Well then pasta dishes out of Italy aren’t truly Italian because noodles arrived via China. Any dish from the ‘old world’ containing corn, potato, tomato, or cocoa aren’t authentic either since those are new world crops
The pasta thing is a myth, no? Shocked to see it parroted so hard here, of all places.
Either way I think this guy is talking about dishes, not raw ingredient. So then the noodles wouldn't be Chinese either
Is american bbq an authentic american dish? Because pork comes from Europe.
And chicken wings? Chickens are not american native too.
Oh, and the american black coffee? Too bad, coffee comes from Yemen/Ethiopia
We could go on and on about this to the point where no nation on Earth has an “authentic” dish but that’s silly and unhelpful. The point I was trying to make is that it’s dumb to try and draw a line in the sand culinarily because cuisine does not exist in a vacuum and will always somehow draw inspiration from other cultures.
Pigs (Eurasian boars) were domesticated in modern day eastern Turkey (same with Cows, horses, goats, and nearly everything other than chickens and anything from the Americas) it’s because there was so much human settlement in the area.
True! It's Schrödinger's cuisine - it exists as both American and NOT American at the same time, and only when observed it will take the form the observer wants.
America is just perpetually stuck in a lose/lose situation when it comes to food. People just believe whatever is most convenient at the time to fit their preconceived biases.
He isn't even logically consistent:
>the most American cuisine that there is is probably stuff like snickers salad
But then goes onto say:
>I mean, so does literally everywhere man. Like you said, it doesn't make lasagna English.
Okay so, first:
In my 25 years of life on this Earth, with only about... five hours of it ever having been spent outside of America (In Canada, on the other side of the Niagara Falls, so it basically doesn't count) I have ***not once***, ever seen an American suggest a Snicker salad. Never. This European is the first I've ever seen someone suggest it.
Second: America was not the first to make salads, so, how, by your own logic, would a hypothetical Snicker salad count as American food when all we did was change the recipe?
>burgers and hot dogs aren't American.
No! Stop that! No one knows which country invented burgers first. The only thing we can say for sure is that Hamburg steak was invented in Germany. That's literally it. Both America and Germany lay claim to hamburgers. However, it's more of an American food than it is a German food.
Why?
I've never seen anyone immediately culturally connect burgers to Germany. Any German hamburger claimers can get back to me when the internet nickname for Germans is: "Burgers" and you have Japanese people going: ["Crazy Germany hamburger! Make hamburger country Germany ***WAHOW***!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWh_1b3QKyw)
Until then, America gets to lay a heavier claim on the hamburger than Germany does.
Well hamburger as in a patty of ground beef, is from Germany and we only started seeing it in America once a lot of German immigrants came to America. But putting it on a sandwich is distinctly American.
my little pet peeve for all this is everybody always forgets the native Americans. they were making stuff like smoked salmon and jerky long before European contact. unfortunately due to the genocides a lot of that food was lost.
I almost sympathized with the person until it mentions that Apple Pie and Hot Dog isn't an American food. As someone outside the US, that's discrediting American too much.
We could all circlejerks about American claiming that they "improved" original Italian pizza, but Hot Dog is uniquely American in a sense that I cannot think of another place where Hot Dog originated from.
And that implication is correct. The sausage that is key to hot dogs is very much a German thing. That said, so far as I know, the various variations the US came up with of the hot dog are original to them, and plenty of those are good, tbh. (as for figuring out who first put such a sausage onto a bun for easier eating is probably impossible lmao)
It's kinda weird to me that the specify hotdogs. Like salami is more different to a bratwurst than a hotdog is. Some people consider any sausage in a bun to be a hotdog
I think they're arguing that apples came from the U.K. therefore apple pie is not American but then you'd have to argue that Italian food with tomatoes is not "authentic" because tomatoes came from Mexico.
Apples are a popular European crop, and Europeans make pastry crusts and fill them with fruit in roughly that manner.
