For a long time Facebook’s algorithm kept recommending posts from a page called “White People Making White People Food” (Yes, I still scroll through Facebook from time to time). From what I could tell the page was run by a Louisiana native who had relocated to the Midwest and was posting pictures of all the bland Midwestern food he encountered, and was incredulous that people from there actually seemed to think this food was good. Of course, being on social media I suspect a good bit of this was just “engagement bait” – write a post criticizing some beloved regional dish and you’re guaranteed to get flooded with comments defending that dish.
From what I’ve read, it was something that predated Mexico as its own nation even, and was actually derived from the original settlers to San Antonio, who were from the Canary Islands in the 1730s, and cooked with a lot of dried cumin, which wasn’t really a Spanish thing at the time. Combine that with native use of chiles, and make a stew, and you’re most of the way to chili.
It’s one of those oddities that’s basically wholly Mexican and wholly American at the same time, and can be legitimately claimed by both.
I really think there are three things going on here.
One, traditional European cuisines had a different set of herbs and spices that were used, and they were primarily ones that were either locally grown, or could be dried and imported. So stuff like black pepper, bay leaves, parsley, thyme, rosemary, savory, oregano/marjoram, onions, garlic, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, mace and that sort of thing were common. And while I’m not an ethnobotanist or foodways researcher or anything like that, it does seem like the further north you go, the less intense the use of herbs and spices gets. Most likely due to both more difficulty and expense in importing spices, and less friendly conditions for growing their own. Meanwhile, in other nations in southern Europe like Hungary and Spain, chiles became part of the national cuisine. And it seems that there must be something to the whole “hot and spicy food is good in hot climates” thing, because even the Acadians who ended up in Louisiana have incorporated a lot of heat and spice in their cuisines (Cajun & Creole) that wasn’t there in the original French.
So when these people immigrated to the US, they brought their ethnic foods with them. Cuisines hybridize as they’re in contact with others; somewhere like Texas has multiple cuisines in contact with it - Mexico, the Midwest, Louisiana, German immigrants, Czech immigrants, Vietnamese immigrants, and Southern.. So we end up with food that is often multi-influenced. Stuff like boudin kolaches, Vietnamese crawfish, Tex-Mex, and more. Which, not surprisingly is exactly what happened in Louisiana as well, with native, African, Spanish, Mexican, etc… influence.
But in the Midwest, it’s basically a bunch of northern European cuisines interacting. German immigrants with Scandinavian immigrants. And everyone with other American immigrants from elsewhere in the East. So while stuff recombines, there’s not really anything new, and the cuisine stays rather bland.
Two, there’s also that sort of in-group identity that comes with eating a certain way combined with the people with the spicy food being the minorities/out-groups. For example, there’s a style of tamale that’s distinct and originated in the “Delta”, which is a region of Arkansas and Mississippi where Black people interacted with Mexican migrant farm workers and put their own spin on the tamale. Something tells me that there wasn’t too much cross-pollination between Mexican migrant farm workers and the middle/upper class White society of the era. So bland food sort of gained a sort of cultural inertia due to being what ‘we’ eat to a lot of people, and it likely excluded all sorts of ethnic foods in all sorts of places.
I’ve seen them on menus more recently, but I made them back about 50 years ago for a work potluck.
My mom was more adventurous than my dad (a real meat-and-potatoes guy), and she had a lot of spices, but she didn’t go too far. As soon as we kids had enough money to pay for our own meals we ate at all the places our parents would have hated. It’s really a good thing to grow up where nearly every ethnic cuisine is available locally.
“This was after stew, but then, everything is after stew. When the first man crawled out of the first muck on the first day, what he had for dinner that first evening was stew.”
Considering the many influences to which it was exposed, I’m not sure I’d consider Southern (ex-Confederacy) dishes to be “bland” or strictly “White people” food either. The wide use of game, pork, corn, rice, greens, legumes like black-eyed peas, and other indigenous products make up a tasty menu going back to plantation days.
I, for one, would love a plate full of ham with red-eye gravy, cheesy grits, and buttered lima beans right now, accompanied by freshly-baked biscuits, some peach cobbler, and a pitcher of sweet iced tea.
Indeed, I still remember the first time I ever had a taco. I was a teenager visiting California from Montreal, in 1977. I thought it was delicious and exotic. In hindsight I don’t think it was anything special. I think it was from Taco Bell.
The corridor from New England west to the northern Great Plains held about two-thirds of all Americans until the big shift to the South AAC (After Air Conditioning). The South, Southwest, and West were alien nations full of people with weird accents and not much more to offer. What they did with their weird selves weren’t no concern to no one.
Around that time, the first tacos some of us had were homemade with a spice packet, hard corn shells and a jar of taco sauce, all purchased from the supermarket and usually either Ortega or Old El Paso brand.
