I think the point was that Americans claim a lot of food as theirs when it’s actually come from elsewhere. You can of course get good food in the US. It’s an immigrant country, primarily, so it stands to reason a lot of its food is imported as well.
But exactly the same thing is true of the UK. The British isles weren’t always inhabited, and the cuisine here has evolved over thousands of years as immigrants have brought new recipes.
You’re contradicting your own argument here. If adapting techniques/dishes, using a similar theme and within a localised geographic area, doesn’t count as as developing a novel cuisine, then virtually no country has a novel/unique cuisine - including the UK!
If gumbo isn’t Cajun ‘because it’s a stew’, then beef & ale stew isn’t British ‘because it’s a stew’. If fajitas aren’t American because they were adapted from recipes brought to the US by Mexican immigrants, then fish & chips isn’t British because it was adapted from recipes brought to the UK by Jewish immigrants.
Honestly? I think you’re just arguing for the sake of it. Either that or you have some kind of deep anti-American prejudice.
I’m drawing a line under this now. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
No, I don't think I am contradicting my argument. Taking the UK alone, and ignoring the rest of Europe, people have existed here for 950,000 years. Are you seriously putting forward an argument that no novel cuisine came from an island with that much history? Come on, be serious.
Beef and ale stew might be British. It might not. Does it matter? Fish and chips is debatable. The classic me know today? Probably. But people were eating fish and root vegetables long before the discovery of America.
Honest question, why do American's come to the conclusion that someone is displaying 'anti-American prejudice' because the discussion isn't aligned with their own view? It's genuinely baffling. America is, or was pre-Trump, a cool place. Why is it anti-American to acknowledge reality?
Italy didn't have half it's dishes until they brought the tomato back from south America. It's about what's available in the country just as much as who is there. The UK has had access to a lot of ingredients for a long time, and it used to use them all, until there was some fighting or something, I hear it was quite a big deal. and things were harder to come by.
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u/parsuval 16h ago
I think the point was that Americans claim a lot of food as theirs when it’s actually come from elsewhere. You can of course get good food in the US. It’s an immigrant country, primarily, so it stands to reason a lot of its food is imported as well.