All technology is US technology. Except for tulips, which were invented in Belgium or something.
American expat in Australia here. As it happens, I’m in America with my wife visiting my family for Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is, as mentioned, not a thing in Australia. If nothing else, it’s the wrong time of year - it’s late spring in Australia, not late autumn, and it all feels wrong.
Turkey’s available in Aus - it’s a bit less common, but not unusual.
My wife was introduced to pumpkin pie in American, and has become quite fond of it; pumpkin pie filling is not available in Australia, unfortunately, unless you make it from scratch. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed cranberries in Aus, much less the canned cranberry sauce (the jellylike stuff).
I’ve mentioned this thread to my wife, and she can give her two cents if she’s so inclined.
Americans think everything was invented in America. Actually, only the cotton gin is an American invention. Radio, automobile, photography, ball point pens, all invented outside the USA
According to Wiki:
Apple pie was brought to the colonies by the British, Dutch, and Swedes during the 17th and 18th centuries.
American in Taiwan now. In the 27 years or so that I’ve lived in Asia, I’ve only had Thanksgiving once at a friend’s place.
Many or most Japanese don’t have ovens, and not many Taiwanese do either.
Japanese tend to have “oven toasters” which work ok only for the latter.
Turkeys are generally order-only although Costco sells them.
I think you’ve got this backwards—I found turkey to be much less common in the USA than in many other places I’ve visited. In my experience, most Americans eat turkey at Thanksgiving, and maybe also at Christmas, but with the exception of deli meats, it’s eaten very rarely (if at all) outside those holidays. By contrast, turkey is cooked and served at all times of the year in much of Europe. As the aptly named pulykamell (“turkey breast” in Hungarian) notes, it’s ubiquitous in Hungary. (I never ate so much turkey in my life as when I lived in Hungary! It’s on the menu of practically every restaurant and cafeteria.) It’s slightly less popular in German-speaking Europe but still much easier to find than in North America. Whole birds (usually frozen, but sometimes fresh) are always available in supermarkets in the autumn and winter. Fresh turkey parts are available year-round. Turkey schnitzel is a common dish in restaurants and cafeterias.
Making the rest of a Thanksgiving dinner isn’t too hard in Germany if you don’t mind making things from scratch. You can forget about canned cranberry sauce, boxed stuffing mix, canned pumpkin pie filling, and prefabricated pie crusts. (These things may be available in some American specialty shops, or in the international section of larger supermarkets, but you can’t really count on their availability, and the prices may be astronomical.) But fresh or frozen cranberries (or lingonberries, which are pretty close) and pumpkins (or other squash varieties) are commonly sold here. Ditto for all the ingredients for stuffing and pie crusts.
actually I’m told in most of asia a good oven has to be imported because baking isn’t a big thing in Asian cultures or if they do its mainly savory types of things
Gosh, what is this “pie” thing you speak of, Bwana?
In Spanish some people have taken to calling them pái (transliteration of pie) when they’re round, as our traditional versions came in other shapes. Some versions are pan-fried instead of cooked in an oven.
Some of the materials would be more complicated to find in Southern Europe than in Central and Northern Europe, but nowadays many supermarkets include some sort of “foods of the world” section which will include any Thanksgiving materials that aren’t normally eaten locally. For fresh pumpkin or cranberries, go to the veggies section. And yeah, turkey is available year-round.
Woops, didnt mean to offend anyone on this.
Its just that when I think of foreign countries like say Denmark or France when I think sweets and deserts I think like cake or rolls or cookies or other things but not so much an american apple, cherry, pecan, or pumpkin pie. Yeah I’ve hardly ever been outside the USA.
But its also interesting to see how the worlds diet is changing.
Thats true in the USA we rarely eat turkey outside the holidays except like you say as a deli meat.
No problem getting frozen turkey in the Cayman Islands. We have a large expat population and the grocers stock up in time for Canadian Thanksgiving and keep a decent stock through Christmas. And this is all for the expats as the traditional Caymanian Christmas meal is beef, which was quite the luxury in earlier days.
Pumpkin is a staple to certain Caribbean recipes so is stocked fresh whenever it is available, not just for the holidays. Canned pumpkin pie filling, cranberries and a few other assorted sides are stocked just for the holidays.
