Why did Americans not inherit the culinary traditions of the British?

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No-Conversation1940@reddit

America diverged from Great Britain in the 1770s. My guess is a sizable portion of British culinary tradition hadn't been established yet.

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ucbiker@reddit

Right. Europeans overestimate how long their traditions have lasted.

Fish and chips for example is from the 1860s.

This phenomenon is particularly funny with Italians because they’re such jerks about things being done traditionally even if a ton of iconic Italian food was invented in the 20th century.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/famous-modern-food-dishes/index.html

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It's even funnier when you find out that the vast majority of Italian dishes are not just modern, but modern re-imports from the US because such a large fraction of their population came to the US for work, worked for a decade or two, then returned to Italy with these new dishes.

Pizza is a really fun one because the pizza the US servicemembers brought back and reinvented as a mass-market fast food in the US post-WWII was based on pizza that had been brought back to Italy by these immigrants after it was transformed in the US.

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NathanGa@reddit

Fettuccine Alfredo is barely 100 years old. Apparently before 1906, Italian chefs and home cooks would just look at butter, cheese, and pasta and furrow their brow in frustration.

You're right. 1600 was a bad choice to illustrate my point anyways because chilies had already made their way to SEA by then.

Nope, everything I know is secondhand info from random videos. Sorry!

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PacSan300@reddit

Furthermore, pad Thai, probably the most famous Thai dish, was not invented until the 1930s. The motivation was actually political: to create a sense of nationalism.

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_Nocturnalis@reddit

Creating a sense of nationalism by making a new dish is quite a plan.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Reminds me of the legend that surrounds the Pizza Margherita, that it was made to resemble the Italian tricolor flag!

Speaking from a medium sized town with a Thai place. That is actually genius. I didn't think about it that way.

Now I feel stupid. I've not understood the plan for years.

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PacSan300@reddit

rawchess@reddit

Pad Thai is quite interesting in that it's significantly more "Thai" in flavor profile than most Thai noodles which are very Cantonese, yet it's relatively unpopular in Thailand itself.

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SomeDumbGamer@reddit

No Papaya. They’re native to the Americas too.

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Klutzy-Spend-6947@reddit

Chinese have been emigrating throughout Asia for hundreds of years, with Korea and Japan being the exceptions.

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DontCallMeMillenial@reddit

There's still a ton of Chinese influence in Korea.

Hell, some of the best Korean food (like jjamppong) is chinese-derived.

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Yossarian216@reddit

This is why I get annoyed when people get uppity about the “authenticity” of food, there’s basically no such thing. Food is constantly evolving, especially in the modern world where people can emigrate so easily, and ingredients are so widely available. Gatekeeping food by choosing a fixed point and declaring that to be authentic while all further evolution is inauthentic is fucking stupid.

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Calculusshitteru@reddit

Typical opinion for someone who still uses the word "uppity."

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Yossarian216@reddit

Care to engage with the actual argument, or just going to fixate on a single word choice? Would you prefer high and mighty? Or pretentious? What term would you allow to describe someone who declares themselves the arbiter of what is or isn’t authentic?

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Chinese people invented American-Chinese food. How is that inauthentic?

Also, it’s good and important to be anti-racism, but food does not have race or belong only to one group of people. Me making Plov, ravioli, Korean bbq, shepherd’s pie, and shawarma in the same week isn’t cultural appropriation (even though I’m only genetically connected to one of the ethnicities represented there). And what would those dishes have to achieve to be considered “authentic”? Does my food have to pass a purity test?

I also don’t think it’s pretentious to say that something is misnamed (i.e. when people in western PA call stuffed cabbage/cabbage rolls “pigs in a blanket” - drives me crazy). But that’s not about “authenticity”; it’s about accuracy. So perhaps Kim K’s “hot dog sushi” doesn’t fit the definition.

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Calculusshitteru@reddit

Chinese people making American Chinese food is fine. That's kind of its own genre anyway. I'm talking mostly about white Americans making international dishes, changing them, but still saying they're "authentic." Especially if they start selling them, that's crossing into cultural appropriation. If you wouldn't see it in the original country, it's not authentic.

As a home cook you can make whatever you want any way you like. But you can't really claim it's authentic if you significantly change the recipe or have no connection to the culture. And that's fine. I don't get why people are upset about calling international dishes made in America inauthentic? It doesn't have to be authentic to be delicious!

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Spirited_Ingenuity89@reddit

I don’t get why people are upset about calling international dishes made in America inauthentic?

For myself (and others on here based on their comments), “authenticity” – especially in the context of food – is a designation with no clear parameters and often constantly moving goalposts that’s used almost exclusively to gatekeep something or be disdainful of something.

Like even your earlier example of bánh mì is kind of a crazy one since it’s literally a French-Vietnamese fusion dish. Are you going to accuse the Vietnamese of appropriating baguettes, pâté, and mayo? I mean all the Vietnamese sandwich shops are making money off French culture. How is that okay? Or what about all the Mexicans that make al pastor? They’re just appropriators, right?

But you can’t really claim it’s authentic if you significantly change the recipe

But if a person from that culture changes the recipe in the exact same way, it’s authentic then? Like what if a Japanese person made that hot dog sushi. Would that make it “authentic” sushi? And what about Japanese pizza? Is it cultural appropriation?

have no connection to the culture.

And what constitutes a “connection to the culture”? This is vague at best and elitist at worst. I have sold both tacos and borsch before, and I’m neither Mexican nor Ukrainian. What “connection to the culture” would I have to have for it not to be “appropriation”?

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Calculusshitteru@reddit

Are you going to accuse the Vietnamese of appropriating baguettes, pâté, and mayo?

No, because the French are not oppressed.

But if a person from that culture changes the recipe in the exact same way, it’s authentic then? Like what if a Japanese person made that hot dog sushi. Would that make it “authentic” sushi? And what about Japanese pizza? Is it cultural appropriation?

No, it's not authentic if a Japanese person makes hot dog sushi. But it's not cultural appropriation either because Americans are not oppressed. Japanese pizza is not cultural appropriation because Italians and Italian-Americans are not oppressed.

And what constitutes a “connection to the culture”? This is vague at best and elitist at worst. I have sold both tacos and borsch before, and I’m neither Mexican nor Ukrainian. What “connection to the culture” would I have to have for it not to be “appropriation”?

I think for it to not be considered cultural appropriation, you either have to be a member of that culture, or have spent a significant amount of time in that culture and understand the cuisine. For example, I am actually certified in Japanese soba noodle making. I was taught by Japanese masters and certified in Japan. If I were to open a Japanese soba shop in America, that would probably not be cultural appropriation, although as a white person I understand why I might be accused of it, and I would rather leave it up to a Japanese soba master with more experience than me to represent their own cuisine anyway.

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Spirited_Ingenuity89@reddit

No, because the French are not oppressed. No, because Americans are not oppressed. >because Italians and Italian-Americans are not oppressed

Firstly, I reject the oppressor/oppressed paradigm. Not every context is one of oppression. Like ciabatta is essentially cultural appropriation even though neither Italian nor French culture were oppressing the other.

