The cuisine of the United States is a style of food preparation derived from the United States of America. The cuisine has a history dating back before the colonial period when the Native Americans had a rich and diverse cooking style for an equally diverse amount of ingredients. With European colonization, the style of cookery changed vastly, with numerous ingredients introduced from Europe, as well as cooking styles and modern cookbooks. The style of cookery continued to expand into the 19th and 20th centuries with the influx of immigrants from various nations across the world. This influx has created a rich diversity and a unique regional character throughout the country.
History
Pre-1492
Before the European colonists came to America, the American Indians had an established cookery style that varied greatly from group to group. The vast variety of ingredients, drugs and cookery styles were never found in the same locality; any one group had a much more limited diet. Nutrition was an issue for most hunting and gathering societies that wandered widely in search of game and who might encounter serious shortages in wintertime.
Common ingredients
Plant foods
The Native Americans had at least 2,000 separate plant foods which contributed to their cooking. Indigenous root vegetables that were part of the diet included camas bulb, arrowhead, blue lapine, bitterroot, biscuit root, breadroot, prairie turnip, sedge tubers, and whitestar potatoes ( Ipomoea lacunosa ) along with the sweet potato and white potato. Greens included salmonberry shoots and stalks, coltsfoot, fiddlehead fern, milkweed, wild celery, wood sorrel, purslane, and wild nasturtium. Other vegetables included century plant crowns and flower shoots, yucca blossoms, tule rootstocks, amole stalks, bear grass stalks, cattail rootstocks, narrowleaf yucca stalks, and sotol crowns. Fruits included strawberries which Europeans named the Virginia strawberry due to being larger than the European dwarf mountain strawberry, as well as huckleberries, blueberries, cherries, currants, gooseberries, plums, raspberries, sumac berries, juniper berries, hackberries, elderberries, hawthorne fruit, pitaya, white evening primrose fruit, Nuts proliferated in the diet as well, including pecans, hickory nuts, beechnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, chinquapins, black walnuts, and butternuts. Acorns were also popularly used to produce oil for seasoning, and pounded into a flour to mix with cornmeal to thicken soups and fried into cakes and breads. Legumes included peanuts, screwbeans, honey locust beans, and mesquite beans. The grain used in most of Native American cooking was maize, while wild rice (not a true grain) was found in certain southern regions. The seeds from various plants were also commonly utilized: pine nuts (western white pine, western yellow pine, pinyon pine), anglepod, dropseed, pigweed, spurge, sunflower seeds, tumbleweed, unicorn plant.
Land animal foods
The largest amount of animal protein came from game meats. Large game included bison, deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, and bear, cougar, along with Mountain goat and pronghorn found in the Rocky Mountains. The small game cooked included rabbit, raccoon, Virginia Opossum, squirrel, wood rat, chipmunk, ground hog, peccary, prairie dog, skunk, badger, beaver, and porcupine. Game birds included turkey, partridge, quail, pigeon, plover, lark and osprey. Water fowl was quite abundant and varied, particularly on the coasts such as ducks, geese, swan, crane and sea crane. Other aqueous proteins included alligators and frogs, which the legs were enjoyed from, especially bullfrogs. Snail meat was also enjoyed, along with various turtles such as the painted turtle, wood turtle, and snapping turtle along with their eggs. In addition the sea turtle and green turtle, endangered today were considered an important spiritual protein by the Native Americans.
Seafood
Saltwater fish eaten by the Native Americans were cod, lemon sole, flounder, herring, halibut, sturgeon, smelt, drum on the East Coast, and olachen on the West Coast. Whale was hunted by Native Americans off the Northwest coast, especially by the Makah, and used for their meat and oil. Seal and walrus were also utilized. Eel from New York's Finger Lakes region were eaten. Catfish seemed to be favored by tribes, including the Modocs. Crustacean included shrimp, lobster, crayfish, and giant crabs in the Northwest and blue crabs in the East. Other shellfish include abalone and geoduck on the California coast, while on the East Coast the surf clam, quahog, and the soft-shell clam. Oysters were eaten on both shores, as were mussels and periwinkles.
Cooking methods
Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods. Grilling meats was common. Spit roasting over a pit fire was common as well. Vegetables, especially root vegetables were often cooked directly in the ashes of the fire. As early Native Americans lacked the proper pottery that could be used directly over a fire, they developed a technique which has caused many anthropologists to call them "Stone Boilers." The Native Americans would heat rocks directly in a fire and then add the bricks to a pot filled with water until it came to a boil so that it would cook the meat or vegetables in the boiling water. Another method was to use an empty bison stomach filled with desired ingredients and suspended over a low fire. The fire would have been insufficient to completely cook the food contained in the stomach however, as the flesh would burn so heated rocks would be added to the food as well. Some Native Americans would also use the leather of a bison hide in the same manner.
The Native Americans are credited as the first in America to create fire-proof pottery to place in direct flame. In what is now the Southwestern United States, Native Americans also created ovens made of adobe called hornos in which to bake items such as breads made from cornmeal. Native Americans in other parts of America made ovens out of dug pits. These pits were also used to steam foods by adding heated rocks or embers and then seaweed or corn husks (or other coverings) placed on top to steam fish and shellfish as well as vegetables; potatoes would be added while still in-skin and corn while in-husk, this would later be referred to as a clambake by the colonists. The hole was also a location for producing what has become Boston baked beans made from beans, maple sugar and a piece of bear fat.
Colonial period
Main article: Cuisine of the Thirteen ColoniesWhen the colonists came to America, their initial attempts at survival included planting crops familiar to them from back home in England. In the same way, they farmed animals for clothing and meat in a similar fashion. Through hardships and eventual establishment of trade with Britain, the West Indies and other regions, the colonists were able to establish themselves in the American colonies with a cuisine similar to their previous British cuisine. There were some exceptions to the diet, such as local vegetation and animals, but the colonists attempted to use these items in the same fashion as they had their equivalents or ignore them if they could. The manner of cooking for the American colonists followed along the line of British cookery up until the Revolution. The British sentiment followed in the cookbooks brought to the New World as well.
There was a general disdain for French cookery, even with the French Huguenots in South Carolina and French-Canadians. One of the cookbooks that proliferated in the colonies was The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy written by Hannah Glasse, wrote of disdain for the French style of cookery, stating “the blind folly of this age that would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook!” Of the French recipes, she does add to the text she speaks out flagrantly against the dishes as she “… think it an odd jumble of trash.” Reinforcing the anti-French sentiment was the French and Indian War from 1754-1764. This created a large anxiety against the French, which influenced the English to either deport many of the French, or as in the case of the Acadians, they migrated to Louisiana. The Acadian French did create a large French influence in the diet of those settled in Louisiana, but had little or no influence outside of Louisiana.
Common ingredients
The American colonial diet varied depending on where the settled region. Local cuisine patterns had established by the mid 18th century. The New England colonies were extremely similar in their dietary habits to those that many of them had brought from England. A striking difference for th
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