Why go
A menu can bring together cornbread, spaghetti with meatballs and a California roll without treating them as one uniform cuisine. This overview helps identify the everyday dishes behind the broad label American food. It also explains why home cooking and packaged ingredients belong to the story alongside fast food.
The full story
American food includes dishes created in the United States and foods that changed after arriving from elsewhere. Pizza and spaghetti with meatballs show the importance of adaptation, while bagels, pretzels and tortillas add other strands to everyday eating. Indigenous food traditions also remain part of this wider history, including cornbread and the preserved food pemmican. Home cooking has an important place in that mixture. Macaroni and cheese, meatloaf and casseroles sit alongside roast turkey, associated with family meals at Thanksgiving. Desserts range from apple and pumpkin pies to brownies and sundaes. These names describe different meal traditions rather than a single formal national menu. During the twentieth century, canned and prepared foods changed what cooking at home could involve. Books, television and food companies helped circulate recipes and techniques. That relationship between household meals, commercial foods and media is another part of American cuisine, beyond its internationally familiar hamburgers and hot dogs.