Essentially, you can define cultural appropriation broadly to include all cultural borrowing, in which case most instances are not exploitative or problematic. OR You can define it to just mean the exploitative theft of culture, in which almost no food borrowing would be included. But you can’t/shouldn’t conflate the constant cultural borrowing (that every culture does incessantly) with exploitation.

Secondly, since when is oppression a necessary component of cultural appropriation? In the broad definition, everybody appropriates from everybody else. In the narrow definition, exploitation is the problem, and although marginalized groups are more likely to be the targets of exploitation, they can also participate in it.

And really, the only way you can argue something is “theft” is when money is involved. (Like in the case of bánh mì, it was the Vietnamese sandwich-makers who were/are profiting.)

No, it’s not authentic if a Japanese person makes hot dog sushi.

Food made by a Japanese person isn’t authentically Japanese? You know that somebody had to be the innovator for every dish. Like chocolate chip cookies weren’t traditional American food before they were invented by that lady at the Toll House Inn. Some guy back in the Edo period first made sushi, before that it was not “traditionally Japanese.“

I think for it to not be considered cultural appropriation, you either have to be a member of that culture, or have spent a significant amount of time in that culture and understand the cuisine.

So the majority of Americans are culturally appropriating tacos? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (as the old saying goes), and certainly, if someone or something is seen in a positive light, it’s gonna be imitated. And most imitation is certainly not exploitation.

And as I already said, this is at best vague and at worst elitist.

If I were to open a Japanese soba shop in America, that would probably not be cultural appropriation, although as a white person I understand why I might be accused of it, and I would rather leave it up to a Japanese soba master with more experience than me to represent their own cuisine anyway.

This would only be exploitative cultural appropriation if Japanese people were unable to profit from making their own cuisine, and your “whiteness” is what allowed you to. Instead, Japanese cuisine is highly respected and on par with French cuisine when it comes to prestige. So no, it wouldn’t be problematic for you to open a soba shop.

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Calculusshitteru@reddit

Oppression and exploitation are the actual requirements of cultural appropriation, and it most definitely can include food. I suggest you read the definition of cultural appropriation and watch videos of Simu Liu blasting those white people for cultural appropriation of bubble tea, because he explains it better than I ever could. I'm already over this discussion that happened over 24 hours ago anyway.

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Spirited_Ingenuity89@reddit

Right so if oppression and exploitation are the requirement, then food borrowing is almost never cultural appropriation. I never said that it couldn’t include food, just that it’s unlikely and rare. So far none of the examples you put forth are oppressive or exploitative.

Your bubble tea example is kind of a perfect one. This is a multi-million dollar industry of a product that’s Asian. So Asian bubble tea shops are making bank on this product. If some non-Asians make and sell bubble tea, how does that negate or oppress the successful businesses already built by Asians? If it was actual cultural appropriation, it would be a product that Asians were prevented from selling while simultaneously a non-Asian group swiped it and sold it with great success while pretending it wasn’t actually of Asian origin.

And I’m glad you’re “over” this convo. Maybe this means you’ll stop trying to police the authenticity of food or labeling all food borrowing as “cultural appropriation.“ Just generally moving away from a postmodern framework would be beneficial.

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I feel like the end result of this argument is always some American dude who went to Mexico City for a month trying to come in and tell me "cheese Enchiladas are inauthentic and it's called pastor not trompo"

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Calculusshitteru@reddit

Lol yeah, I get it. I've lived in Japan for 17 years, I'm married to a Japanese person and have gained citizenship recently, but there are always the know-it-alls on Reddit who "went to Tokyo and Osaka for two weeks" who try to correct me about Japan stuff.

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Throw-ow-ow-away@reddit

I disagree. Authentic Chinese food is what is now commonly being eaten in China regardless of when it was invented. What we often times get in the West is heavily modified Chinese style food and it is worth pointing out the difference for those that care to eat food similar to that served in China.

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Yossarian216@reddit

So it’s only authentic if it’s current? If someone prepares food that was served in China 50 years ago is that somehow inauthentic? Seems like you agree with me that the concept of authenticity is tied to a specific time period, you just happen to choose right now.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Is it historical recreation>

I wonder what some on the thread would think about feasts put on by the SCA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Creative_Anachronism

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Spirited_Ingenuity89@reddit

Most Chinese restaurants in the US are labeled “American-Chinese.” Most America-Chinese food is based on food from the Canton (Guangdong) region in southern China. And yes, these dishes were generally Americanized, but they were Americanized by Chinese people who adapting to new contexts. And this also happened in the late 19th century, so I’m sure that Chinese food in China has evolved separately from the American-Chinese food that started ~150 years ago.

Also, China is huge, but you seem to think the whole country has the same food without regional differences.

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Throw-ow-ow-away@reddit

Well I've lived in china long enough to know that thank you very much and my point was precisely that there is a difference between American Chinese food and "authentic Chinese food". You can get American food in China, too but just because the owner is American, it doesn't mean that it will taste the same as back home because they still work with ingredients from China catering to a Chinese taste.

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

The problem is you are assuming there is a single, correct version in that other country.

Foreign countries are neither static, isolated, nor homogeneous.

No, I got the joke.

But just because you know when/where it wasn’t invented doesn’t mean you knew when/where it was. IMO, info is always good.

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maple-sugarmaker@reddit

Haha sorry. I'm on here too much. I'm out.

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We add a lot of unnecessary fat and sugar to things though. And often those additions don’t enhance the flavor.

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Yossarian216@reddit

Absolutely a valid point as well

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

This.

If you move somewhere new, your ideas, culture, and supermarket all change really fast.

Also not actually a pepper.

brownstone79@reddit

I say something similar when Europeans bring up potatoes.

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rawchess@reddit

Without the magic that is potato most of northern and eastern Europe would be <50% of their current population levels. Potato saved Europe.

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RDCAIA@reddit

Potato saved Europe.

Sufferers of the Irish potato famines rolling over in their mass graves.

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Dear-Explanation-350@reddit

The Irish know who to blame for an Gorta Mór

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That's true for Britain, though my understanding was that the Saxons et al were invitedto fill a power vacuum after Rome pulled its troops out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain

These folks never made it to Ireland. The Norse gone a-viking did.

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Eodbatman@reddit

I mean they did eventually conquer Ireland, though they obviously didn’t replace the Irish population wide. The Angles and Saxons came to Britain in large enough numbers to change the ethnic makeup in addition to political changes. The later Danes also came in large enough numbers that they were a majority population in the Danelaw, until they were genocided (though they’d mixed enough that Northern Europe is basically all related as is).

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Brian Boru stopped the Vikings at Clontarf. The Norse married into the Irish clans, so there were Irish and Norse on the losing side. The Anglo-Saxons never led a conquest of Ireland, though they may have been troops for the Norman knights.

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Sufferers of the Irish potato famines rolling over in their mass graves.

As i understand, the Irish potato famine happened because the Brits forced them to stop growing potatoes and raise cattle instead.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

No. Converting grain fields to pasture or flax? Yes. The flax was for the linen industry.

Potatoes could be grown in lazy beds on what might otherwise be waste ground.

