What exactly is American food?

you dont like sopaipillas? Then youve not had em fresh and hot . Its the only thing to cut the heat in the SW cookery.

They're a great way to finish off a breakfast, too. At Cafe del Arroyo, if she asked "Red or Green," and you said green, then she's leer at you and ask if you really wanted green. If you then said yes, she'd bring the sopaipillas with the bowl of green chile sauce, which in that case was about half fresh green chiles, half jalapenos, with diced onions. Put that on your eggs, and you want them sopaipillas right next door.

Yeh, I learned early on that you said "green" onlyif you really wanted to challenge your own resistance to red-hot and had plenti of tortillas of some sort handy, along with a large glass of agua pura.

Cold milk, works better than anything . . .

Most "Chinese" and "Mexican" food in the US are really American creations that are convincing replicas of the actual ethic cuisines of the countries. Pizza as the world knows it is an American mutation.

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I read through this whole thread. Got hungry. No surprise there. Trying to think of something that hasn't been mentioned. I will ruminate.

After getting to the last page of the thread, I had to go back to page 1 for this:




Keep your steenkin' tomato off my bagel.

I feel the same way -- even prefer some nice creamy butter on it rather than the cream cheese. I like being able to taste the flavor of the bagel. If you can't taste it, you might as well eat a slice of Wonder Bread.

In Montreal, they make the best smoked meat - brisket, I believe. Do they do have it in NYC? A New York smoked meat?
It's so good, it's actually shipped across the country. Nobody does it better...

I was thinking about crawfish - since we don't get them up north other than ones that are cooked and then shipped. Love it when I am down in TX during crawfish season.

I hear that burger king delivers now...

As I recall (an old recollection from some food television show, mind you), If Hawaiians don't eat the most, they're definitely up there on the list... From the story as I remember it, Spam was a very prevalent food source for US forces during WW2. And being that they occupied several places in the area (the Pacific), Spam surpluses tended to make their way to the civilians. Evidently they liked it...

Again, this is a murky account of history, but I think that's the gist of it anyway. And I've great confidence that any of the history buffs 'round here can fill in the gaps...

I used to go netting for crawfish in the Cotituate Reservoir in Natick back in the days when Carling's had its Black Label Beer brewery there and the runoff from the brewery vats provided excellent fodder for the little crustaceans. We'd go out at night and scoop up buckets full. (I'm talkinglate 1950s here; Carling's, far as I know, has been out of business for years and years. Used to be a pretty fair beer. Local and cheap.) Fresh crawdads are da bomb!

Probably true. Spam is extremely popular here, not just on grocery shelves but on fast-food cafe and diner menus as well. You can order spam on your pizza and there isn't a breakfast menu that I've seen which doesn't offer Spam as one of the meat choices with your eggs.

I grew up in Texas, left to live in the north for about 40 years all the while missing terribly chicken fried steak. After moving back here 10 years ago, first to Marble Falls (Hill Country) I ordered said dish in 3 restaurants. Horrible, awful gristly cube steak breaded and fried. Ghastly! After moving to Austin I have ordered same dish three times. No more. Texas has forgotten how to make chicken fried steak.

Used to eat chicken fried steak each Friday in our Garland High cafeteria. Oh, luscious. It seemed to be thinly sliced, then stacked, breaded and fried. Maybe I'll find some I like, but we're thinking of having a butcher thinly slice a couple tenderloins, take that home and fry it up into chicken fried steak. I heard that's what they served George and Laura Bush while the two lived in the White House.

I believe Spam is big on the Rock, Newfoundland. Must have something to do with Island life. War rations make sense too...

Hah. I've only ordered Chicken Fried Steak once, the first time Dys and Diane took me to the Route 66 Diner here in Abq. I like the place, it's fun and the servers are nice (well, they usually were anywhere when the Dys was around) but I have found the food is working upwards toward mediocre - the plan seems to be to spare expense. Anyway, your description of gristly cube steak breaded badly fits to a tee. 'Course, Dys ordered Frito Pie, which I've managed never to try... but if Frito Pie isn't on the american food list, I'm thinking it should be.

I might like the real thing.. I mean, real chicken fried steak.

We had Spam at our house when I was young (younger then than now). Picky eater thought it was ok since it didn't wiggle or wriggle. Later, I had it once as a teen. Gaaah.

Now I'm thinking, Vienna Sausages in a small tin.. We used to have those sliced with canned small white potatoes, fried up. That was in the Chicago area. I won't blame Chicago though. I know the stockyards had good beef for sale. I will accuse Chicago of my childhood neighborhood favorite lunch - Baloney sandwiches with mayo on airy white bread along with Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, with strawberry koolaid.

Crawfish . . . mud bugs . . . i love 'em. I worked at this place once, and was a good friend of the guy who was in charge of environmental programs. He had a 40 acre field which he was restoring to the prairie species original to that area. He had gone to enormous trouble to dig a pond there--it was a dew collection pond which took a couple of years to fill, but was then self-sustaining. I asked him it that was common in pre-Columbian prairies and he just smiled.

The next summer, we were getting ready for a big cookout the employees were going to have and he stopped in my office and asked if i could get away for the afternoon. I said i thought so, so he said come on. We got in his truck and drove to the prairie. We got out, he reached in the back and hand me a pair of hip waders. We then spent a couple of hours harvesting literally thousands of crawfish from the pond. We took them back to the facility, to a summer camp site which was then unused, and ran water through 5 gallon buckets full of the crawfish until the water ran clear. That took us a couple of hours, too. By the time we were done, we had probably 25 or 30 pounds of crawfish. We went to the cook out and started throwing the crawdaddies in the pot. He and i ate most of them, but everybody who wanted some got some. He said he figured the population would recover in about a year.

I remember my brother and I catching crawdads at Clear Lake in California when we were kids. Back in the day, that lake was full of them and you could easily fill a 5 gallon bucket with them.

Back to more serious on my part -
the grandmother of a couple of girlfriends of mine used to sell tamales from a cart in the street in downtown Los Angeles just after the turn of the century, 1905 or 1910, I think. I dearly love a good tamale but they have so far been hard to find here in town.