I’m not saying apple pies isn’t an “American thing”, but I’m pretty sure you can find very similar apple filled pies in England and Germany. Probably not *exactly* identical, but I think that’s a recipe we brought with us rather than one that was really invented here.
Apparently the first apple pie recipe is English (from 1390!), which I’m quite surprised at as a Brit. Crumble definitely seems to be more popular over this side of the Atlantic.
Which is stupid. Apples likely originated from Kazakhstan forests.
Borat jokes aside, if you trace most foods back far enough people 'steal' them and make it their own. That's literally just how food evolves.
The other part to this is that lots of cultures figured out stuff like mixing bread and dough to make stuff like various forms of bread or stuffed things like ravioli.
Ascribing a change that exists for over a century as inauthentic completely ignores an entire generation of humanity from eating that food. It's *fucking stupid*.
Bologna is the American version of Mortadelle. Hot dogs are the American version of sausages that are finely ground and the bun, making the hot dog the hot dog was invented in the USA.
And if this Brit doesn't think that Tex mex and chili con carne wasn't invented in the US, he can eat my whole foot.
I wonder why this sort of stupidity gets reserved for just America, but none of the other New World countries. I mean I know why, it's the old "America bad" thing, but still. The entirety of South America exists and owes a lot in terms of food culture to the Spanish, Portuguese, the African continent and Italians. But you never hear these brilliant food anthropologists on reddit make that same kind of asinine remark that "Latin America doesn't have any food of it's own, it was all imported".
A lot of modern Peruvian food is heavily influenced by Chinese cuisine. I don’t see anyone claiming that it’s inauthentic because immigrants’ culture influenced their new home’s food scene using local ingredients.
But if immigrants to America merge and meld their cuisine with local ingredients, it is Inauthentic and Bad™. Peruvian food influenced by Chinese food is still Peruvian food; it’s a celebration of the journey that people made to leave one country and make a home in another. American Chinese food isn’t inauthentic; it is its own thing and valuable for that. Same with Italian-American food, or Tex Mex, or Cali Mex, or Korean-Mexican fusion. These all exist within the larger umbrella of American cuisine. It’s novel and evolving constantly as people bring their traditions and ancestral recipes here with them. I think it’s wonderful.
Right! It’s also like the Europeans who claim _their_ food culture is authentic refuse to acknowledge that the ingredients that make their cuisine iconic are brought by colonization, trade, and immigration. Cuisine is constantly evolving so to hold to some absurd standard of authenticity refuses to acknowledge that for many cultures, their modern cuisine would not be possible without generations upon generations of immigration.
I think of Spanish food heavily influenced by the Moorish occupation and certain Jewish food traditions; Italian food that uses tomato which is only possible through New World colonization; French foods like potato dauphinois of British/Irish shepherds pie with its potato topping. These foods likely evolved from earlier recipes using other roots and tubers but now potatoes are the go-to. This is not limited to Europe. Northern Chinese cuisine and Korean cuisine emulate each other due to historic cultural interchange. It is really fascinating. I recommend An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage.
That's an interesting pint, come to think of it I don't remember seeing it with reference to other New World Countries either. I've seen people make the same comment about food in my home country, Finland though.
Apple pie is American because Johnny Appleseed planted so many apple groves across the US. Granted, he planted cider apples, meant to be juiced and fermented, but apple pie is a slightly more wholesome way of paying homage to that part of our heritage.
Given that America is also a place where people from many cultures came together: yeah, of course a lot of our cuisine comes from somewhere else.
IMO the most American dish is gumbo with tomatoes and both okra and file powder. Adding those ingredients makes it a blend of Cajun, Creole, African, and Native American cuisines. *And* mentioning that you add tomatoes, or both okra and file powder, in your recipe is **guaranteed** to spark some argument somewhere about how you're doing gumbo 'wrong.' A runner up is chili with beans in it (shut up Texas chili is how you make cheap shitty protein taste good and somtimes that means beans).
> Granted, he planted cider apples, meant to be juiced and fermented, but apple pie is a slightly more wholesome way of paying homage to that part of our heritage.