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Low-Cat4360@reddit

Potatoes really are the only thing that kept the Irish alive, even though half of them didnt survive. The issue was that they weren't allowed to consume any of the other crops or meats because the British took them all. If they didn't have the potatoes, I dont think there would be many Irish people today. Potatoes were the only food available during the "famine" (deliberate genocide by the English)

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HappyCamper2121@reddit

My understanding is that the Irish were using a single genetic clone for their entire potato crop and that lead to rampant disease. A fungus took over, I think. That's what happens when you don't have genetic diversity in your food chain.

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The USDA says that you don’t need to discard green potatoes, but you should prepare them properly: “Peel the skins, shoots, and any green color; that is where the solanines concentrate.” Be a little aggressive if the flesh is still green beneath the peel and remove all traces of it.

https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/can-you-eat-green-potatoes

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jabbadarth@reddit

Exactly, no one outside the middle east and Asia had anywhere near the amount of spices we have now jist a few hundred years ago.

The spice trade was massive once Europeans gained access to the east because it was so new and novel.

1500s, 1600s, early 1700s most people were eating pretty bland food.

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Saltpork545@reddit

Correct, it was also extremely local food so the diet was mostly based on what was available to relatively insular communities and groups based on geography.

The lack of refrigeration, specific nutrients, spices, education on preservation is the why behind food we now turn our noses towards like lutafisk or acorn meal or stewed crab or pemmican.

You can try this on your own pretty easily if you live in a temperate climate.

This winter, for a couple of weeks, live on a bag of potatoes, whatever protein is local to your area that's available in winter, 2 onions, 1 carrot and saltines. You have the salt from the saltines and a little extra as you see fit. Nothing else.

Have some coffee or tea if you're feeling fancy.

Saltines are as close as we have to hard tack, which was a common food that stored well through winter and took the place of bread when flour was more scarce or expensive and could be bought or made, but was part of lots of early American winters rations.

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Bawstahn123@reddit

>2 onions, 1 carrot

Eh, likely as many onions and carrots as you want. Root vegetables were very easy to store.

Add in cabbage and you would be mostly all set.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

I would {exaggeration mode on} sooner starve than try to survive on onions, {/em}, or any allium, with the exception of garlic used in moderation.

[ r/onionhate ]

I would be rooting for turnips, rutabagas, potatoes, radishes.... I like a lot of root veggies.

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donuttrackme@reddit

To be fair, even rich people in other parts of the world enjoy eating things like pig's feet, ox tail, chicken feet, snails, offal etc. It's more of an American/Western thing to only eat the easiest, tastiest, tender parts of the animal and ignore the rest. However, I do still agree with your overall point.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

That's what our poor ancestors ate.

Grandpa: "Listen boy, when I was your age, we'd eat every last part of the damned hog, right down to its poop chute. And I bet none of your little friends knows how to make squirrel stew that won't keep you from shittin' for a week!"

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donuttrackme@reddit

I mean, I personally still eat and enjoy all those things. And if I have children I will also feed them those things and they will hopefully enjoy them as well. Like others have said, oxtail is expensive now. Oysters and lobster are expensive now. They used to be what the poorest of the poor ate. Now they're luxury ingredients.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Shellfish has become expensive because as our cities and suburbs located near estuaries grew, those waters became more and more polluted. We destroyed the habitat. Enormous amounts of seafood were gathered from waters near Manhattan Island and the other waters of the New York Bight. Overfishing caused the resource to decline while habitat destruction made it tough for it to recover.

Sandhogs who built New York's bridges used to complain about how often they were fed lobster, complaining it was convicts' food!

I grew up on the shores of the Great South Bay, and our village had a plant for canning clams. Some of my high school buddies clammed as a summer job. That plant is closed now, and great sections of the bay are off limits to clamming. Oystering and lobster trapping have been similarly affected.

Similar problems of habitat loss down on the Chesapeake Bay.

https://www.cbf.org/issues/habitat/index.html

There's a lot of effort to restore estuaries, seeding them with clams and oysters, even farming them in special structures. Bivalves actually clean water, by filtering impurities, so that's helpful even if one doesn't like to eat shellfish, or won't, for religious reasons.

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SkiingAway@reddit

Not sure I'd really include ox tail in this list.

It's pretty popular in the US these days, and is very much not a cheap cut of meat to purchase anymore.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

It used to be! In Italy as well.

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donuttrackme@reddit

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InevitableSweet8228@reddit

Because they had something amazing to come back to and someone amazing to bring their loot home to?

You're probably right!

Rule Britannia, indeed!

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itsatrapp71@reddit

Possibly, possibly... but on the whole I don't believe so! Lol

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InevitableSweet8228@reddit

I mean, they brought a lot of loot back home to their sweethearts and they always returned, longing for a home cooked meal and a decent cup of tea.

Which, in many ways, led to the Spice Wars in those centuries: https://spiceadvice.com/history/the-15th-to-the-17th-century/

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hakumiogin@reddit

It wasn't bland-bland. Everyone around the world had onions and garlic and salt. And fermented foods were used to be even more popular.

I think it boils down to competition. In NYC it better be good, because if it isn't, you won't be able to keep up with the 50 other places within a 2 mile radius.

It's like what Southerners claim about BBQ outside the South, or us Southwesterners say about Mexican(-American) food. The further away someone ventures from that dense network of competition and high expectations, the less pressure there is for them to make it up to snuff.

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b-sharp-minor@reddit

Good points. BTW, it's the roll, right? The meat has to be good, but the bread always makes or breaks the sandwich.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

You'd have to ask someone from Philly. I'm as far away from there as you can get without striking out for either Alaska or Hawaii.

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BlueLondon1905@reddit

Because in 99% of situations it’s good and never claims to be something it’s not. Italian American is a perfectly good standalone category of food. (I grew up on it)

Italian immigrants from Italy to the United States invented these recipes because they had to use the ingredients that were available. Just as every other category of food did at some point, and still is to this day

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icyDinosaur@reddit

Honestly my only gripe with Italian-American food is that it lives in a global world where the -American part can't just be implied, so recipes online can get misleading.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

What a lot of people don't realize is that Italian food in Italy is heavily regionalized. Tell people in Emilia-Romagna that their food is the same stuff as those bastards up in Liguria and they'll start fighting each other like hooligans, but first they'll join forces to destroy whoever makes such a statement.

Italian-American cuisine is just another regional variation, IMO. (And it has regional variations of its own.) It's just that there's an entire ocean, rather than a river or a line of hills, between them and the others.

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Delores_Herbig@reddit

That’s why immigrants in Italy open up pizza shops instead of restaurants focused on their home country’s cuisine.

I actually noticed this in Italy, but didn’t think too much about it at the time. I live in Los Angeles. I’m used to having food from all different cuisines everywhere. Within walking distance of me, there’s an Indian restaurant, a sushi restaurant, a Chinese place, a Korean restaurant, three Mediterranean spots, a “Latin American” place, two Thai restaurants, an Italian place, two Cambodian restaurants, an Irish pub, a Honduran spot, and so many Mexican restaurants and taco trucks it’s impossible to count. If I wanted to broaden that radius, I could fairly easily get food from pretty much anywhere.

