their resources to celebrate, and that habit never changed.

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