Not only that, most modern Cajun food recipes only date back to the 1980’s when the early celebrity chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Justin Wilson popularized it and pushed it out to a mass audience. Most people outside of Louisiana had never even heard of, let alone had, Cajun food before then. Sure, Cajun food is a real cuisine with a long history and general unifying concepts but it was very family and community based for specific recipes.
I am from Louisiana and know a lot of Cajun families and I have some older traditional Cajun cookbooks. The basic ideas like making a proper roux are there in the older versions but a lot of the specifics are different today. For example, one of the most popular Cajun dishes in the 80’s was blackened Redfish (Paul Prudhomme made it so popular it threatened the whole species). I am not going to claim that no Cajun family ever made that dish but I have yet to meet one that had ever seen it before it became popularized. The spice blends used have been updated and refined as well. Early Cajun settlers didn’t have access to the number of spices available in even the most basic supermarket today let alone the custom blends for Cajun cooking so they used more basic ingredients.
Did you actually read that article or just skim it? Because it clearly states that pizza was brought to the US by Italian immigrants around 1900, not that it was invented in the US.
You just said two different things, neither of which contradict what I said. Italian immigrants didn’t literally deliver the same pizza they used to have from the old country. Pizza fundamentally just means flat bread with stuff on it and there is no clear origin because it is an obvious and very old idea implemented every from the Middle East to Greece and Italy to India. The Italians were the ones that combined cheese and tomato sauce to form what is unarguably a type of pizza before it was introduced to the U.S. and it is still widespread in parts of Italy today. However, Italian immigrants to America didn’t introduce that specific style to the U.S. when they started their first pizzerias in the early 20th century. They had to develop a new style based on the ingredients and preparation methods they had available. Several people developed a new, distinctly American style, of pizza that spun off to be the ubiquitous New York style you see worldwide today. Others that immigrated to Chicago created a completely new style that is barely recognizable as pizza (but still tasty).
The New York style of pizza remained relatively isolated within Northeastern Italian-American communities for a few decades until it became a national sensation in the 1950’s (i.e.; you could get something that resembled it in most large cities and even some larger towns across the country). That phenomenon eventually spread worldwide but the style that spread is much closer to the type that Italian immigrants developed after they got to New York than it is to its ancestor, Neapolitan pizza.
Thanks to the foodie movement, you can also find traditional Neapolitan pizza in the U.S. readily now as well but it isn’t the most common style. However, it is a mistake to think that today’s Neapolitan pizza is any less unchanged than the evolution of American pizza. The original Pizza Margherita, the most popular style of Neapolitan pizza, originally dates to 1889 but has also been updated constantly.
The evolution of pizza and its various branches are a good example of why this question is so arbitrary.
I showed my young students in China pictures of dishes from PF Chaing’s. They had no idea what that stuff was. Fortune cookies, either (as Duckster noted upthread).
You could make a case for turkey. They were originally raised for food in Aztec-era Mexico, but the whole oven roasting and stuffing thing might have been us gringos.
Potatoes are a New World crop. It’s heavily associated with Ireland as much as Idaho and probably originated in Mexico, but what could be more American then the good old spud?
To be honest I don’t see a huge difference between New York style and what was going on in Italy in the 19th century. Your mileage may vary.
However, you seem to be changing your argument from the previous post, which seemed to think tomatoes being a new world fruit was somehow important. I guess you did some background reading and found that tomatoes being used in Italy predated the US as a country.
yeah, I think way too many people overestimate how old a lot of cultures’ “traditional” dishes are. Tomatoes are a New World vegetable, yet somehow they’re strongly associated with Italy. You’ll even find them in “traditional” Indian dishes like chana masala, for God’s sake. then there are some Vietnamese foods; bánh mì is about as “traditionally” Vietnamese as I am.
I didn’t change my argument. I already knew that New World crops were exported back to Europe and elsewhere starting with Columbus’s voyages and became fairly widespread in the 16th century. My point was that you can easily push the “cultural appropriation” argument to absurdity and that is just an extreme example. What most people don’t realize is that it isn’t THAT absurd. The vast majority of so-called traditional dishes are quite new in their present state and ever-evolving with many lines of cross-pollination. That applies to the vast majority of countries, cultures and cuisine. For example, SPAM (the canned meat) is just as traditional today as poi and pineapples to Hawaiians because of WWII.
I would argue that any dish regularly prepared by Americans from base ingredients is American by definition and the same holds true for any other country. You can call that jar of Marmite British because it is a direct import but that lasagna recipe that was handed down by your American grandmother is authentic as any other.
You said chocolate twice. Is that because you really like chocolate?
Having played in the distant past with medieval cooking, your list is the way I think of dividing food. It was either available and being used in the time and area that you’re interested in or it wasn’t. It’s fascinating to watch how foods become available in different places and how methods get developed. But people always, in every time and every place ate what was available. It’s food.
Well, except when it’s distrusted. It took awhile to convince Europeans that tomatoes weren’t poisonous.
Frozen food was an American invention (Clarence Birdseye), though not exactly a style. Fruit juice, other than fresh-squeezed, is also American; it’s where electric refrigeration and the American Protestant temperance movement intersected. Frozen concentrated juice, which might also have been a Birdseye invention, could be dehydrated, frozen and transported cheaply and profitably on freezer cars on freight trains.
The Bloody Mary was probably invented in Paris, but there’s a charming myth that American comedian George Jessel asked his bartender, out of the blue, for a vodka and tomato juice. Bartender tweaked it with hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce and salt, and a stalk if celery, perfecting it.