But when I went around Italy, even in restaurant-heavy areas of the biggest cities, there were very few non-Italian restaurants. Compared to LA, there was basically nothing. Even in small cities in the US, finding a Chinese, Italian, Indian, and (the ubiquitous) Mexican restaurant is simple, plus whatever ethnicity has a high population in that region.

Italian food is amazing, but I can’t imagine eating just that. I’d also be unhappy to live in a city in the US that only had typical “American” fare restaurants be the only option. I figured it was to do with just having fewer immigrants, so it’s interesting to hear that it’s largely a cultural aversion.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

You can find other stuff, but it's usually tucked away in the non-touristy areas. You have to either be a local or know where to look.

This is also true for the best restaurants that serve regional cuisine (becuase there's like 80 Italian cuisines, not one). Most the tourist places are a rip, even in the poshest quarters. But then some kind soul will steer you to some random place in some seedy neighborhood next to a freeway overpass, where the inside looks like the set of a 1970s porn flick. And it'll be so good that you literally cry.

Anyways, as for cuisines from outside of Italy, it can be hit-or-miss. I can't much complain about Chinese food here. On the one hand it's less heavy on the stomach, but on the other they don't have orange chicken (but then that's a Chinese-American thing, I think).

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ComesInAnOldBox@reddit

I've found this to be the case in most places in Europe. Especially the "1970s porn flick" vibe.

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sjedinjenoStanje@reddit

Well, I can understand it from their perspective: compared to other European cuisines, Italian cuisine has to be the best. You'll find Italian restaurants (and at least pizzerias) everywhere in the world, while it's pretty hard to find Hungarian, German or even Spanish restaurants to the same degree.

But, yeah, "culinary purism" is tired and actually it was because Italians didn't practice it that their cuisine is so much better than their neighbors'.

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serious_sarcasm@reddit

Continental cuisine is all over the place. Beers, brats, and sauerkraut basically define the upper Midwest.

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Mexican is very European, though the worse Mexican I ever had was in Poland.

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

This happens all the time with all kinds of foods.

If I had a nickel for every American I saw trying to find "authentic nachos" or "real fajitas" in Mexico City, not realizing that both of those are primarily Texan dishes, I would be reach.

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canisdirusarctos@reddit

The ubiquity of Tex-Mex food in the US is fascinating as well. Fajitas, for a great example, are not only from Texas, but don’t even have a true analogue in Mexico. The closest similar dish is alambres.

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

I also find the variation in what the word "fajita" means really interesting.

In its original Tejano version, "fajita" is a cut of beef, not a dish. So at a tejano place, you can get a "fajita taco" but not "fajitas".

Then of course, there's "fajita" the Tex-Mex dish you think of.

In central Mexico, "fajitas" means a plate of grilled chicken, usually with beans and corn tortillas.

In Britain, it's just any crap you can think of in a flour tortilla.

Three of the four are quite good

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1200multistrada@reddit

lol

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Saltpork545@reddit

This is correct. I'm a food history nerd and what most people consider staple and 'old' foods simply aren't. They're inventions of the last 175 years or so.

The industrial revolution also revolutionized food and WW1 and WW2 also had huge changes on food and food culture globally, so much so I will suspect that the 20th century centuries from now will be seen as a modern civilization Columbian exchange.

Tamihera@reddit

And apple pies. The Romans didn’t call Britain the land of apples for nothing.

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ucbiker@reddit

Well neither I nor OP said we got nothing from them.

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RickySlayer9@reddit

My favorite is “I will never eat Alfredo sauce, it’s not traditional. I stick to my marinara” yk make with tomatoes…from America…

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rawbface@reddit

from the 1860s.

Afternoon tea didn't become a thing until the 1840s.

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pgm123@reddit

The tea boycott was part of it, but another part is the proximity to the largest coffee suppliers in the world. That's a bit of a chicken and egg problem (Brazil isn't that close), but at one time New Orleans was the largest coffee port in the world, followed by New York, and San Francisco was in the top five. Up until cupping coffee to rate quality was invented for the San Francisco market, global coffee was judged by a standard invented in New York (basically how the beans looked).

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rhino369@reddit

Americans boycotted tea right before the revolution because of trade disputes.

And they got a taste for coffee instead.

The bigger question is why do the Brits drink tea instead of coffee.

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blackhawk905@reddit

1920s and later with it really kicking off post WWII especially in the 50s and 60s. If you look at the list of British colonies and when they gained independence or has the first stage of independence it goes US 1776, Afghanistan 1919 lmao

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PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt@reddit

Most other British colonies gained their independence in the 1900's. So, they are both going to be a lot more "culturally British" in general both due to the recent timing of being independent and having more time under British rule when these culinary traditions were invented.

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PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt@reddit

Although the Midwest's Friday night fish fries aren't descended from the British dish. They were made popular by Catholic immigrants who didn't eat meat on Fridays.

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thelordchonky@reddit

Thank God for Tejanos. Without them, we wouldn't have the wonderful Tex-Mex cuisine so many of us Americans love.

r2d3x9@reddit

And the huge population influx circa 1900-1910. Ellis island, etc. influence of slaves from Africa. Influence of Native Americans and indigenous foods like cranberries, blueberries, corn.

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For one, we did not have an amicable breakup with the UK. Canada, New Zealand, and Australia still have the Queen on their money. I think the rejection of tea and adaptation of coffee was a conscious “FU” to the British (tea taxes, Boston tea party).

There are still a few other remnants of British cooking. We’re big dessert pie people, which was likely from the British meat pie tradition. we also developed chicken pot pie, which is probably the only popular savory type of pie in the US (except maybe Shepards pie). in some areas of the northern Midwest, pasties are still eaten since they were an easy lunch for ore miners. I think our “baked beans” what we have with barbecue likely developed from British beans, but you can fact check me on that.

A lot of American baked goods are based more on German and Dutch tradition than English/French. Waves of non-English immigrants brought their own food traditions - and keep in mind that New York City was originally New Amsterdam. American cookies, for example, come from the Dutch "koekie".

Additionally, there were technological innovations: American-style biscuits were invented after the creation of baking powders.

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bub166@reddit

Also Czech, depending where you're at. Kolaches and poppy seed muffins/bread/etc. are ubiquitous around here and also in Texas to my understanding. Lots of Scandinavian deserts as well, at least at family reunions and things like that.

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LunaTehNox@reddit

Yes! There are multiple little Czech stops along the way between DFW and Austin. Kolaches, preserves, knickknacks, ornaments

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bloobityblu@reddit

And by multiple, you mean one?

LOL I know there are others in town in West but I think only one right on the interstate right?

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Cormetz@reddit

Fun thing about that. Texans love kolaches, but not what you're thinking of. Some places in central Texas will still call actual kolaches the right thing (sweet and open faced), but throughout most of Texas what is referred to as a kolache would be unrecognizable to people in Czechia.

