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Much of American cooking, in terms of a universal cuisine, is actually French, German, Italian, Chinese, or food hearkening back to its original British roots.

Some say there's no national cuisine in America, just regional. Others counter, though, that no truly great food nation has a national food tradition -- Chinese, Italian and French cooking is actually all incredibly regional. Still others say that trying identify a national cuisine by focussing on regional differences is the wrong way to go: you can spend so long looking at the trees that you won't see the forest. You need, they say, to focus on the commonalities between the cooking in its various regions. Perhaps the core of such an American national "food" now is industrialized, commercialized food.

American cooks in general don't seem to catch on in the UK. It may be the "measurements" barrier, though UK cooks seem to be able to leap the barrier going the other way. Only a handful in people in Britain had ever heard of Julia Child.

Pizza is different as made in California, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

Ordinary Americans tended to downplay enjoying fine food -- some speculate because of a lingering Puritan ethic

Vinegar is used on fries in some parts of the north-west, and in random places such as Ocean City, Maryland, some parts of Pennsylvania such as Palmerton, at French fries in PNC Park in Pittsburgh (malt vinegar even), and in Maine. Americans, though, will have vinegar on their fries when they are at places serving English-style fish and chips, and salt and vinegar chips (aka crisps in the UK) are now available almost everywhere.

The results of 8th Annual Reader's Survey, conducted by Bon Appetit, an American food magazine, were released in March 2005. The five food items least popular with their readership, which is mostly American, were Squab, Jerky, Rice cakes, Cardoons, and Quail Eggs. Readers in the North Eastern states also hated lima beans; readers in the Western States hated brussel sprouts and ketchup, and readers in Southern States were more likely to serve cocktails before dinner, though they disliked soy sauce.


New Mexican Cooking uses a lot of hamburger. Chile sauce tends to be served on the side, or in some way that it is independent of the rest of the food being served.

Tex-Mex tends to use shredded beef instead of hamburger, and chile sauce tends to be an integral part of dishes.

The main vegetable crop in Texas is onions.

One source of American products in London is Panzer's in St John's Wood, in business since the 1950s http://www.panzers.co.uk


HOLIDAYS
There are actually no national holidays in the States. The President and Congress can only declare holidays for Washington, DC, and for federal employees.

The holidays are observed in all the states as well because the states have also declared these days holidays.

In 1995, special federal proclamations of special days was pretty much brought to a halt, as it had just become too time-consuming with everyone wanting their special cause to have a day.


DAIRY

Homogenized milk appears to have first been sold in the United States in 1919. It was offered by the Torrington Creamery of Torrington, Connecticut. But it really took off in 1932 when a William McDonald introduced it in Flint, Michigan.[1]

There was a large battle in America between butter and margarine. In the early 1940s, the administration of Iowa State University backed down to pressure from dairy farmers and had a research report commenting favourably on margarine withdrawn.

During the Second World War, ice cream was thought to be a wholesome, nutritious food, and so was declared an essential food and makers were allowed to keep on making it.

Milk delivery started dying by the end of the 1950s, as supermarkets appeared and people had cars to get to them.

Cheese from sheep's milk was not made commercially in America, it appears, until the late 1980s, when the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company in New York State began producing it.

Under FDA regulations, cheeses made from raw milk must be aged for a minimum of 60 days at a minimum temperature of 35 F (1.5 C)


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[1] Trout, G.M. Official Acceptance of Homogenized Milk in the United States. Department of Food Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Journal of Dairy Science Vol. 46 No. 4 342-345. 1963.

History
British food traditions remained the basis of American food for almost 200 years after the revolution. Everything else was just absorbed into it.

Up until the start of the 1900s, American food was based on tradition and American cooking had common national elements. By the start of the 1900s, American food was changed with industrialization, and mass immigration, and was fragmented by ethnicity, region and class. It became based on change, and on what's new, instead of tradition. The Women's Centennial Committee for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition surveyed women around the country for their recipes, and compiled the "National Cookery Book." Few of these recipes, though they came from the grassroots, were being made 100 years later.

