Defining American Food

So back to food-related posts....last week was just a little too busy for me to focus on that stuff as much, with a total of some 46 hours spent at and around school, plus the visit to I Tatti, plus attempting to buy a bicycle, plus needing to deal with life in general, etc, etc, and so I got a little overwhelmed. But now we're back on track a bit! Just as a warning, I step up on my soapbox here for quite a bit--its long.
***
This is a prototype of a conversation I've had a few times here:

Italian: No wonder you came to Italy to learn about cooking! Goodness knows there's more to food than hot dogs and hamburgers. Don't get me wrong, I like hot dogs and hamburgers a lot, but American food just isn't as good as Italian or French food.
Me: Well there's lots of great food in the States! And American food isn't just hot dogs and hamburgers.
Italian: Well then what is American food?
Me: Uhhh......

I usually get stuck at this point. I've been thinking a lot about the subject in the past few days, trying to develop a pithy explanation of what American food is all about. What are some quintessential American dishes? The South definitely has their own style of cuisine, with a lot of great, rich food, and I think I could explain that well, but that isn't all of American food. Even within regions of the South there are different styles: cajun, creole, tex-mex, etc. But I wouldn't use any of those foods to describe what American food is.

Regional variation is definitely an important part of a national cuisine. Here in Italy everyone makes pasta, but the southerners do it with different shapes, doughs, and sauces than the northerners do. Each region has its own style of what is essentially fruitcake to be eaten at Christmas, and yet while there are these regional variations, there is an underlying base style of food which everyone adheres to.

The only thing I can think of which follows this line of thought in American food is BBQ. Almost every part of the US does barbecue, but everyone does it in a slightly different way. However I don't think that as a style of cooking it defines our national cuisine in the same way that pasta does Italian food (or mustard for the French!).

Of course there is the argument that America is the big melting pot, and that everyone brought their own cuisine in to the country, and so every household does different food. I suppose this is true, but I also think that the country has been around long enough that despite this a national cuisine could emerge. Or perhaps the States are too big for that to happen. Italy is just slightly bigger than Arizona, and ranks 71st in terms of square footage, just behind Oman. Their population is just under 60 million and shrinking, and so obviously we're talking about a very different situation (CIA factbook). If you asked the residents of Arizona how they define the food of their state, you would get a much more specific answer, and while it might lack some of the variety that Italian food has, they only have 6.5 million people, so we'll let that be their excuse.

Yet despite all of this I feel that there is more to American food than what immigrants have brought in from the old country, and that can be found across the entire country. The difficulty is that its a very simple kind of food, and I would define it almost entirely by how it is ingredient-driven. While we are seeing restaurants pop up everywhere describing themselves as serving "New American" (which I think is actually just a derivative of Californian cuisine as passed down by Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, etc), I think this kind of food is also getting onto the dinner table, at least in the households where people are cooking dinner.

My proof is going to be through the food network. While there has been a lot of discussion lately on whether the food network is actually teaching anyone to cook, a quick glance at their website shows the trends that I think define a lot of American cooking. They have a tab for "in season", which features pumpkins, apples, potatoes, and squash; the first tab listed is "quick and easy", which also is focused mostly on fall ingredients, with things like butternut squash mac & cheese and pear and fennel salad. These kinds of dishes don't belong to another culture's cuisine, and even the ones that can be traced elsewhere culturally seem to have little twists that make them somehow American. Using the "quick meals" tab, I selected that I want a beef dinner that can be made in less than 45 minutes, to which it supplied quite a few options. The "lime marinated flank steak with herb salad" has a title which makes me think that it will be based on Mexican or central American flavors, because of the limes, but looking over the ingredient list the marinade also includes balsamic vinegar and olive oil. The herb salad mixes basil, cilantro, parsley, and tarragon. I could find everything for this recipe here except the cilantro and maybe the tarragon. I haven't seen them anywhere since arriving, and the limes would have to be considered an import item because they aren't really common in the cuisine here. So here we go, a dish offered up on TV by some guy named Danny Boome who has a show, and people cook it. But how do you define a cuisine like this?

The best explanation I can come up with is ingredient-driven. While that makes sense in an American context, the only problem with it is that in large parts of the world (here included), food is always ingredient-driven. It is hard to find bad produce here. I haven't seen things around that aren't in season somewhere in the country, and it was considered unusual that the supermarket had to import their lemons from Spain. That's about 500 miles, which is just a little further than Chicago to Nashville. However in the States ingredient-driven means a little more than just in season or local (though they're getting to be more and more synonymous), but it means keeping things simple to let the ingredients shine. Nothing about that steak is particularly flashy, the flavors aren't masking anything, and I imagine all the ingredients balance pretty nicely so nothing is overwhelmed. In Italian cuisine, a ragù is made with so many different ingredients that there is often no way to know all that went in there (think about the beef in dolce e forte I featured a few weeks ago). These are definitely two distinct approaches to food.

I am definitely still not satisfied with this as an explanation, not only because it doesn't quite do justice to American food, but because saying that another cuisine doesn't focus on ingredients to let them shine is also wrong. The bistecca fiorentina (Florentine Steak) that they serve here is nothing more than a whole lot of beef with salt and pepper cooked very briefly on the grill. Straightforward and simple, it is nothing but the one ingredient.

However I feel like as someone who wants to cook so-called "American" food, I do need to be able to define what it is to a certain extent. Fusion and multicultural make it sound like it is just a remix of some other foods, which also happens to imply that it is inferior, which I don't believe it is. I want to find a definition, a way of explaining to people what American food actually consists of. And perhaps if its successful, maybe one day the stereotypical American dish won't be a hot dog!