Originally they were called klobasnik and they are bread wrapped around a savory filling. They were created by Czech immigrants to Texas. Mass produced ones are often just a basic sausage with American cheese, especially in Houston. Back in central Texas you'll find them with better filling like Pan sausage with cheese or sauerkraut. The weirdest one I don't like at all, that is definitely an east Texas thing, is filled with boudin (the Cajun kind, not the French kind, another food that has the same name despite being very different), it's just too much bread and rice.

In fact I want to find a group of Czechs and French people and tell them we have boudin kolaches and watch their heads explode.

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link3945@reddit

From my understanding, Texas Kolaches (which have spread to Louisiana as well) tend to be more savory, with usually sausage or something wrapped in something like a brioche dough. From Wikipedia I think you would call them klobasnek?

You can get fruit kolaches that I think are more like what you would call a kolache, but the savory one is more Texan.

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bub166@reddit

Yep that's right, they are popular here as well but we'd probably call them klobasnek, although honestly that word has kinda faded over time and a lot of people kinda have their own name for it at this point lol. Kolaches are always sweet by default here, although I have heard people call klobasnek "meat kolaches" (among hundreds of other random things).

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tangledbysnow@reddit

Yup. I agree we are definitely familiar with both sweet and savory here. And I agree I think most people call them meat kolaches or kolaches with meat (same thing in my book) with the default being sweet not savory. Personally poppy or cream cheese are the best…now I want a kolache darn it.

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mynumberistwentynine@reddit

we'd probably call them klobasnek

Granadafan@reddit

The Full English Breakfast wasn’t popular in England until the Victorian era, after the Revolution

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aculady@reddit

Long John Silver's is a fairly popular fast food fish and chips shop. We have it; we just don't call it "fish and chips".

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DerekL1963@reddit

Meat pies: we got them and they evolved into pot pies (chicken pot pie in particular).

Sharing the video about sweet tea for people who haven't seen it:

I was under the impression that their custard was equivalent to our pudding.

Fish and chips is fried fish and fried potatoes, to my understanding. I've had that my entire life.

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wooq@reddit

We have custard too. Boston cream pie, custard-filled donuts, etc. We also have imported custard desserts like creme brulee and flan. We also have pudding which is usually thickened with starch, and more often than not, flavored with chocolate, pistachio, etc.

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timdr18@reddit

Yeah pudding is just one type of custards but there’s plenty of others too. Crème brûlée and flan are custards, as is the filling of a Boston crème donut.

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Efficient-Judge-9294@reddit (OP)

Afternoon tea: Absolutely a 19th century tradition. We were long independent by the time that became a thing.

Most people in the US do not have British ancestors.

Fish n Chips is very common in the USA. I can get it at probably 20 restaurants within a 10 min drive of my apartment.

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strange_chimney@reddit

I believe many more Americans have British ancestry than is acknowledged because research relies on self-reporting. If British ancestry is remote enough, those surveyed might be completely unaware of it and, therefore, any cultural connection is nonexistent.

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Royal_Today_1509@reddit

If we are talking about Whites in the US. Yes there were a lot of Anglo Saxons in 1700 and 1800s. Settled in East Coast. .

But other Europeans didn't arrive until well after Civil War. 1880-1920s. Most of this immigration was not from England but lots of Eastern European, German, Irish, Scananavian countries.

Then the next immigration boom from Europe wasn't until the 1960s.

I live in the Midwest. Tons of Germany ancestory, Norwegian, Swedish, and Irish. Of course I'm only talking about the Whites. There is no British culture here. Maybe more so in other areas of USA

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TurbulentChange2503@reddit

British food, especially the English fare is notoriously BAD. We have a joke here in the U.S. , the English invaded half the world for spuces and then DIDNT use them.

Mushy peas and chips? Nah thanks. I'll pass.

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observantpariah@reddit

Just lucky, I guess.

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Jiakkantan@reddit

Canada also does not recognize those as comfort foods! Sorry to burst your bubble!

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nwbrown@reddit

Because after kicking out the Brits we got immigrants from countries where taste is not considered a vice.

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OutOfTheBunker@reddit

Why did Americans not inherit the culinary traditions of the British?

TrustNoSquirrel@reddit

We need more meat pies! But yeah that one guy made a lot of sense - hadnt been around too long. We do have these things though, just not as staples.

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Few_Profit826@reddit

Doesn't matter long as we aint stuck with British food I'm happy

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nooneiknow800@reddit

They did in the beginning, but there were local ingredients and the coming together of different cultures

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Upbeat_Experience403@reddit

We have fish and chips it’s just ordered as fish and French fries

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LazWolfen@reddit

Mainly because we are a mixing pot of races, cultures, and incentive food artists.

My sisters who live in The City know all the best shops to buy things like Irish Rashers (bacon) for your full fry-up. Woodside, Queens is a good bet.

What else did we sometimes have? Shepherd's Pie (more properly cottage pie, if we used beef in place of lamb) was a favorite. Bird in the nest/hole for breakfast?

The joke (?) in my family was that Irish cuisine was limited, because in the 1840s the problem wasn't how to cook the food, but how to get any, at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

American Irish had to make do. The bacon here in the States was cut differently. A bacon (ham) and cabbage dinner became corned beef & cabbage because salt beef was cheap and plentiful, given how much cattle was raised and shipped to the East Coast cities and Chicago to be packed. Being rich Americans, we adopted tame versions of Italian-American and Chinese dishes. Buying supermarket bread, sliced, became a status symbol. Delicous, crusty, home-baked bread was a thing poor folks relied on. (!) People stopped growing a kitchen garden and canning their own in favor of buying canned veggies at the store. I recall my Italian-American friends growing their own veg longer. Tony's papa could be proud of his tomatoes!

Some foods thought to be quintessentially American are actually British, such as apple pie and baked beans - though the molasses in the beans is a North American addition.

https://www.paulreverehouse.org/boston-baked-beans-a-case-study-in-culinary-tradition/

The potato and the tomato are New World plants, so Europeans who employed them in their cookery owe a hat tip to the tribal people of Leftpondia who cultivated them, chilis and other peppers, and maize (American corn.) That Thanksgiving/Christmas turkey is also from the Americas.

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Responsible-Test8855@reddit

Poor girl gold 🥇.

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LilRick_125@reddit

culinary traditions of the British

In WWI, maybe less so, but in WWII you had actual American Nazis who were on the actual wrong side of history and absolutely needed to be fought.

As for the US getting involved in WWI, it did so for the same reason it got involved in WWII - American Interests.

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NorwegianSteam@reddit

WWI put it on life support, WWII pulled the plug.

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Turgius_Lupus@reddit

Not really, the damage was done by then. In WWI the propaganda was "Kill the subhuman and savage Hun!" In WWII the propaganda was "the good ones already came here."

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NorwegianSteam@reddit

My grandmother was born in a German town in Kansas in 1926. She learned English in school when she started going at 7, Marysville still had at least one German language newspaper going when she was growing up, mass may have still been done in German. None of that survived WWII.

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rhino369@reddit

The biggest reason is that German immigration mostly stopped when Germany unified.

Assimilation happens quickly. The first generation born here fits into America well but had a connection to the past. The second has little connection beyond grandparents. The third has barely any connection beyond maybe some family dishes.

