The Myth of American Regional Cuisines

The admirable Mr. Strenk took me to task for my failure to appreciate New York pizza.  Coming from most New Yorkers, I would have shrugged of the (albeit playful) criticism, but I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Strenk some years back at a Summer School and learned to view him as the best sort of American.  To avoid further plunge into saccharine platitudes, I'll get to the  point.

I take it as a given that the strength of local and regional cultures can be  measured in part by their distinctive cuisines.  Now, it goes without saying that in highly civilized cultures--like those of ancient Greece or Italy for the past thousand years or France since the Renaissance--regions like Tuscany and Aquitaine, cities like Florence and Pisa, Venice and Strasburg, ancient Argos and Sicyon gave birth to distinctive traditions in art, music.

Here in America, only an extreme chauvinist would boast of our contributions to painting and sculpture, music, architecture, and poetry and philosophy.  Of course we have writers worth reading--Twain, Melville and Hawthorne, Poe and Simms, but most of our best writers are simply regional variations on British themes.  Our frontier writers were perhaps the most distinctive, though hardly the most accomplished or polished of our literary performer.s  Music, if we regard jazz as a higher kind of pop music, which is what it is, we had better not talk about, though there are some decent schools of regional painting.  Still, on the whole, after 300 plus years, American cultural contributions are considerably less than those of Florence, much less of Tuscany as a whole.

Though candor is as rare as it is despised among us, let us for a change be honest with ourselves and confess, we are, at best, a colonial culture, much like Greek Sicily and Magna Graecia, with the obvious stipulation that we have never come close to producing anything like the temples in Agrigento, much less writers of the stature of Stesichorus, Parmenides, Zeno, Ibycus, and the Pythagoreans.  In most respects, where we are most distinctively American, we are roughnecks and primitives.  I'm not complaining, just observing.

So we have a yeoman culture, typified by cowboy ballads, blues, country and western music, and the peculiarities of our regions and localities can be best appreciated by sampling the songs and the food.  Does it ever strike you as odd that, while there are dozens songs, many traditional and folkish celebrating Georgia, Savannah, Charleston, the Shenandoah, etc, and some even devoted to the Ohio and Wabash rivers of the Middle West, it is only the commercial song factories of Tin Pan Alley that extoll the merits of New York and Chicago and San Francisco.

Yes, this is overstated and yes there are significant exceptions, but I think the pattern is clear.  In the American popular mind, the South and the West are attractive to the imagination, but no so much New Jersey or Illinois.  (Yes, to anticipate, I agree entirely that The Music Man and Guys and Dolls are two of the best productions of our musical theater.)

When we turn to regional and local cuisines, we find a similar pattern.  People go out of their way to eat the seafood and pork barbecue and fried chicken of the South and the beef brisket of the Southwest.  Who makes the drive to Springfield, Illinois to try the Horseshoe Sandwich?  (My advice is don't!).

There are urban dishes in northern cities that at one time or another have been celebrated:  pizza in New York and New Jersey, steak sandwiches in Philadelphia, hot dogs in Chicago, chili in Cincinnati?  How many of my readers, I ask, have ever eaten the Cincinnati treat, chili three ways?

The history of Cincinnati chili is a little vague but it seems to have been the creation of Middle Eastern Greeks who opened up hotdog stands and diners.  In other words, it is not a cultural development of Cincinnati but a restaurant invention.  The same is true of the Chicago hotdog and New York pizza.  I like them all, but imagine someone foolish enough to put them on par with the specialities of New Orleans or Cajun country?  Or Charleston?  Or Texas along the border?

To put the matter quite simply.  Much of what we regard as American regional culture, the literature, the music, and the cuisine, are commercial products with about as much claim to authenticity as a MacRib Sandwich or a Barry Maniilow song about a Cuban night club.

Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl
With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there
She would merengue and do the cha-cha
And while she tried to be a star
Tony always tended bar...

Sure, much traditional country music was written and recorded by professionals, but the songs of Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams  were simply a refinement on what local people had been singing from time immemorial.  Charleston and Birmingham now have famous restaurants but the basis is still Southern and local.  Perhaps more to the point is that if you go to an upper South diner serving meat and three, you are given real food, very much like what local people eat at home.  Who makes New York pizza at home?

The most important exception to my wildly overstated generalization is Maine lobster (and other seafood).  It is decidedly local, and, although painfully simple, absolutely delicious.  Does that mean that Maine is as deeply unique as South Carolina or Texas?  I think so, though I have only been there two or three times.  The dialects are as incomprehensible as the old Lowcountry South Carolina dialect, and the people as bizarre.

Another very distinctive culture region in America is the far North stretching from northern Michigan out to perhaps northern Minnesota and the Dakotas.  It's a cultural mishmash, dominated by Germans and Scandinavians but with strong elements of Russians, Finns, Poles, and even Southern Slavs.  There is, alas, no distinctive cuisine, unless "really bad" can count as a distinction, but in the sticks there are still people who eat a lot of venison, grouse, and fish, and there is actually good Lake Superior trout and Whitefish in places like Bayfield.

Why didn't the frozen north develop a distinctive cuisine?  My guess is too much ethnic diversity, and the contributing folk cuisines of the Scandinavians and Poles is something better left undiscussed.  My wife and I once saw a promotional film entitled "Norway, Land of Giants," which starred a very skeptical John Cleese.  At one point he talks about the food and singles out some lutefisk.  "This is a kind of cured fish," he observes, "though what it was cured of, we'll never know."