From almost the beginning, American colonists had been better fed than those who had remained behind in the Old World. By the War of Independence, American soliders were taller than any of those from Europe. In the late 1700s, it's estimated that the average daily calorie intake in the newly independent colonies was 3,000 to 4,000 calories. But it was the "pre-leisure era", when people burned that off just doing everyday household chores. Early Americans only had fish rarely, preferring heavier foods to fill them up, such as meat. Pork was popular as pigs were cheap to raise, and game was plentiful. Most of the people don't have access to a lot of cooking equipment, so dishes were simple.

The big meal was lunch, a break from working on household chores or in the fields, which had started very early in the day.

Water was not trusted greatly for drinking. There were outbreaks of disease that people suspected, often rightly, of being caused by the water. The first settlers drank little beer. English-brewing tehniques, making stuff such as ale (top-fermenting) didn't always work well in the American climate. Top yeast got contaminated with wild yeasts that made the beer bitter.

Corn, as a vegetable or grain, was seen as more for ordinary people. The richer people preferred wheat.

In the eastern US, native plants that were domesticated for food included cranberries, jerusalem artichokes, and sunflowers. The colonists grew beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, cucumbers, potatoes, radishes, squash, and turnips. Both meat and vegetables were pickled to preserve them.

Squash, beans and maize were grown by different native groups in different areas. Despite the modern myth of those three being the "three sisters" that all natives grew, only a very few of the First Nations actually did grow all three. Some people argue that in some native groups, far more important than the "three sisters" were the three "f's" -- fish, flesh and fowl.

By the 1850s, special rooms to eat in -- "dining rooms" -- were still considered something for the wealthy.

As in the UK, the 100 years between 1830 and 1930 brought a great deal of change to the American kitchen. Knowledge of canning to preserve foods came over from France, which helped to broaden the diet in off-seasons. More and more labour saving devices, even labour saving ingredients such as baking soda and baking powder. The number of kitchen gadgets multiplied, and in cities, power such as gas and electricity was used to power them. A kitchen wall holding a fireplace and hearth was slowly replaced by a metal cooking range. Cooking on a stove was less labour intensive than by a fireplace, and you didn't get as dirty, and it was safer.

In the mid-1800s, Germans introduced lager (made with bottom-fermenting yeasts), and consumption of beer doubled between 1870 and 1885 alone. By 1890, half of the alcohol consumed in America was in the form of beer, but but wine consumption remained negligible. Wine was expensive. Almost all wine was imported, with high duties. The California wine industry had an early start and was producing some wines that were considered of good calibre by the turn of the 1900s, but Prohibition, introduced in 1919, and largely driven by the middle-classes and imposed on the working-classes, killed the fledgling wine industry there. Only 100 wine makers survived Prohibition in the entire country, by making wine for churches, grape juice and wine that was salted to turn it into cooking wine.

What was popular by the late 1800s were soft drinks at soda fountains. Soda water was accessible in price to all.

In the 1890s, internal mobility within America began, with people leaving their hometowns for the big cities.

Upton Sinclair 1906 Novel "The Jungle" exposed the poor state in which much of the nation's meat was being handled, and put people off hamburger. In 1933, Arthur Kallet condemned hamburger again in 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, saying that it was like getting your meat out of a garbage can.

During the depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, American housewives had to be very frugal. They would use thick cotton animal feed and flour sacks to make aprons, quilts, and even hats.

In May 1944, war rationing ended for most meats except for beef steaks and beef roasts.

By the 1960s, US was classless as far as food went -- though people with more money might purchase and consume the same food items but in different forms.



RESTAURANTS
Americans gave to the world self-service restaurants, completely standardized restaurants, and chain restaurants.

One of the earliest, most important restaurants was the City Tavern in Philadelphia, opened in 1883. It even had a ballroom on the third floor (the building was destroyed by fire in 1854.)

Prohibition killed off many fine restaurants in America. They needed the profits from alcohol to stay in the black. The ones that survived had to learn new marketing techniques. Some, for instance, had operated by giving out free sandwiches along with a beer.

Of those that survived prohibition, many more collapsed after the stock market did.