Italian immigration didn’t end until recently so it’s more visible. Irish ended during the Great Depression so there are still a lot of second and third generation Irish immigrants walking around.

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Turgius_Lupus@reddit

Missing the point. German was one of the largest if not second largest ethnicities in the country going back to before the revolution. There was a pronounced German cultural character that existed since the 1600s in the U.S. that was largely eradicated in favor of a non discript vanilla if you would anglo identity in the early 20th century.

It's not an issue of immigrant assimilation as it was an aspect of the nation's heritage and mainstream culture that was removed over nationalistic war fervor and popular political pressure. Something that has happened time and time again throughout history and is still happening today.

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Welpe@reddit

Oh man, yeah. Our family is scotch Irish plantationers too though I don’t think we ever had anyone pretend to be Irish over it. It was fascinating to learn about simply because you never hear much about the Plantation system in the US (Damn if THAT isn’t an ambiguous sentence…but I am talking about the British colonization of Ireland obviously, not the US slavery issue). Although it kinda feels bad to see Londonderry pop up so much.

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ritchie70@reddit

I think that German eradication varies a lot across the country.

I grew up in Illinois farm country. I found property records from the 1860's online and the names written on them were 1) largely German and 2) almost all names I recognized from families still around town.

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ImWicked39@reddit

My dads family are Shenandoah Germans and this completely tracks which is super unfortunate. My grandfather (b1916) and grandmother(b1920) were both fluent in German but rarely spoke it in public but they did teach my father and his siblings the language.

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LieutenantStar2@reddit

Yes! One set of my great-grandparents were born in Germany, and they refused to speak German after WW1. My grandfather was sad as a teen that his Italian friends were bilingual while he wasn’t.

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Friendly_Molasses532@reddit

Germany was a huge influence on our culinary. Dishes like the cheeseburger, chicken fries steak, brats, hotdogs pretzels, light beer and Texas BBQ spice rubs (German/mexican) are just a small amount of examples

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OppositeRock4217@reddit

Yeah the revolution which involved Americans throwing tea into the ocean definitely got Americans to reject tea and embrace coffee

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kaetror@reddit

Also, as far as tea goes, there are historical reasons why tea isn't as much of a thing here. You can thank King George for that.

You can thank American businessmen wanting to rip off customers.

Yes, there was a tax imposed on tea (brought in to pay for the 7 years war defending the colonies) and this is usually where the US version of the story ends.

But it's not the end. American businessmen, seeing a chance to make some money, get in contact with the Dutch and start smuggling tea in. Obviously as it's untaxed it's far cheaper and everyone buys that instead.

The British government realise nobody is buying their tea, so they're making no tax revenue. So they scrap the tax.

The tea that was thrown in the harbour was completely untaxed!

But why would they throw untaxed tea in the sea to protest unjust taxes? Because without the tax the British tea was cheaper; these businessmen were about to lose their market (and their profits).

That's why they carried out the Boston tea party. It wasn't some noble stand about freedom of the common man, it was about keeping their monopoly.

So many of the American founding myths about freedom are just that, myths. The reality is it's a bunch of rich dudes wanting more wealth for themselves, and spinning a story to justify it.

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jcstan05@reddit

I appreciate the more detailed context. I was just making a cheeky remark while leaving the specific historical reasons ambiguous.

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JohnnyBrillcream@reddit

Yes, they had a Tea Party in Boston to celebrate him.

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ZealousidealFee927@reddit

I do thank him, coffee all the way!

Murica!!

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nc45y445@reddit

y’all are also forgetting the African influence on American cuisine, soul food, BBQ, everything we think of as Southern cooking . . . .

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Someones-PC@reddit

We have all those foods in America. You can get fish and chips at many restaurants

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ZaphodG@reddit

I grew up in a Massachusetts coastal village where the donut shop stayed open Friday evening and did fish & chips in newspaper. There was another restaurant called Chippy’s. Fish & chips is still pretty universal here. Cole slaw instead of mushy peas and French fries instead of English fatter chips.

I’m old enough to remember restaurants that served bland English fries-style food. The grocery store has crumpets. Scones have always been around. The English Sunday roast is pretty similar to 1960s New England cuisine.

Cormetz@reddit

How do Americans use spices like the British? In fact how do Americans use spices in general? We're a mix of lots of people. Maybe in the Midwest and northeast where not a lot of spices are used? In Louisiana and the southwest even the white folks know how to use spices more than the British.

Breading and frying are definitely not British. Fried Chicken is a mix of Scottish and African cuisines. Chicken fried steak is what happens when you put Germans somewhere with more cattle than pigs (Schnitzel itself not really even being German/Austrian since the story goes that a general brought the style over from Italy).

American Chinese food was established by Chinese immigrants to the west, most of which were from southern China (which is why most of it uses rice instead of noodles). They began to adapt it to suit the pallet of their American clientele and use what was easily accessible. It has nothing to do with Britain whatsoever. If anything, the recipes and style of American Chinese food was exported to Europe from the US since the US had a much larger influx of Chinese immigrants earlier on.

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_Nocturnalis@reddit

Our coffee is British? Other than toast, this is a weird list. You can generally tell an American by how they use forks and knives.

What, dribbling batter into the pan of drippings and calling it pudding isn’t good enough for you? There is a special version of TOSTITOS® Chunky Salsa Mild, an extra mild in England as the standard mild was too spicy, lol.

Taco Bell pre covid was my grab a 99¢ item in town when feeling peckish. Now, I make my own burritos and bring them into town, as I am not paying $4 for the snack and have to eat it in my car.

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nasadowsk@reddit

I think basically anything is better than British food.

They are good at candy, but they suck at everything else.

BluePandaYellowPanda@reddit

Tack-o is pretty bad, but tar-co is worse imo. When I lived in Colorado, loads of people said tar-co and it drove me crazy (my gf is mexican-American, so I've been taught to pronounce it properly or I get the choncla! Lmao)

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SigilumSanctum@reddit

I refuse to watch that show/episode on principle, and I'm not even Mexican. This thread has me craving Birria now. I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.

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According-Bell-3654@reddit

Depends what state you’re in.

California? Mexican wins easily, lots of Mexican immigrants

New York? Italian wins easily, lots of Italian immigrants

Your answer basically depends on how many of that cuisine’s immigrants reside in a given area

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

A lot of people have moved from Mexico to New York lately.

Lots of Poblanos and people from the exurbs around Mexico City there.

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JohnnyBrillcream@reddit

Honestly I'd say your going to find foods from Central/Latin American woven into the Mexican category in many places.

Tex-Mex doesn't extend much outside of Texas but more authentic Latin American foods do. My parents live in Maryland and when I visit they want to take me to the newest "Mexican" place. Turns out most are more Central America cuisines then Mexican.

We have Mexican

The Brits have Indian

Germany and Scandinavia have Middle Eastern

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

The Dutch have Indonesian food.

benjpolacek@reddit

Because a lot of us aren't really British anymore. Plenty are German, Italian or Slavic depending on where you are at.

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Disastrous_Head_4282@reddit

The British had to go to India to get spices because they knew their food was shit.

