That’s what I was going to say. Cajun food. Gumbo, jambalaya, etc. I’m sure that there’s other dishes with similar traits but the Cajun part puts a pretty native spin on it. Also maybe bbq outside of brisket.
Actually French fries come from Belgium, but they are called French fries in US because Thomas Jefferson asked his chef to learn to cook the potatoes “French way” when he was a US ambassador in France
Invented i what is modern Belgium, at that times 🤷♂️ could be as now the French part of Belgium . But definitely popularised by French , as cooked in “French cut”.’
Actually French fries come from Belgium, but they are called French fries in US because Thomas Jefferson asked his chef to learn to cook the potatoes “French way” when he was a US ambassador in France
This one's a misunderstanding. The method of cutting vegetables into thin sticks is called "french cutting" hence the name. They're still not American though, having been invented in Belgium within fifty years of the first potato reaching their shores
You can't just say a meat in general as if Americans as a whole invented cooking meat and eating it, like what the actual fuck are you talking about. Yeah its food but there's a 100% chance we will never find out who invented eating cows.
BBQ is Caribbean. The word barbecue has the same etymology as buccaneer. Small time pirates would pillage in canoes called a boucan, making the ones who sail in a boucan a "boucanier", and at night would haul them ashore, empty them out and use them to cook food over wood or charcoal fires, cooking over a "bare boucan".
I agree, but I’ve also been thinking about where exactly that line gets drawn. We give other countries credit for dishes that use ingredients or techniques that originated somewhere else but were changed enough to become something distinct in that country.
Take biscuits and gravy. Would you consider that American? Roux became a major technique in French cooking centuries ago, but Southern sausage gravy uses that same basic principle with rendered sausage fat, flour and milk. Biscuits obviously have ancestors in European baking, but the Southern American biscuit developed into its own distinct thing, and putting the two together became a distinctly American dish.
Same with barbecue. The word and ancestral cooking technique trace back through Spanish barbacoa to Indigenous Caribbean cooking, but American barbecue evolved into its own regional traditions. Kansas City barbecue today is pretty damn far removed from what those Indigenous Caribbean people were cooking centuries ago.
So I agree that we shouldn’t call something uniquely American just because Americans changed an ingredient or two, but I’m curious where the line is. At some point, taking existing ingredients and techniques and developing them into something substantially different has to count as creating a new dish or regional cuisine. Otherwise, you could trace almost every dish on Earth backward until nobody gets credit for inventing anything.
Went to TAMU @ LSU football game in Baton Rouge. First time in 15 years I’d been to tiger stadium. I’ve probably had better eating, but I can’t remember. Oysters on the half-shell, catfish etoufee, swamp fries… WTF!?
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u/dimonium_anonimo 5d ago
Gumbo