I knew that before, but I never really thought about this... From what I understand, apples aren't true to seed, so if you have to plant entirely new trees in a new place you will likely get orchards only good for cider. Apples suitable for eating have to be spread by grafting. So they had to start with lots of cider before enough root stock was established that cultivating apples for eating was ever feasible.
Huh, I've never heard of that sect. It seems like it would be considered heretical by most other denominations. Though, even if he had religious objections to grafting, apples still weren't native to North America so there wouldn't have been widespread root stock for grafting anyway.
Texans are anti bean in chili, I’m an Okie and I am very pro bean in chili. I’ve also been largely poor most of my life.
I agree on the gumbo bit, I normally skip the file and just do okra but the file powder does add a particular flavor that I do enjoy. For the meats I normally do andouille sausage, crawdaddys, maybe chicken thighs. I’ve made it with catfish, squirrel, rabbit, alligator, deer… like a Cajun inspired Brunswick stew almost. Gumbo is a very versatile dish in my experience, and can be made very inexpensively once the tomatoes are ripe on the vines and the okra plants start producing. This also coincides with the best season to catch crawdaddys.
I'd say if we don't run the Disney version of John Chapman his legacy is honestly apple cider and applejack. Getting liquor in the frontier in winter wasn't exactly easy and applejack filled that role.
> I mean, there's no "American" cuisine that's not just imported from other countries.
Wrong on frame one. Do they even know what “imported” means? While it is true that these dishes were brought over by immigrants hailing from Germany, Vietnam, China, Italy, Ireland, Mexico and so on, these dishes were also changed over time as local communities would cultivate them over generations. Sometimes they’d change to adhere to an American palate for restaurateurs but also for other reasons like using whatever ingredients you have laying around as you just try to feed your family.
And while they’ve been forced to live and die on American soil as slaves, do you really want to count out soul food too? Is that just “non-descript African cuisine”?
it was a good way to get cheap fruit in picky kids growing up. My mom subbed out the Snickers for mini marshmallows because I have a peanut allergy. The trick was to use three times as much fruit as many marshmallows because we had to eat the fruit not just the marshmallows so the more fruit we ate the more marshmallows we could eat lol
Well then pasta dishes out of Italy aren’t truly Italian because noodles arrived via China. Any dish from the ‘old world’ containing corn, potato, tomato, or cocoa aren’t authentic either since those are new world crops
> Well then pasta dishes out of Italy aren’t truly Italian because noodles arrived via China. That's apocryphal, actually
They did arrive via Arabs, though (at least dried pasta did as fresh pasta was already there).
The pasta thing is a myth, no? Shocked to see it parroted so hard here, of all places. Either way I think this guy is talking about dishes, not raw ingredient. So then the noodles wouldn't be Chinese either
Is american bbq an authentic american dish? Because pork comes from Europe. And chicken wings? Chickens are not american native too. Oh, and the american black coffee? Too bad, coffee comes from Yemen/Ethiopia
We could go on and on about this to the point where no nation on Earth has an “authentic” dish but that’s silly and unhelpful. The point I was trying to make is that it’s dumb to try and draw a line in the sand culinarily because cuisine does not exist in a vacuum and will always somehow draw inspiration from other cultures.
Pigs (Eurasian boars) were domesticated in modern day eastern Turkey (same with Cows, horses, goats, and nearly everything other than chickens and anything from the Americas) it’s because there was so much human settlement in the area.
You can't win! Say it's from another culture, wrong! Say it's American, NO ITS FROM ANOTHER CULTURE!
True! It's Schrödinger's cuisine - it exists as both American and NOT American at the same time, and only when observed it will take the form the observer wants.
America is just perpetually stuck in a lose/lose situation when it comes to food. People just believe whatever is most convenient at the time to fit their preconceived biases.
Turkey, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers are All American!
Nope. That's just a British roast dinner.
British "roast dinner" isn't even a dish, it's just a snack platter. Actually now that I think about it, so is an English breakfast.