For real though, I’m pretty sure that the colonists wanted to do everything they could to differentiate themselves from the British.

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normalguy214@reddit

British food sucks, that's why. Go try some southern food, then come back and ask why America didn't keep British culinary traditions. Lol. Texas bbq, biscuits and gravy. Even sweet tea is better than British tea.

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coffeewalnut05@reddit

Southern food is pretty similar to our traditional food, if I’m honest.

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normalguy214@reddit

Come on now. Have you been to the south? Have you seen Josh and Jace on tiktok? They are proof British food is not comparable.

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coffeewalnut05@reddit

I’ve looked at lists for southern foods and for almost every one of them, I can find a British equivalent/identical. Some examples: mashed potatoes, macaroni cheese, fried chicken, peaches and cream, banana pudding, chess pie, peach cobbler, apple pie, biscuits and gravy, pot pie, etc. Lots of use of potatoes, butter, cheddar cheese and milk in recipes.

Responsible-Test8855@reddit

Because Mexican food is 1,000% better than any of those things.

Also, when Britain ruled over the colonies, they were what, 1/4 of the size that it we are now?

Not to say I don't love my hot tea, but that is mostly because I love Chai, which is not exactly British eithet.

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PhD_Pwnology@reddit

We have all those things, though. Where are you getting the idea that we don't have those?

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Little-Bones@reddit

We picked the traditions that were worth keeping. Fortunately, that doesn't include most British cuisine.

Fish and chips are fairly easy to find in the States.

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ninjette847@reddit

The best fish and chips I've had was in Alaska and the PNW. I've had a lot in the UK and Australia and didn't come close. OP is acting like we just decided to stop eating fish and chips in Kansas when it's still popular on an island.

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Efficient-Judge-9294@reddit (OP)

Easy to find? Sure. Popular? Not at all

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firesquasher@reddit

Fish on the coast 🙂👍

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Reduxalicious@reddit

My Girlfriend lives in the Seattle Area and I was genuinely surprised (In a good way) How Popular Fish and Chips were out that way.

And as you stated you can find them at almost any Sports type Bar/Restaurant anywhere in the US.

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OodalollyOodalolly@reddit

Fish tacos are far more popular in my area. For the UK people- it’s the same fried fish as fish n chips but we put it in a corn tortilla with cabbage, salsa, like and cream instead

witty__username5@reddit

Popular depends on individual preferences.

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Yankee_chef_nen@reddit

When I was growing up in New England, fish and chips were everywhere.

Also as a professional chef I’ve found fish and chips to be very popular whenever I’ve put it on my menus.

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prometheus_winced@reddit

Try feeding fish to 5x as many people, when 200 million of them live further from a coast than the width of the UK at its widest point.

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Master-Collection488@reddit

As posted elsewhere in the thread, fish & chips wasn't really a popular item in the UK until the 1800s. The earliest fish and chips probably got to the U.S. was after WW2.

Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips was a franchised chain of fast food restaurants that was founded in 1969 and started to peter out come the 1980s. Their earlier ads called it "The meal you can't make at home." Later on they added on and promoted boneless breaded fried chicken (they maybe invented chicken tenders, but didn't call them that), then they switched their slogan "We are something else!"

Arthur Treacher's I want to say did a LOT of advertising throughout the 1970s. I don't think it ever really caught on as a fast food chain in the U.S. A lot of franchises wound up closing down/converting to something else as time went on. Nowadays there's just TWO in the U.S.A., one is in my town. When I first saw their in-house ad (combined with a local pizza chain) it was like a flashback to my childhood.

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green_rog@reddit

Ivar Haglund, pier 54 in Seattle, next to the aquarium, started selling fish and chips in 1938. Ivar's restaurants have been a major regional player, similar in scale and influence to Toshi's Teriyaki. Don't just blow me off with, "Ya, sure, you betcha."

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TBF, it’s not even that in the UK anymore

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Agile_Property9943@reddit

Is it fried chicken now other than curry?

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Maquina_en_Londres@reddit

A curry house is a different niche than a chippy.

A chippy, a fried chicken house, or a shawarma place fill the "as cheap and fast as possible" niche. Think your fast burger places and taco trucks of the world.

Your neighborhood curry house is more a "something nice you can eat at home" thing. Basically the Chinese take out or delivery pizza of the Urban UK.

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shizarou@reddit

Yes, fried chicken is probably the cheapest takeaway option. Even curry can be pricey depending where you are in the country, Chinese food is a better bet, but fish and chips are really expensive!

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captainstormy@reddit

We even still call it Fish and chips even though we call that particular side item fries.

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Lastofthehaters@reddit

Well, just like their engineering British food sucks

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Some-Air1274@reddit

Some things that the US did not inherit from the UK:

parsley sauce
brown sauce
bread sauce
sausage rolls
back bacon

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TreyHansel1@reddit

sausage rolls

We have those, but they're very different. They're either German based(pretzel-dogs or pretzel brats for example) or they're kind of our own thing like "Pigs in a Blanket", which is a sausage wrapped in a pancake and typically on a stick. Also corn dogs.

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Some-Air1274@reddit

Never seen them can you share a photo?

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Status-Inevitable-36@reddit

Because there is way better stuff to eat. Tastier and healthier.

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SmellyTerror@reddit

I'm Australian and I have no idea where to get a meat pie near me*. My usual lunch in banh mi and sushi. I haven't had custard, a tart or pudding since I was a kid.

I do eat fish and chips though. Chips are everywhere including the US. Do Americans not do fried/battered cheap-ass fish on the coasts?

*Wait, actually the chinese-family bakery near me does sell meat pies. I should get one.

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OhHeyJeannette@reddit

Because of Slavery & Immigration. Outside cultures heavily influenced the American palate.

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most metros? I am in Seattle and we're not taste makers or trend setters up here. At least not for food. We had the music lime lite back in the day.

It is very flavorful and spicy similar to Indian. Not as much seafood as Thai. Ethiopian uses a lot of the same spices and aromatics as Indian. In the comments section in YouTube of Ethiopian recipe vids there's Indian people calling them food cousins.

Due to all of the geopolitical conflict [which has supplied us with immigrants], a lot of people will promote the food as Eritrean rather than Ethiopian.

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TreyHansel1@reddit

I'm in St. Louis and the closest kind of food we have is like shawarma and Indian food.

I don't think that's a very applicable thing for most of the country....

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Confetticandi@reddit

I’m from St. Louis and there was an Ethiopian food in the Loop for a long time before the place closed recently and there’s a few Ethiopian restaurants in the South Grand area.

Or do you live in like Arnold or Belleville “St. Louis.”

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TreyHansel1@reddit

Ballwin lmao. Yeah never realized it lol. Don't find myself downtown often and I've never heard it advertised lmao

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Confetticandi@reddit

Ah, I see. Yeah, you should try it sometime.

The west coast saw a large diaspora of eastern and and southern

In the south you have heavy French Acadian and Spanish influence.

The food heritage of our African American communities is probably the most unique and colorful.

The northeast has a large French, Italian, and Greek influence.

If you zoom in to population centers you can even diversify whole cities. Albany, where I live, has a very large western African, South-Central Asian, Caribbean, and Central American communities.

