American cuisine

American cuisine consists of the cooking style and traditional dishes prepared in the United States. It has been significantly influenced by Europeans, indigenous Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and many other cultures and traditions. Principal influences on American cuisine are Native American, Irish, British, West African, Greek and Italian cuisines.^[1]

While some of American cuisine is fusion cuisine, many regions in the United States have a specific regional cuisine. Several are deeply rooted in ethnic heritages, such as American Chinese, Cajun, New Mexican, Louisiana Creole, Pennsylvania Dutch, Soul food, Tex-Mex, and Tlingit.

American cuisine saw significant expansion during the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily due to the influx of immigrants from different nations. This has allowed for the current rich diversity in food dishes throughout the country.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} This was driven in part by the many chefs and television personalities who contributed to the rise of the culinary arts in America.

Native Americans origins: American cuisine before 1600[edit]

See also: Native American cuisine

Diorama of Iroquois planting the "Three Sister" crops; squash, maize and climbing beans

Early Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods in early American cuisine that have been blended with the methods of early Europeans to form the basis of what is now American cuisine.

Nearly all regions and subregions of the present day cuisine have roots in the foodways of Native Americans, who lived in tribes numbering in the thousands. Prior to 1600, native peoples lived off the land in very diverse bioregions and had done so for thousands of years, often living a nomadic life where their diet changed with the season.

Many practiced a form of agriculture revolving around the Three Sisters, the rotation of beans, maize, and squash as staples of their diet; in the East, this was documented as early as the 1620s in Of Plimoth Plantation, evidenced by the pages William Bradford wrote regarding Squanto: he showed them the traditional regional method of burying a fish or eel in a mound with seeds for maize to improve the soil; this itself is also part of the widely practiced phenomenon of companion planting.^[7][8]

Other tribes across the land were practicing an iteration of using the same three staples, evidenced by 100 years of archaeological investigations in every region.

Wild game was equally a staple of nearly every tribe: generally speaking, deer, elk, and bison were staples as were rabbits and hare of every kind. The Cherokee of the Southern Appalachians used blowguns made of an indigenous type of bamboo to hunt squirrels.^[9]

Northern tribes like the Ojibwe of what is now the state of Michigan and the peoples of the Wabanaki of what is now the state of Maine would stalk and hunt moose, whereas their Southern counterparts, like the Choctaw or Catawba, hunted snapping turtles and other testudines,^[10][11] possums,^[12][13] and young alligators^[14] in the subtropical swamps of Louisiana and South Carolina.

Many tribes would preserve their meat in the form of pemmican, needed greatly on long journeys or to survive harsh winters.