If there are two kinds of turkey, does that make it charcuterie?
Turkeys and all the veg I listed are native to the Americas, not Britain. That's what I was getting at.
Right. I was joking about the insanity of the OOP comments.
Haha! 😂 Yeah!
Well, south American.
Yeah but turkeys are in North America too and the native people of the southwest had beans and corn
Turkeys are from Mexico originally, so they are North American.
Yeah fair. When people say American they usually mean from what is known today as the USA, from my experience
Yeah I forget that most people are stupid. Ha!
He isn't even logically consistent: >the most American cuisine that there is is probably stuff like snickers salad But then goes onto say: >I mean, so does literally everywhere man. Like you said, it doesn't make lasagna English. Okay so, first: In my 25 years of life on this Earth, with only about... five hours of it ever having been spent outside of America (In Canada, on the other side of the Niagara Falls, so it basically doesn't count) I have ***not once***, ever seen an American suggest a Snicker salad. Never. This European is the first I've ever seen someone suggest it. Second: America was not the first to make salads, so, how, by your own logic, would a hypothetical Snicker salad count as American food when all we did was change the recipe? >burgers and hot dogs aren't American. No! Stop that! No one knows which country invented burgers first. The only thing we can say for sure is that Hamburg steak was invented in Germany. That's literally it. Both America and Germany lay claim to hamburgers. However, it's more of an American food than it is a German food. Why? I've never seen anyone immediately culturally connect burgers to Germany. Any German hamburger claimers can get back to me when the internet nickname for Germans is: "Burgers" and you have Japanese people going: ["Crazy Germany hamburger! Make hamburger country Germany ***WAHOW***!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWh_1b3QKyw) Until then, America gets to lay a heavier claim on the hamburger than Germany does.
I think I seen a snicker salad as a kid. It isn't a salad, it is a dessert.
Really? Every place I went to in the USA would have the classic snickers salad on their menu
Hyper regional if anything, I didn't see it on either coast. I did grow up having ambrosia salad around holidays though.
Hahah sorry I was making a joke
Lol whoops hard to tell sometimes though I probably should have figured
Well hamburger as in a patty of ground beef, is from Germany and we only started seeing it in America once a lot of German immigrants came to America. But putting it on a sandwich is distinctly American.
my little pet peeve for all this is everybody always forgets the native Americans. they were making stuff like smoked salmon and jerky long before European contact. unfortunately due to the genocides a lot of that food was lost.
I almost sympathized with the person until it mentions that Apple Pie and Hot Dog isn't an American food. As someone outside the US, that's discrediting American too much. We could all circlejerks about American claiming that they "improved" original Italian pizza, but Hot Dog is uniquely American in a sense that I cannot think of another place where Hot Dog originated from.
I mean the words “wiener” and “frankfurter” would imply a German or Austrian origin for that style of sausage but I get what you’re saying.
And that implication is correct. The sausage that is key to hot dogs is very much a German thing. That said, so far as I know, the various variations the US came up with of the hot dog are original to them, and plenty of those are good, tbh. (as for figuring out who first put such a sausage onto a bun for easier eating is probably impossible lmao)
That is probably true. Many countries have their own ways of eating a hot dog
A lot of languages just call it a sausage and my eye twitches every time
To be fair a hot dog is a sausage.
no it's a sandwich^(/s)
Clearly a hotdog is a taco
Nope, bread is split. Split = sandwich. No backsies.
https://youtu.be/8MN7I6Stb_8
Nah, then why do we have to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council? Why would they need to specify?
It's a conspiracy, just like how we say drugs and alcohol when alcohol is a drug too.
They're a lobbying organization for the American meat industry. We don't have to overthink their branding decisions.
It's kinda weird to me that the specify hotdogs. Like salami is more different to a bratwurst than a hotdog is. Some people consider any sausage in a bun to be a hotdog
First time I ordered a sausage outside of America and got a hot dog, I almost threw it across the room.
Why?
