The Top 10 Foods Only America Could Have Invented
Photo: Emdot
When it comes to food, America gets a bad rap. It’s a common refrain that America has no cuisine to call our own. We’ve got apple pie and hot dogs, but that’s about it. (And when you really get down to it, the Germans invented hot dogs, and the British were eating apple pie like 1,000 years ago.)
But the truth is, America does have a cuisine to call it’s own. Over the past 232 years we’ve invented some of the most creative, daring, and yes, downright craziest dishes the world has ever seen. Sure, they can be overly greasy, a little too cheesy, and sometimes fried a few times too many. But they’re ours. So to celebrate Independence Day, we’ve put together this list of the best foods that only a country with just the right combination of greed, grit, and gluttony could have possibly dreamed up.
The Top Ten Foods Only America Could Have Invented:
10. Corn Dog
Photo: Intangible Arts
In 1942, at a beautiful place called the Texas State Fair, an industrious young man named Neil Fletcher came up with a way to make his hot dogs sell quicker: dip them in corn meal, deep fry ‘em, and pop ‘em on a stick. And so an American tradition was born. Every year, as the weather turns warmer and state fair season comes around, Americans say to themselves: what can we deep fry next? We’ve deep fried twinkies, oreos, hamburgers, even coca-cola. But all of these wondrous achievements owe a debt to the original food that really didn’t need to be battered and fried but just had to be: the corn dog.
9. Philly Cheesesteak
Photo: x-eyedblonde
Only Philadelphia, the most American of all cities, could invent an iconic sandwich and then vehemently insist that there shall be no attempts to make it good. Crappiest ingredients only, please. Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell explained problems non PA-ers have when trying to make cheesesteaks: “First, they use good meat. You need the fattiest, stringiest meat to get a proper taste.” The second mistake, of course, is that you’ve got to use Cheese Whiz; no real cheese allowed. Rendell insists this is became “real cheese doesn’t melt,” which is of course a lie. But never matter. The Philly Cheesesteak is delicious. Would it be more delicious if it were made with thinly slice Kobe steak and melted Gruyere? Of course it would be. But it wouldn’t be as amazing.
8. “Chinese Food”
Photo: VirtualEm
One of the great things about American cuisine is that when we come up with something so outrageous that even we can’t stand behind it, we figure out a way to pin it on someone else. Case in point: “Chinese Food.” All across America, Chinese buffets offer endless arrays of beautiful, deep-fried, grease-soaked food. General Tso’s chicken, chop suey, egg rolls, chow mein, fortune cookies. What do all these dishes have in common? They were all invented in America. Seriously people, do you really think Chinese people eat this crap? No. They eat rice. With vegetables and maybe a little meat. And it’s not battered or fried, or double fried, or double battered, and it’s certainly not filled with cheese. I mean, crab rangoon? Come on, that stuff has imitation crab meat and cream cheese. It could only have been invented in one place, and I think you know where that is.
7. S’mores
Photo: Phil Hawksworth
It’s difficult to say exactly how s’mores became so popular throughout America. Graham crackers are not particularly well-liked, and neither are marshmallows. We generally do not enjoy eating things that were cooked on a stick our little brother just found in the dirt, nor do we usually like to burn our food to a crisp before dinnertime. Yet somehow, s’mores just work. Despite their cutesy contraction of a name, and the fact that we have to actually cook and assemble them ourselves, rather than order them from a fast food window, I’ve yet to meet a person who does not love s’mores. Except for foreigners, who will look at you like you are the craziest person ever if you try to explain what a s’more is.
6. Reuben Sandwich
Photo: kimberlykv
This fully-loaded sandwich may seem like an international delicacy, but the reuben is as American as it gets. Start with pastrami–a meat so infused with spices that it has more flavor in a single bite than most full meals. Pile this sky-high, preferably using at least a pound of meat per sandwich. Add on some “swiss” cheese–a bland, hole-y cheese that no actual Swiss person would ever touch. Top it off with “Russian dressing,” a beautiful orange mayonnaise concoction that–you guessed it–hasn’t a thing to do with Russia.
5. Cobb Salad
Photo: Richard Moross
The responsibility of eating all this greasy, fatty food can be weighty. Sometimes so much so that Americans have been known to say “I think I’ll just have a salad today.” Of course, when we say salad, we don’t mean it in the same greens-and-tomatoes topped with balsamic way that the Euros do. No, when we make a salad, we pile it so high with meat, cheese and carbs that it passes the caloric intake of the cheeseburger we were so proud of ourselves for passing up. The ultimate example: the cobb salad. Bacon, chicken, eggs, cheese, and really whatever else you can find in your fridge, ideally piled so high that the eater can see no shred of lettuce at all.
4. Baked Alaska
Photo: Angusf
We Americans are complex people. When we face serious decisions like “What would you like for dessert, dear? Ice cream or pie?” we don’t merely sit back and say, “How about you put a scoop of ice cream on top of that pie?” No, no. We take the entire box of ice cream, and figure out a way to bake it inside the damn pie. How does it work? Damned if I know. But I do know this: you can throw rum on top of it and light it on fire – now that’s a meal.
3. Buffalo Wings
Photo: rick
So yeah, chicken is fine. I mean, it can taste OK sometimes, but really it’s kind of a bland protein. Why can’t you be more like pork, chicken? Wait a minute. What if we fry it at 600 degrees to a burnt little crisp, until it’s barely recognizable as meat, then smother it in XXX hot sauce and serve it with a heaping bowl of gooey cheese product? That’s more like it, chicken! Bonus points: the use of vegetables—solely as a palette cleanser between bites of meat.
2.Turducken
Photo: The CJM
Such a brilliant-but-simple innovation, it’s hard to believe that 5,000 years of civilization couldn’t create it without us. Take one turkey, shove a duck inside it, and then shove a chicken inside that. From there you’re on you’re own, although it’ s most preferably enjoyed with sausage stuffing in the very middle, deep-fried, and wrapped in bacon if possible. Bonus points if you can figure out a way to enjoy some form of melted cheese product with this monstrosity. Some people have pushed to have the turducken become the traditional Thanksgiving feast, while others have begun to enjoy it on Christmas. But this invention is so uniquely American that there is no better day to enjoy one than the Fourth of July.
1.Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream
Photo: WayTru
When Ruth Graves Wakefield of Whitman, Massachusetts first chopped up a semisweet chocolate bar and added it to her buttery cookie recipe in 1937, she invented a treat that likely would have made this list on its own merits. But it was to be significantly improved. As the decades went on and millions of Americans attempted to recreate Ruth’s recipe, they came to a shocking realization: they were way too lazy to actually bake the cookies. On the flip side, they realized that eating the cookie dough straight from the bowl was actually even tastier than waiting for the final cookie, despite the salmonella risks. Searching for a way to eat this delicious snack without having mom yell at you to get your hands out of the mixing bowl, America put our collective heads together for one epic conclusion: chop it up and put it in ice cream. Now that’s cooking.
