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memecucker:

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

here’s another podcast about Chinese food from Gastropod: The United States of Chinese Food

and there’s also that beef thing that Irish American immigrants adopted from their Jewish American neighbors but no one actually eats it in Ireland. I’m blanking on the name

also California sushi roles were made by a Japanese American

Corned beef!

England imposed a bunch of anti-Catholic laws to drive native Irish people into poverty while consolidating land ownership in the hands of English or Anglo-Irish Protestants. Beef raised in Ireland was for export back to England, and it was corned (salted) to keep it from spoiling in transit. Your typical Irish-Catholic tenant farmer had to make due with a tiny plot of land, and the main way to turn that plot into enough calories to keep your family alive was planting potatoes. The only meat most of these folks had access to was pork and bacon, since pigs can be raised on less land and with cheaper fodder than cows.

But then Irish immigrants in places like New York and Boston discovered kosher butchers and kosher delis, which didn’t sell pork products for obvious reasons – but they sold corned beef brisket at an accessible price. So this “luxury” food replaced bacon and salt pork in Irish immigrant cooking, and Americans came to think of “corned beef and cabbage” as the Iconic ™ Irish Dish.

I’m confused about what people thought the difference between “bastardized versions” and “product of immigrant experiences” was.

The difference between corned beef and green beer.