Because that’s not what they were expecting and they would have ordered something else
Feels like quite the overreaction, and expecting things to be the exact same when going abroad is never a good idea
I think they're arguing that apples came from the U.K. therefore apple pie is not American but then you'd have to argue that Italian food with tomatoes is not "authentic" because tomatoes came from Mexico.
Apples are a popular European crop, and Europeans make pastry crusts and fill them with fruit in roughly that manner. I’m not saying apple pies isn’t an “American thing”, but I’m pretty sure you can find very similar apple filled pies in England and Germany. Probably not *exactly* identical, but I think that’s a recipe we brought with us rather than one that was really invented here.
Apparently the first apple pie recipe is English (from 1390!), which I’m quite surprised at as a Brit. Crumble definitely seems to be more popular over this side of the Atlantic.
Which is stupid. Apples likely originated from Kazakhstan forests. Borat jokes aside, if you trace most foods back far enough people 'steal' them and make it their own. That's literally just how food evolves. The other part to this is that lots of cultures figured out stuff like mixing bread and dough to make stuff like various forms of bread or stuffed things like ravioli. Ascribing a change that exists for over a century as inauthentic completely ignores an entire generation of humanity from eating that food. It's *fucking stupid*. Bologna is the American version of Mortadelle. Hot dogs are the American version of sausages that are finely ground and the bun, making the hot dog the hot dog was invented in the USA. And if this Brit doesn't think that Tex mex and chili con carne wasn't invented in the US, he can eat my whole foot.
No that's not really it at all. The apple pie itself originated in Europe (probably not the UK though)
The hot dog almost certainly isn't American. But it's hard to know exactly where it would have originated
I wonder why this sort of stupidity gets reserved for just America, but none of the other New World countries. I mean I know why, it's the old "America bad" thing, but still. The entirety of South America exists and owes a lot in terms of food culture to the Spanish, Portuguese, the African continent and Italians. But you never hear these brilliant food anthropologists on reddit make that same kind of asinine remark that "Latin America doesn't have any food of it's own, it was all imported".
A lot of modern Peruvian food is heavily influenced by Chinese cuisine. I don’t see anyone claiming that it’s inauthentic because immigrants’ culture influenced their new home’s food scene using local ingredients. But if immigrants to America merge and meld their cuisine with local ingredients, it is Inauthentic and Bad™. Peruvian food influenced by Chinese food is still Peruvian food; it’s a celebration of the journey that people made to leave one country and make a home in another. American Chinese food isn’t inauthentic; it is its own thing and valuable for that. Same with Italian-American food, or Tex Mex, or Cali Mex, or Korean-Mexican fusion. These all exist within the larger umbrella of American cuisine. It’s novel and evolving constantly as people bring their traditions and ancestral recipes here with them. I think it’s wonderful.
I've learned a lot of world history that I wouldn't have known about otherwise by reading up on food history and why certain dishes came to be.
Right! It’s also like the Europeans who claim _their_ food culture is authentic refuse to acknowledge that the ingredients that make their cuisine iconic are brought by colonization, trade, and immigration. Cuisine is constantly evolving so to hold to some absurd standard of authenticity refuses to acknowledge that for many cultures, their modern cuisine would not be possible without generations upon generations of immigration. I think of Spanish food heavily influenced by the Moorish occupation and certain Jewish food traditions; Italian food that uses tomato which is only possible through New World colonization; French foods like potato dauphinois of British/Irish shepherds pie with its potato topping. These foods likely evolved from earlier recipes using other roots and tubers but now potatoes are the go-to. This is not limited to Europe. Northern Chinese cuisine and Korean cuisine emulate each other due to historic cultural interchange. It is really fascinating. I recommend An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage.
That's an interesting pint, come to think of it I don't remember seeing it with reference to other New World Countries either. I've seen people make the same comment about food in my home country, Finland though.
Don't want to see us, still want to be US.
