By Stanley K. Schultz
Thanksgiving season, I suspect, means to most of us good eating. Every American schoolchild knows (if often inaccurately) the story of the first great celebration of American cooking, Thanksgiving. A Native American named Tisquantum (the English called him Squanto) arrived in Plymouth Colony in the Spring of 1621 and taught the semi-starving settlers how to fish and hunt productively, while also showing them how to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. That Fall brought a bountiful harvest. To celebrate harmony and survival, Pilgrims and local Wampanoags banqueted together in the first Thanksgiving, a feast that lasted three days with Indians providing most of the food and the Pilgrims the "strong beer." It might not be fanciful to regard that junket as one of our earliest foreign policy triumphs. Our subject here, however, is not Thanksgiving itself, but, rather, Americans and good food.

This is a verbal coupling that to much of the rest of the world might seem an oxymoron. Although we are a nation of immigrants from around the globe, although we like to tell ourselves in our history books and our politiciansâ speeches that we are the first "melting pot" society in world history, that "melting pot" seldom has bubbled in our cooking pots. The American capacity for being a culinary melting pot has operated within narrow limits. Itâs not that we donât eat good, solid, ordinary food; itâs just that it usually is, well . . . ordinary. The only other cuisine in the world customarily as uninteresting and unimaginative as ours is that of England. There is, of course, a very good reason for that÷American cooking, for the last three centuries, essentially has imitated English fare, with a dollop of German cuisine thrown into the pot.

"Nonsense!"÷I hear you cry. What about Chinese cooking; French cooking, and its cousin Creole in Louisiana; Spanish cooking, and its Tex-Mex sibling; Italian cooking, represented best in the basic pizza? What about Swiss Steak and Russian salad dressing, to name only two exotic favorites of American cuisine? Phooey! In our cuisine we have tried to do what we often have attempted in our foreign policy, that is, remake the world in our own image. We have invented American dishes with foreign names and a vague resemblance to a foreign creation, but ones that in actuality are native-born citizens of the American kitchen.

Let me give you only a few examples. Swiss Steak was concocted in the United States; in Switzerland it was unknown. No Russian ever ate Russian salad dressing before visiting the United States (and, if wise, not again thereafter). Chop Suey, a "delicacy" that millions of Americans request when they go to a Chinese restaurant in their home towns, appeared first in the United States to feed as nourishing slop to Chinese coolie workers building the railroads in the last half of the nineteenth century. It was unknown in China until recent years when the Chinese began to import it from the United States to feed American visitors to that ancient country who longed for "authentic" local cuisine.

Vichyssoise, that wonderful "French" soup made of leeks and potatoes, delicious served either hot or cold, requested by Americans when they enjoy an expensive evening in an upscale and high-priced French restaurant, was created in New York City in 1910. As we eat it, the dish is unknown in France except in hotels frequented by Americans who think they are ordering the "real thing" in Paris. Chili con carne certainly sounds authentically Spanish, but isnât, because the Spanish never had seen a chili before they reached the Americas. We might think the Spanish name came from Mexican origins, but the Mexicans vehemently deny this, to the extent that a leading Mexican dictionary defines chili con carne as "a detestable food with a false Mexican title which is sold in the United States from Texas to New York." The dish was invented in San Antonio shortly after the Civil War and did not gain popularity until around 1902 when a German immigrant developed chili powder for the first time.

In the melting pot of the American kitchen, the only melting is the pot÷from the heat generated by Americans patting themselves on the back for being such worldly-wise people. If we have not been as fully successful in remaking the world in our own image as at least some Americans feel we have a right to do, we have at least accomplished something. We have created native dishes with foreign-sounding names and have forced the rest of the world to serve it to us as their own whenever we visit foreign shores. This stands as a foreign policy triumph surely never contemplated by the Pilgrims in the long ago Fall of 1621. You might think about all this when you sit down to your next Thanksgiving meal. Or, . . . maybe not.

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© Stanley K. Schultz

Previous Town Crier Articles:

"Sex Scandals and the American Presidency"

"Voting Season, Television, and the 'American Majority'"

"The American 'Right' to a Vacation"