At the end of the day I wanted to get out my reasons for why I’m willing to assert that there’s no such thing as an American food—but I also want to suggest that there are better questions to ask–just as there are better questions to ask than those regarding authenticity, as food historian Rachel Laudan has asserted–that might more profitably advance the fields of history and food studies.
Even if readers don’t accept the claim that there’s no such thing as an American food, I want to suggest that it’s more helpful to ask why people at the time cared so much about defining it, and what that says about them and that time period. And although I wouldn’t agree to the existence of an American food, I would acknowledge the existence of American foodways. So bear with me for a minute as I provide a definition. Foodways comprise anything related to the production, distribution, or consumption of food; in other words, they describe how we eat rather than what we eat.[10] And European travelers to America in the first half of the nineteenth century presented a very clear summary of American foodways.
In short, observers complained that Americans ate their food quickly, rudely, and in excessively large quantities. Sound familiar? In the 1820s Margaret Hunter Hall decried the fact that “one and all, male and female, eat invariably and indefatigably with their knives,” thus challenging a recent article dating the implementation of fork usage to the Revolution itself. (Some Americans owned forks, but they tended to use them as serving implements rather than as tools for eating). “It goes rather against one’s feelings,” Hall continued, “to see a prettily dressed, nice-looking, young woman ladling rice pudding into her mouth with the point of a great knife, and yesterday to my great horror I saw a nursery maid feeding an infant of seventeen months in the same way. I must own the woman deserved credit for her dexterity in not cutting the child’s mouth.”[11] In his Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson took great pride in describing the fact that animals raised in America were larger than those reared in England: “of 26 quadrupeds common to both countries, 7 are said to be larger in America, 7 of equal size, and 12 not sufficiently examined.”[12] Such animals, by inference, would produce more meat for American tables. Abundance was one thing, but many Americans reveled in the idea of excess. Amelia Simmons’s recipe for Independence Cake, for example, required twenty pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of sugar, ten pounds of butter, and four dozen eggs.[13] Add that to your menu for tomorrow, if you dare.