I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. I would have been if the food wasn’t good, but that would be true even if it were exactly what I expected.
OK, how about I just change that sentence to “a Scotch bonnet”, instead?
Authentic Vindaloo isn’t very spicy. It’s a stew made with pickled pork, garlic and wine. The modern Goan version is spicy, but specifies using mild Kasmiri chilis. The Vindaloo served in 99% of Indian restaurants is a bastardised version of generic curry with extra potatoes and chili added. What your cafeteria served probably bore no relation to either.
Nope, that’s the sauce for patatas bravas, they’re patatas bravas because they have salsa brava.
ETA: actually, I’d be happier with “tomato sauce with tons of paprika” than with the “bottle mayo + ketchup” used in many locations. The “tomato with paprika” version is hot (so, true to the spirit of the invention), the mayo with ketchup one is not.
Ignorance fought - thanks.
You’ve clearly been to our cafeteria! 
And what’s the phrase for a foreign word that sounds like an English one, but means something different? Aloo means potato in Hindi, but the Aloo in Vindaloo is a corruption of “alhos” which is Portugese for garlic.
No, it’s fine if you’re on board with it. I’m just saying that if you go to the restaurant and the menu reads “Beef stroganoff” and you order it, and you get beef carpaccio with a dollop of sour cream on the side and a bowl of pho, it might taste wonderful but unless it’s a famous restaurant with a famous chef, he’s going to be out of business real fast because people who order beef stroganoff are going to expect the traditional recipe. (I might even order that if it were described properly on the menu!)
It is typical of American cuisine to blandify anything it comes in contact with. Take cheese, for instance. American cheese – the cheese that, at its very best, has no flavor whatsoever* – is the most popular cheese in the US. Most Swiss cheeses made in the US (e.g., Bordens) have no Swiss flavor, either; it’s basically American cheese with holes in it.** The best-selling cheddars are also flavorless (luckily, you can find something like Cabot’s that has some real character to it).
Then there’s bagels. A true bagel is dense, with a thick crust that comes from boiling. If it doesn’t crunch when you bit into it (when fresh), it’s not a bagel. If you can squeeze it and it acts like a pillow, it’s not a bagel. Yet that’s what people buy.
Croissants. A croissant is light and flaky, with thin crunchy layers of bread and filled with butter. When you bit into it, it should crunch. American croissants might have a slightly crunchy crust, but not the through-and-through flakiness. I won’t even get into crescent rolls.
French bread is far more flavorful than a baguette in the US, with a real character to each bite. Might be the olive oil, or the yeast, but a quarter French baguette and some cheese is a satisfying meal, while the US version is an appetizer.
One reason why Americans are fat and the French are thin (despite the richness of their food) is because the French prepare their food to have the most flavor they can get out of it, while Americans prepare their food to drain all flavor and character from it.
*At its worst, it tastes of the oil and chemicals. The very existence of Cheez Whiz says volumes about the blandness of American flavors.
**Though at least it doesn’t taste of oil and chemicals.
Philly’s Best is to Cheeseteaks what Boone’s Farm is to Wine.
It’s like ordering the same Cobb Salad without Bleu Cheese and being told that it doesn’t come with it.
Then I would have to say to you that you have never really had American cheese. Sure, it’s different than sharp cheddar, but to say it’s flavorless is just silly. It has a very rich flavor.
Not according to the International Dairy Foods Association: “By far the two most popular single varieties of cheese in the United States are mozzarella (10.7 pound per capita) and cheddar (10 pounds per capita).” (2007)
But I do agree with your main point that cheeses do receive a good amount of blandification in America.
That’s because strong flavored cheese is not conducive to eating it in one pound servings.
I’ve had all sorts of American. It has no flavor at all – at best, you can detect the taste of milk. Bland. It’s main advantage is that if you add it to a sandwich, it doesn’t add or subtract to the taste of the other ingredients.
Compare it to Emmenthaler, Cabot Cheddar, Finnish Swiss, grueyere, Armenian String cheese, camembert, Brie, Havarti, or any other cheese. That’s flavor.
Hell, even American cream cheese is a blander version of Neufchatel.
Americans just don’t like flavorful food. There is a small exception for hot sauce, where they go overboard, but that’s more a macho thing than trying to make things taste good.
Could not disagree with you more - we have, over the past 20 years or so as a country, emerged from a period - mainly the 50’s through the 70’s where we were so enamored of the American Ingenuity of Mass Production™ that we valued the techie-wow of large-scale Big Food over the humble nature of local food.
With the emergence of the locavore, slow food movements, Fast Food Nation and the explosion of artisanal food products, we are reeducating our palates for a broader array of tastes and re-embracing the tastiness that is Food, in the Michael Pollan definition of the word…
…large swaths of America are getting past our fascination with Wonder Bread and Tang.
Wow. Couldn’t disagree with you more. American cheese has a very distinctive flavor. I like all kinds of cheese, as far as the level of taste in American, it is similar to Havarti. Like I said. You must not have had real American cheese (are you talking about that pre-wrapped stuff?). It is simply a mild soft cheddar. Don’t understand how you can posibly say it has no flavor at all.
I’m not a huge fan of American, but to say it has “no flavor whatsoever” means your tastebuds are so deadened that you need something with the umami dialed up to 11 to register on your palate, it seems. A good American cheese tastes like a very mild cheddar. It has a decent flavor, but it’s not usually what I reach for when I’m having a cheese hankering. That said, there’s plenty of room on the market for the more subtle cheeses. I could think of egregious violations of flavorless cheese (most mass-market mozzarella, both the hard pizza-topping kind and some of the fresh varieties tend to be bad in this regard), but the better brands of American cheese are not the ones.
I disagree. It’s a different cheese that serves different purposes. Neufchatel is aged with a slight bit of funk. Cream cheese is not aged at all and has a fresh, slightly sour bite to it. They’re not comparable cheeses at all, even though cream cheese originated as Neufchatel gone wrong. This is neufchatel. You wouldn’t use that, for instance, in making American cheesecake. It’s more like a Camembert.
Agreed. It’s like sneering at sour cream because it’s not creme fraiche.
While I agree that “Pizza Mozzarella” is a better example of bland-to-the-point-of-banality cheese than “good” American, one of the troubling things about eating out in the U.S. is that American cheese is frequently used in contexts where people from away would generally expect something with a little more character.
The first time I ever heard of American, it was in the context of a cheese omelette. I asked the server what kind of cheese they used. “American.” “Yes, but what kind?” “It’s just American cheese.” When it finally dawned on me that this was an actual type of cheese and that it wasn’t merely a declaration of origin, I tried to extract a little information about its qualities. “I don’t know, it’s just… American. It tastes like… American.”
After my introduction, I understood why she was at a loss to describe it. There’s not much there in the way of flavour. It’s certainly not a good choice for a cheese omelette, because all it added to it was a slightly unpleasant texture. Blaaaaaand.
“Quality” American cheese seems to me to be sort of like an anemic version of Colby, which is already usually passed over as “too mild to bother with.”
Are you kidding? It’s an essential part of the Plastic Sandwich - Wonder bread, Miracle Whip, baloney, and a slice of American cheese (take the plastic off if you want).
You can’t tell me that the Plastic Sandwich doesn’t have flavor.
You could say that it doesn’t have good flavor.