Over here: Hamburgers and hot dogs are considered “American” - Hamburgers because they are sold by McKotz*, and hot dogs because they are not common (Though IKEA has them).
*McPuke
Colibri, that’s not clarifying “traditional,” that’s clarifying the boundaries of the group whose traditions you’re talking about (the “folk group,” “subculture,” “ethnicity,” “culture,” or whosever term you want to use). Pizza and hamburgers are unarguably traditional in that they’ve been prepared for generations. You’re also bringing up the emic vs. etic point of view: do people within the tradition (emic) see these as their traditional cuisine? That’s a different question from whether they are objectively traditional.
Within the study of tradition, you’ve got “high culture” tradition, highly esteemed and valued within a society and usually supported and maintained by the elite. (Fine restaurant dining, for example.) I often find people are reluctant to accept high-culture traditions as traditional, on the somewhat shaky logic that educated people can’t have traditions.
You also have mass culture, spread through the mass media. Burgers and pizzas are definitely found here. People sometimes don’t like to see mass culture as traditional because it’s not very old and doesn’t seem authentic.
Then you have “low” or “folk culture,” the informal level—people making pizza and burgers at home, perhaps in imitation of mass culture and perhaps not.
What I am trying to clarify is in what sense the OP means it.
Like Dr. Drake, I don’t see why the range of living memory should be considered to have anything to do with it.
I’d also argue that a food tradition includes not only those dishes that are currently in wide consumption, but the whole cultural context which resulted in a given set of dishes being in wide consumption.
Every dish you can point to as representative of a traditional cuisine now was invented or introduced at some time in the past–at which time there was an existing, active tradition which “chose” to embrace and develop it. No recipe is an island.
Well well, learn something every day. I’ve probably eaten this but never heard of it and had to Google. I do get confused on the bean front but apparently this dish uses runner beans. Being somewhat of a caveman on the culinary scale I’ll ask my wife to give it a try.
I don’t think pizza is traditional American food anymore than green bean casserole is. Most Americans in the 1950’s had never eaten pizza. It didn’t become a standard fast food item until the mid-1960’s. I clearly remember that when I entered college in 1970, I had never either been to a pizza place nor ordered a pizza delivered. This is my definition of traditional cuisine and I’m sticking to it.
This seems reasonable. It also clearly differentiates pizza from hot dogs and hamburgers, both of which were current in American cuisine by the 1920s if not earlier.
Also, purely from my own perspective, pizza is still Italian food. It still has an ethnicity distinct from just being American, much like how chop suey is still thought of as Chinese food. Hot dogs and hamburgers have been deracinated from their Germanic origin and are seen as purely, traditionally American food. This is likely related to how Italian restaurants are one or two to a town once you get above a minimum size but the last time I saw a German restaurant in this country was near St. Louis.
So two staples of traditional American cuisine are about a century old but are certainly younger than the end of the Civil War. That still makes them ancient compared to green bean casserole. (I’m still amazed at how young that is.)
The Thai peanut sauce that everyone raves about is actually an import from Malaysia and Indonesia. Maybe within the past century.
Same here. (And Chinese food, too. Mexican came many years later.) The wonderful tv series Remember WENN, set just before WWII in Pittsburgh, had an episode where one of the staffers at the radio station brought in this new thing called pizza he found at an ethnic deli. People were awed and amazed.
It’s not just that ethnic foods we find ubiquitous today were rare outside of the big cities - and only in the Little Italys and Chinatowns there - but ethnic food was all-but-officially frowned upon and suppressed throughout the country.
After the food chemists had finally figured out that foods were made of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates - but still didn’t know about vitamins - there were campaigns to teach middle class households how to cook “efficiently” alongside campaigns to teach poor, i.e. ethnic, households how to make the best use of cheap meats. (Because obviously they knew nothing about food. Even more stupidly, they would spend money on tenderloin just because it tasted good.) But the foods they taught were of the sort propagated by the Boston Cooking School, and featuring boiled, bland New England dinners. (Fanny Farmer eventually took the school over and it folded when she left to start a school under her own name.)
The best science of the day taught that mixing foods together made them harder to digest, unless they were a special few foods. All the hearty ethnic dishes like stews, casseroles, and goulashes were banned from government handouts - a major source of advice in those days - and ignored by all the cooking schools. You could feed a family of six for 28 cents with three pounds of beef heart, after all, and throw in lots of potatoes and onions. No tomatoes, though; those were bad for you. Food for the middle class was literally white, covered with the bland flour and water white sauce. This is where all those incredible and incredibly awful sounding recipes that required adding both mayonnaise and whipped cream to a salad came from. One pork and bean company put out a recipe that added whipped cream to make their bean salad.
Ethnic food as we know it today stirs a few tendrils in the 50s, starts growing in big cities in the 60s, and reached the sticks in the 70s. But ethnic traditions certainly go back centuries in Europe and maybe thousands of years in Asia.
Tomato sauce isn’t even necessary in Italy for Pizza, unless the place I ordered a “Four-cheese Pizza” was just screwing with the American tourist when they gave me some baked pizza dough with 4 kinds of melted cheeses on it. It tasted great, although obviously a bit different from what I may have expected. The menu for most of the pizzas (what I could make out, although the menu may have been in English, French, Spanish and Italian) listed sauces on some but not on all of them, so I think tomato sauce is as optional for pizza as it is for spaghetti - even though most Americans probably think it isn’t.
I had to reference the Wikipedia article just to learn that chop suey, indeed is Chinese in origin (and not American as I’d believed).
I tend to think of pizza as very American, though, but I go out of my way to avoid that Italian style cracker-like crust stuff that I’d get at an Italian restaurant.
I’m a little bemused by the people stating pizza is Italian. I realize its Italian roots are still well-known, but the stuff sold at Pizza Hut is no more similar to a traditional pizza than a McDouble is to a traditional burger. Pizza’s not even a typical Italian restaurant food, is it?