Pie, as a sweet dessert, is not a traditional Cayman dish but again the expat community is enough to support the local groceries baking some year round. But Jamaican style patties, a sort of empanada with spicy savory fillings, are a regular breakfast item year round.
Despite the mocking that others gave you, pie is actually not terribly common across the world (before modern times). French doesn’t even have a word for it, not seeing it as a different thing from a tart.
Dumplings and turnovers, on the other hand, were pretty common across Eurasia, at least. I don’t know about Africa or the Americas, before the Europeans came.
In a sense, these are all the same thing. You’ve got some cooked filling that you’re enclosing in a pastry. If the pastry is soft, then you eat it. If it hardens (or, more likely, is made to be hard), then it’s just a wrapper, to keep the contents fresh. Effectively, it’s an early canning process. Cook the innards and protect with a solid container.
But, a pie isn’t a very good form of this. If you make a small thing wrapped in pastry, then you can carry it with you. If you want to make a large batch of something and seal it, a tall and narrow container with a small pastry top is a lot better, for preservation, than a wide and shallow thing - let alone once you start cutting holes in the top of the crust.
So a pie takes the preservation technology and adapts it for flavor (you can actually eat the crust) and presentation rather than preservation. I don’t know why that transition took place at all (capitalism, perhaps? Little shops trying to sell pastries to city-folk), but it’s not too surprising that it wasn’t a popular avenue, before the invention of the refrigerator.
I live in Israel.
Turkeys are available, if ordered ahead of time. Some of the Americans “do” Thanksgiving, some don’t. AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) in my city had a big dinner, including the whole Thanksgiving shebang. I didn’t go - I don’t feel any particular need to celebrate. It’s a regular work day. I watched some football in the evening.
On the other hand, the handful of times I was in the states during this time of year, I went to friends and ate turkey.
I do find it hysterically funny that there are Black Friday sales here.
You should realise recipes for pumpkin pie appear in English recipe books more than a century before they appear in American ones, even though the pumpkin is a New World squash. And fruit pies predate American settlement by quite a bit. These things are no more American than they are European.
Also, note that a lot of what in America might be called “pie” is called “tart” elsewhere. In general, it needs a starchy cover (pastry, mash) to be a pie, otherwise it’s a tart. Or a flan.
I have several Medieval cookbooks, both Western and Islamic, that say different.
Actually, the tourte/tarte distinction is quite clear.
American expat in Ireland. Last Thursday, I did what I’ve done all but one of the last twelve years since I’ve been here. I took myself out to dinner (this year: French onion soup, 9 oz. prime fillet steak, and lovely bread pudding with hot custard) at a good, local restaurant, had a delicious meal, then went home and watched some NFL action. I can’t say it’s typical of other American expats here, but then, my friends here aren’t American.
I’d say a lot of Irish people here are vaguely aware of the existence of Thanksgiving (one of my Irish friends was kind enough to text me a “Happy Thanksgiving!”), but no one really cares or understands the turkey or pumpkin pie connections. As is my understanding of things in the UK, Xmas is the big holiday here, and there’s a tradition of having both turkey and ham (with plenty of fixings) on that day. Then going shopping or to the pub on the day after, St. Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day in the UK).
That jibes with what my friend, who has a lot of family in the Philippines claims; virtually none of the locals celebrates Thanksgiving unless they grew up in the U.S. or work for an American company.
The most challenging Thanksgivings were in Africa. In Mali, turkeys roamed freely in the city of Bamako, eating garbage and who knows what. Some friends had us over for the day and roasted one of those things; it was pretty awful, as there wasn’t much meat on it and a surprising amount of fat, and the flavor was. . .unique. The second year we were there, I was able to travel back to WDC for some training, bought a cooler and a frozen turkey, and brought it back on the plane with me. I ended up paying $325 in extra weight charges, so that was a very expensive meal.
Dude, I don’t know about pecan and pumpkin, but the other two traveled from Europe to the US. You don’t need to have traveled outside the country to know apples are an import, isn’t there some popular tale or other about it?
There’s a (historical) figure in American folklore named Johnny Appleseed (real name John Chapman) who’s credited with spreading apples across the continent, but he didn’t bring them here from Europe. I’ve never heard any particular story about that.
And while apple pie might have originated elsewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s as common as it is in America.