I’m sure my German grandmother didn’t spice them enough (her favorite spice was bacon), and she would have gotten them from the Ortega aisle too, but she probably was one of the early adopters of tacos among white people. Among her many virtues were that she was willing to try, and subsequently to make, nearly any food she encountered. And aside from the lack of spices, she was a very good cook (no overcooked grey glop vegetables, at her house).
I actually had the opposite experience. I grew up in Texas, and my mother’s family while originally from Illinois, had lived in SW New Mexico for a while.
So I grew up eating various sorts of Tex-Mex and home-cooked New-Mex (I suppose that’s what you’d call it?) for my entire life. Things like home-fried taco shells were common.
Then I got to college and met people from elsewhere (like Iowa) who’d never eaten a tamale, and were suspicious of things like enchiladas and pretty much anything that wasn’t fajitas and on the menu at fast-food taco places like Taco Bell (I think Taco John’s was one?).
I was entirely astounded. I assumed everyone ate this sort of thing. Not necessarily as staple foods that were made at-home, but I figured that when they went out to eat, they got the usual Mexican-style and Chinese food that we got. I did realize that pho’ wasn’t so common, but it took me a decade before I realized that eating it while in high school in the 80s and early 90s in Houston (I grew up in Alief, for any Houstonians out there) was extremely unusual relative to the rest of the nation.
I had some guy from NYC pronounce burrito as “burr-it-to”.
Soul Food is generally regarded as a subset of Southern food in general, so there’s a lot of crossover. Certainly a lot of what my (Caucasian) Southern mother-in-law cooks wouldn’t be at all out of place on the dinner table of a Black Southern woman her age.
I suppose the idea of white people food being bland confused me a bit because I never considered what I grew up eating as bland (for the most part). But then who would, right? When I see stereotypes of white people not seasoning their food it just confuses me.
Of course, well-to-do Southerners were mostly still eating food prepared by black people.
When people go on so much about being proud of “Southern heritage”, and “preserving our culture”, and so on, they really should be talking about cuisine, because for all of the South’s other (many) faults, they’ve got some really great food. That’s something that all Southerners can be proud of.
At first, I found it amusing that macaroni and cheese (perhaps the blandest food I can think of) habitually graces Thanksgiving tables among both Blacks and Whites in the South. Now I suspect this is largely due to the influence of Thomas Jefferson, who actively promoted the dish (and pasta in general) after sampling it in Europe.
Heheh, yeah, threads like this make me happy I grew up in Texas. My brother and I both taunt each other with pictures when we make “mom tacos”. Both of us wish we were having the other’s dinner when we do that. Home fried tortillas are worth extra points, mom would often offer both home fried and factory made.
Nachos with jalapenos, beans and spiced ground beef were a Sunday staple. Sometimes with cheddar, but often with the peppered Velveeta. Best thing to accompany Battlestar Galactica.
The chili I grew up with was my aunt Anita’s recipe. It’s much like the one cited by @terentii up thread, but it called for an entire box of Gebhadrt’s chili powder instead of part of it, and at least three dried cayenne pepper pods. It was delicious, and very hot. I’ve come close to recreating it/improving it with different re-hydrated chilies and spices. It’s thicker and richer that way, but it’s still basically the same chili.
All of that said, I was still subjected to the blandness of things such as tater tot casserole. My mom had grown up in Texas, but she still had access to things like Better Homes and Gardens. Some of the worst gastronomical atrocities she wielded could be traced back to a clipping from a magazine.
So, I blame the housekeeping publishing industry in the US between the 1950s-1980s. Dang. those folks put out some awful recipes.
Aspic is probably bigger right now than it’s been in decades because of the recent food fad of xiaolongbao (I.e. Chinese steamed soup dumplings). They’re filled with meat and a slice of aspic that melts during cooking so that, when you bite in, you get a gush of soup in your mouth. Here in WA we’ve got at LEAST two chains that have sprung up in the last decade that specialize in them.
Part of the reason is that before refrigeration and germ theory, people had to find ways to kill microbes in food even though they didn’t know what microbes were.
In European nations they used things like salting or smoking food. But in a lot of other parts of the world they used spices because various spice kills microbes.
It’s called “catering to the masses,” or “appealing to the lowest common denominator.”
Actually, the average family coming out of (a) the Depression and (b) World War II was probably eager to give some of those new recipes a try, along with foods that were previously unheard of or just unavailable.
British food in particular got an especially bad rap after wartime rationing produced dishes like parsnip and potato pie, and promoted whale meat as a substitute for beef, lamb, and mutton. If you’ve ever had traditional British cooking, you know it is quite delicious, thanks to the many fresh herbs, vegetables, and other ingredients it uses.
They also mask the taste of meat that’s gone bad. If you’ve ever eaten at a “Medieval banquet,” you know what I mean. I once had a serving of heavily spiced venison, and, while I’m pretty sure the meat itself had not spoiled, I was still belching sulfur fumes for the next two days.
Hell, I grew up in San Diego, and I have a vivid memory from my first restaurant job, circa 2001, of an elderly woman pronouncing “tortilla” as it it rhymed with “gorilla”.