True Melting Pot: American Food is an International Delight Thanks to Our “Global Pantry”

One truth about American dining tastes is that if you’re lucky enough to live in a place that attracts many immigrants, your dining experience is flavored by the favorite foods of other people (meaning the foods of other cultures). In the United States, for example, the melting pot is not an idle phrase. American cooking literally bubbles with contributions from every group that’s ever stepped ashore in what President Lyndon B. Johnson used to call the “good ole U. S. of A.”

As the Toronto Star’s food critic Navneet Alang has written:

“We are living in the age of the global pantry, a kind of internationalism with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar Americana.”

Just look at some of the foods and food combinations characteristic of specific ethnic/regional cuisines we now take for granted. Imagine how few you might sample living in a place where everybody shares exactly the same ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds. Just thinking about it is enough to make you stand up and shout, “Hooray for diversity, equality and inclusion at the dinner table!”

Start with soy sauce, a flavoring now so common some people toss it on their salads. The Chinese intensify it with wine and ginger; the Japanese add sugar; and the Koreans toss in sesame, and chili. Olive oil and lemon go with Greek food; tomatoes and chili pepper sit well with dishes dished up by our Southern neighbors. Europeans seem to favor dairy; their contributions include sour cream and creamed veggies.

Finally, let’s hear it for the peanuts our African American folks brought here and George Washington Carver turned into a plethora of tasty treasures, specifically leading to the totally all-American treat: A peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Of course, enjoying other peoples’ foods doesn’t mean Americans don’t have their own cuisine. Among the made-in-America taste sensations, many created by immigrant chefs whose talents flowered in America’s kitchens, are those two Boston beauties, baked beans (a Pilgrim adaptation of a native American dish), and chowder, a word derived from the French la chaudière, the large copper soup pot fishermen used to make a soup shared by the entire crew. Once ashore, German-born Americans translated their Hamburg steak to the American classic hamburger. The chips that go with them are credited to George Crum, a Native American/African American chef who fired up the stoves at the Moon Lake Lodge resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the mid-1800s. And vichyssoise is the commonly attributed to Louis Diat, chef at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York, who in 1917 is said to have named the cold potato-and-cream soup in honor of the city of his birth, Vichy, France.

In short, as cultural journalist Anand Giridharadas, the son of Indian immigrants whose dinner table varied from Indian to American, wrote last week in the website “Portside:”

“The question we should ask is not: ‘What do immigrants eat?’ It’s ‘What would America eat, and be, without immigrants? ‘ ”