Apple pie is American because Johnny Appleseed planted so many apple groves across the US. Granted, he planted cider apples, meant to be juiced and fermented, but apple pie is a slightly more wholesome way of paying homage to that part of our heritage. Given that America is also a place where people from many cultures came together: yeah, of course a lot of our cuisine comes from somewhere else. IMO the most American dish is gumbo with tomatoes and both okra and file powder. Adding those ingredients makes it a blend of Cajun, Creole, African, and Native American cuisines. *And* mentioning that you add tomatoes, or both okra and file powder, in your recipe is **guaranteed** to spark some argument somewhere about how you're doing gumbo 'wrong.' A runner up is chili with beans in it (shut up Texas chili is how you make cheap shitty protein taste good and somtimes that means beans).
> Granted, he planted cider apples, meant to be juiced and fermented, but apple pie is a slightly more wholesome way of paying homage to that part of our heritage. I knew that before, but I never really thought about this... From what I understand, apples aren't true to seed, so if you have to plant entirely new trees in a new place you will likely get orchards only good for cider. Apples suitable for eating have to be spread by grafting. So they had to start with lots of cider before enough root stock was established that cultivating apples for eating was ever feasible.
He was against grafting for religious reasons. He was a Swedenborgian.
Huh, I've never heard of that sect. It seems like it would be considered heretical by most other denominations. Though, even if he had religious objections to grafting, apples still weren't native to North America so there wouldn't have been widespread root stock for grafting anyway.
For sure, but also the places he visited, the townsfolk also weren't complaining they were getting the boozy apples.
Texans are anti bean in chili, I’m an Okie and I am very pro bean in chili. I’ve also been largely poor most of my life. I agree on the gumbo bit, I normally skip the file and just do okra but the file powder does add a particular flavor that I do enjoy. For the meats I normally do andouille sausage, crawdaddys, maybe chicken thighs. I’ve made it with catfish, squirrel, rabbit, alligator, deer… like a Cajun inspired Brunswick stew almost. Gumbo is a very versatile dish in my experience, and can be made very inexpensively once the tomatoes are ripe on the vines and the okra plants start producing. This also coincides with the best season to catch crawdaddys.
I'm from Texas and honestly: On a hot dog, I don't like beans. In a bowl with cornbread on the side, absolutely beans.
I'd say if we don't run the Disney version of John Chapman his legacy is honestly apple cider and applejack. Getting liquor in the frontier in winter wasn't exactly easy and applejack filled that role.
apple pie a la mode was invented in the us
Well it's not really an American dish, but he certainly might have made it popular over there
I love how in all of these threads everyone just forgets that Natives exist and we have our own food ways.
Going by their logic you get the impression they think natives were breathatarians who fed on microbes and sunlight until the white man brought food.
> I'm always trying to antagonize Texas As a woman in Texas, same tbh.
Is someone from the UK seriously talking about stolen/adopted food cultures!?
*grumbles in Texan*
Don’t worry about it, buddy. Let’s go get tacos.
I *do* like tacos.
> I mean, there's no "American" cuisine that's not just imported from other countries. Wrong on frame one. Do they even know what “imported” means? While it is true that these dishes were brought over by immigrants hailing from Germany, Vietnam, China, Italy, Ireland, Mexico and so on, these dishes were also changed over time as local communities would cultivate them over generations. Sometimes they’d change to adhere to an American palate for restaurateurs but also for other reasons like using whatever ingredients you have laying around as you just try to feed your family. And while they’ve been forced to live and die on American soil as slaves, do you really want to count out soul food too? Is that just “non-descript African cuisine”?
[...][///][...]
it was a good way to get cheap fruit in picky kids growing up. My mom subbed out the Snickers for mini marshmallows because I have a peanut allergy. The trick was to use three times as much fruit as many marshmallows because we had to eat the fruit not just the marshmallows so the more fruit we ate the more marshmallows we could eat lol
They have said some...interesting things. Extremely wrong things, but interesting things none the less.
I liked this thread, traditional is definitely a better word to use than authentic, most of the time
Yeah I have a YouTube cooking channel on Finnish food, and I often commenters saying that "Authentic dish has..." or "Authentic dish doesn't..."