America The Food

The US has always been a food forward country. America has given the world great dishes and even greater inventions and innovations. This is what makes this country great.It's recipe.It's chef. Its' people who love a good dish.

Regular contributor Kim Severson wrote about all this in yesterday's New York Times Wednesday  Food section. It starts with the indigenous tribes coming to the colonizer's help by swing tem how to use fish asferti;izer and introducing them to the Three Sisters corn, beans and squash to survive.Their johnny cakes, a mix of waterand corn helped many COlonial troops from starving. Of course there are and will be foreign influences in the cuisine. Baked Mac and cheese is one of the country's old recipe imports. Thanks to Tom Jefferson. James Hemings, half brother of Jefferson's wife Martha and brother of Sally was the first haute cuisine chef in the nation. He created baked Mac and cheese from the French macaroni pie, pasta cooked in milk and then baked with cheese.Throughout the centuries waves of immigrants brought such Americna classics as spaghetti, ots dogs, hamburgers and French fries. Today American can appreciate Kim chee and sushi. America hosted the first iimmigrant restaurants too. The Chinese brought their cuisine to the California Gold Rush in 1840.It was the Swiss-Italian brothers Pietro and Giovanni Delmonico who opened up the first fine dining watering, Delmonico' s in New York City['s Financlia District. Diners enjoyed steak Delmonico a tick cur basted in butter along with Oysters Rockefellar. Type were the first eatery to also promote women dining without any male escort.

This country is also the country of innovation. The first American cookbook was written by Amelia Simmons in the 1700;s. Yes there were plenty of British influences tere but there;s also cranberry sauce paired with turkey. and pumpkin pie  Canned food came about in the 1840'with the first cannery opening in New York City. It brought fruits and veggies to cities and helped to preserve veggies during the winter months. The country also created the automated harvest in the 1850s.a decade later Cyrus McCormick created the automated reaper which  can create arvests in fewer hours with lesser hands.This also created a global market for wheat wit America providing grain for France.The US also invented the refrigerated rail car. Packed with ice from frozen lakes it enabled meat packers like Swift and Armor to deliver goods from coast to coasrOf course America also was the first country to sell sliced bread.Otto Rothwedder created a machine that could slice and wrap bread in minutes which helped America;s housewives. Thanks to a great American authors, Upton Sinclair the country has the FDA. Major federal laws were enacted after his eye opening story that took place in Chicago;s meat packing industry.America also gave the world Cheetos, Mc Donald's and Coke.  What would the world be without them.

America is the land if Great food and great inventions. The country represents what's best in diets . The country is the original influencer.

Restaurants That Change The World

Restaurants are an important part of our culture.They are responsible for foods trends and introducing international  cuisines to communities . There's a new book celebrating them and their impact on the American diet, featuring some of the US's most famous eateries.

Food critic and regular contributor, Tejal Rao wrote about this great new book featuring  the most influential restaurants in today's New York Times Food section. "Ten Restaurants That Changed America" (W.W. Norton and Company Publishers) was written by Paul Friedman who is surprisingly a medieval history professor at Yale University. He took on the massive task of researching two hundred years of restaurants , culling through hundreds of thousands of restaurants to culminate in the top ten. The list spans the 19th and 20th Centuries and the American continent. One of the first and most famous is New York's Delmonico, the city's most famous eatery. It started in 1827 as a French pastry shop by the Swiss born Delmonico brothers. They were the first and the most instrumental in bringing a sit down restaurant to a city full of oyster stands and rowdy , boisterous taverns that served just basic dishes., It was the first restaurant to import foods, namely truffles from the Dordogne region of France. Delmonico's also was one of the first to use local fish and turtles caught from the Eastern seaboard. Their menu was the gold standard for all French restaurants for one hundred years.

Chain restaurants such as Howard Johnson''s and Schraft's also changed American eating and paved the way for fast food giants such as McDonald's and Wendy's. Howard Johnson's , still going and famed for their fried clams, pioneered the idea of franchise restaurants, They were also the first for strategic planning, situating restaurants along highways.The idea appealed to traveling families who didn't want to eat at the truck stops ,mostly populated by truckers and sales reps. Schraft's , also was an innovator, It started earlier , in the 1910's and was a Northeastern chain of candy stores. It added a lunch counter and seats, offering a new concept- dining options for unescorted women. Restaurants would not sit women without a male companion. Schraft's didn't believe in that. They also were the first business to hire women as waitresses along with giving maternity leave to pregnant workers.Other restaurants that made a difference were Mama Leone's, Alice Water's Chez Panisse , the famed Sylvia's in Harlem , the equally famed Antoine''s in New Orleans and The Mandarin. In one way or another they  have influenced generations of restaurant owners and chefs.

Restaurants have always been important in American history and culture. "Ten Restaurants  ThatChanged America" shows just that, how they influenced our eating and cooking habits.It is a fascinating read into how vital these eateries are to our psyche and image.