CHAT: American Cuisine (Was: Re: Homonymy -- Hot Stuff Dept.)

Hello, everybody, and thanks for writing.

> Thomas Wier <trwier@...> writes:
> [snip]
> > (This is actually quite frequent problem for me, since I find the
> > food that Northerners eat quite bland compared to that which I was
> > raised on along the Gulf Coast.)
> [snip]
Well, I grew up in southeast Texas, which lies right at the confluence
of the TexMex and Cajun food-cultures, both of which are spicier than
the cuisines they stem from (Mexican and French respectively), and also
spicier than the stuff Yankees eat :)

(Europeans I've met have often remarked that 'America has no cuisine',
which is true, but only superficially so. The problem is that America
is not a nation in the sense that European countries are; America has a
number of regional and local cuisines, but no cuisine that every part
of the country shares.)

 =========================================================================

According to what I've found out about the Pennsylvania Dutch and relishes on Wikipedia
and Google, the only contribution to world cuisine by a group of American
colonists that was neither brought to America from the Old World nor developed
by the "Native Peoples", is the tradition of "Seven Sweets and Seven Sours" and
all the relishes and savories and so on that so often turn up at traditional
family feasts in America. Many of them were first invented by the Pennsylvania
Dutch; as was the tradition of having fourteen of them at the table. In my
family we always have several, (but never as many as fourteen), whenever there
are several grandmothers, aunts, grand-aunts, and so on, contributing to the
dinner.

-----

Thanks for writing.

Tom H.C. in MI


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