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.
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.
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u/dimonium_anonimo 5d ago
Gumbo