The first drive through restaurant, where you ordered and received your food from a window while still in your car, was "In-N-Out Burger", opened by Harry and Esther Snyder in Baldwin Park, California, in 1948.


HEALTH
By the 1830s, food abundance taken so for granted that the first movements to avoid some foods began under Sylvester Graham (1794–1851.) He renounced meat and became a vegetarian. Many including Henry Thoreau and Joseph Smith tried his diet. Graham's food values were absorbed into Seventh Day Adventism.

By the 1890s, with huge immigration from Europe, the American upper-classes all had servants to serve elaborate meals. But, a new wave of food diets had begun in reaction to the fin de siecle elaborate foods. Science had discovered calories, protein, carbohydates, etc. The middle class thought they could use this science to teach the immigrants and the working classes how to eat better in terms of health and household budget. One thing they wanted to do was to teach them to save money by eating beans instead of beef, which they had learned had just as much protein. But, immigrants hadn't come to the land of plenty of keep on eating beans.

The middle-class health foodies also had some bad advice. The science at the time felt that for the most part fruit and vegetables had nothing useful in them. Consequently, the health foodies advised immigrants to not bother with fruit and vegetables for the most part. But the Italian immigrants just ignored their advice and kept on eating fruit and vegetables.

In 1906, the Pure Food & Drug Act was passed. If you made health claims about your product, you had to provide proof.

By the late 1920s, enough was known about vitamins that it influenced thinking about nutrition.

Natural foods in the 1970s came out of the hippie movement. In the 1960s, there had been movements against big business or the establishment that failed or petered out, so the activists changed their attention to food and the environment. In response, the big food processors labelled their products "natural" or "farm fresh." So, the activists shifted their focus again, this time from what to eat to what not to eat, and the "negative nutrition" school of thought took root.

Literature & Lore
"A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die."

-- Mark Twain



"American cooking suffers from American nervousness, exactly as American nerves are suffering from American cookery."

-- Adelaide Keen. With a Saucepan Over The Sea. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1910. Page 23.



"Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening."

-- Art Buchwald



"Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup."

-- Henry Miller



"I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast." -- Edith Wharton. (American writer. 1862 - 1937)


"We all have hometown appetites. Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown he or she left behind."

-- Clementine Paddleford (American food writer. 1898 - 1967)



"If you've spent all your meat stamps and haven't any more
Eating chicken is a pleasant way to help to win the war."

-- Prudence Penny. Coupon Cookery. US Department of Agriculture. WWII.



"Announcement that the Office of Price Administration has suspended the point-rationing system for all kinds of meat, with the exception of choice cuts and roast of beef, brings to an end one of the least glorious battles on the home front – the battle of the butcher shop....In a world which was visibly tottering under the weight of an atrocious assault on free institutions, a world in which whole races were being systematically exterminated and in which whole innocent and unoffending nations had been overrun and starved, the self-appointed spokesmen the American people acted as though the worst atrocity of all time was a system which limited their right to buy as much meat as they chose and at as high prices as they could afford."

-- Franklin, Jay. Meat Rationing Is Called Least Glorious Experiment. Harlingen, Texas: Valley Morning Start. 12 May 1944, page 4.



"And now the good news. In the 1980s, the United States will emerge as a major world power in a new field — gastronomy. The ingredients necessary for this to happen are three: knowledgeable and adventuresome cooks, consumers who recognize quality and are willing to pay for it, and access to superior foodstuffs. All are available and in increasing quantities."

-- Rice, William. Revolution - In the Kitchen. Syrcause, New York. The Post Standard. 10 January 1980. Page A-7. [Originally in the Washington Post]

Acknowlegements

Other entries for: Cuisine Pages

Acadian Food, American Food, Australian Food, British Food, Byzantine Food, Canadian Food, Chinese Food, Egypt (Ancient), French Food, German Food, Greece (Ancient), Greek Food, Irish Food, Irish (Northern), Italian Food, Japanese Food, Jewish Food, Medieval Food, Mexican Food, Norwegian Food, Roman Food, Scottish Food, Slow Food, Spanish Food, Tex-Mex Food, Turkish Food, Tuscan Food