A lot of American food and traditions are born from the cultures of the people that settle here, where over time, cuisine evolves and is soon shares an identity across the entirety of the country- like cheeseburgers.

But sometimes food remains regional, like Boudin in Louisiana or Whoopie Pies in New England.

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anonanon-do-do-do@reddit

I think you are mistakenly thinking that there is a significantly greater population of Americans of English descent that there actually are. While there were roughly 2.5M colonists in the 1770's, they, like most colonists, weren't exactly the cream of the English crop! Many, including the majority of those of European descent, were British, but there were Scottish, Scots-Irish, Irish, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, and others as well, often fleeing religious persecution. Some had been born in the colonies. I was born and raised in New England and those of English descent are far outnumbered by those of Irish, Italians and French-Canadian descent. Most of those probably arrived during the industrial revolution.

That being said, Fish and Chips can probably be found more easily in MA than in England, which I have been to a half dozen times.

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Almaegen@reddit

You are actually the one mistaken here, most white Americans will have English ancestry, that includes those that identified as German, Irish, Scottish and American in the US census. Statistics wise it makes sense but we have self reporting as a census which is why it under represents the English because English American is baseline American culturally.

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Zxxzzzzx@reddit

Many, including the majority of those of European descent, were British, but there were Scottish,

Scotland is on the island of great Britain,

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Shadw21@reddit

Go tell a Scotsman that they are British.

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rawchess@reddit

Scots are British. English is what they're not.

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Zxxzzzzx@reddit

https://medium.com/globetrotters/the-scots-may-speak-english-but-we-are-not-english-e47a5e66a171#:~:text=All%20Scots%20are%20Brits%2C%20but,Wales%20but%20not%20Northern%20Ireland.

Call me British, or call me Scottish. But don’t call me English. Because I’m not, it’s as simple as that.

Don't need to.

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EAG100@reddit

Cuz tacos reign supreme

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r2d3x9@reddit

You have to remember- Canada used a modified Union Jack as our flag until the 60’s. There are people in their 40’s who remember singing “God Save the Queen” right before “O Canada” at school assemblies. We severed our last constitutional ties to Britain in 1982. It’s really only in the 21st century that Canada has dropped many of its colonial trappings, and that includes food and eating habits.

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Arleare13@reddit

Interesting. I've traveled pretty extensively around Canada (since I'd say probably the early '90s) and a bit around Britain, and my observation has always been that Canada felt closer to the U.S. Like, I don't recall experiencing nearly any "cultural shock" in grocery stores -- to the contrary, I'm always struck by how overall similar everything is.

I wonder if there's some geographical variation here. Do you think it's the case that some regions of Canada have a more Britain-influenced food heritage than others (excluding, presumably, Quebec), or that maybe it's an urban/rural thing?

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alicehooper@reddit

Possibly? I’m from the Prairies and currently live on the west coast. I do find the PNW to be pretty homogenous, and the Prairie provinces more in line with North Dakota, Montana, etc.

I’ve spent 20 years going back and forth though and I still feel a disconnect between American food and Canadian in chain restaurants and major grocery chains as compared to UK chains. I spend much more time out west though, and most of my UK time in the London area. I can’t speak as much for Ontario/the Atlantic region, the east coast of the US, or the Northern UK.

I worked in food science for some time though and the difference in product formulas for the Canadian palate exists. The CFIA (FDA equivalent) has banned additives that are allowed in American processed food. What this means overall for what is sold and consumed in Canada is the stuff of researchers and marketers. Historical context is another layer altogether- this complex mix is part of what makes Canada Canada. It is a gross overestimation to state that America controls our taste (as it were) by virtue of their geographical position and size, and many Canadians are quite offended by the idea. We have a different history and immigration pattern affecting our culinary culture.

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Jazzlike_Drawer_4267@reddit

Might depend on where you are in Canada. Meat pies aren't super common in large cities but I have seen them at a lot of diners in rural Canada. In Toronto at least they were largely pushed out by Jamaican Patties as the meat pie of choice. Though nowadays the Samosa is also a popular option at many convenience stores.

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GEMINI52398@reddit

We are not slave to the UK like those other countries, remember we had a whole war over it. we have our own food.

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Picklesadog@reddit

Fish and chips is popular in the US on the coasts.

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Electronic_Mail_7038@reddit

‘Cause we kicked them out

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EverySingleMinute@reddit

Because British food is awful. Your tea is so bad we had to throw it all away

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Kham117@reddit

We had better options

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chandlerknows@reddit

Because their food is gross. . .

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357Magnum@reddit

In addition to everyone else here piling on claiming classic British food is bad, I'll add something else:

We do have all the things you listed. They just 1. aren't necessarily called the same thing and 2. are typically improved upon or incorporate other culinary traditions.

To your list:

Fish and Chips is something you can find in literally any place on the coast in the US. Fried fish with french fries is an extremely common thing. We just also have many different variations of it. For example, I'm in the gulf south. Fried fish and french fries is a very common lunch. But we use a wider variety of fish. Here we often use a cornmeal based breading, but there are many different types of batter popular around the country (and many different varieties from shop to shop even in any given area). And we will also do other fried seafood as well, especially in my area. Fried fish, fried shrimp, fried oysters, fried crawfish, fried alligator, you name it.

I like the classic British style fish and chips, don't get me wrong. But why limit yourself to that. If you watch the "Jolly" youtube channel in which brits travel to the US and eat US food, one thing they say when visiting Louisiana, where I live, is that "how do we eat so much fish and chips but never considered seasoning the batter?"

Meat Pies are widely available in the US, with, again, different regional variations. Here in Louisiana, crawfish pies, Natchitoches meat pies, and several other varieties are common. Around the US, things like chicken pot pie are very common.
Custards are definitely a thing here. But, yet again, there's much more variety. Rather than just pour creme anglaise on various desserts or sweets, there are shit tons of different sauces, icings, etc that we use on a huge variety of things. The question is less "why don't we use more custard" and more "why don't you use more other things?"
We have tons of tarts. We just call them pies mostly. The only kinds of tarts/pies you won't see in bakeries in the US are honestly the ... sadder looking british kinds.
Puddings are another thing we have but use different names for usually. We usually use the term pudding just to mean the sort of smooth, sweet dessert, though we also have bread pudding, rice pudding, etc. But even things similar to yorkshire pudding we still have. We just call those popovers, or in a large format, a dutch baby.
People drink tea here. We just also drink a lot more coffee. But people having tea with cookies (aka biscuits) is not rare at all.

So, in short, we do have all of your culinary traditions. We just abandoned the sadder ones and the good ones are mixed in with LOADS of other culinary traditions.

Probably because after we kicked them out and declared ourselves a country it was extremely unpopular to be pro-British

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CharleyNobody@reddit

My mother grew up eating things like head cheese (a boiled pig head that became gelatinous with bits of cabbage in it), kidney pie and Heinz salad cream sandwiches.

Not steak and kidney pie. Just kidney pie…no steak. My mother said she’d walk in the frony door when it was cooking and “the whole house smelled like piss.”

Heinz sandwich was a mayonnaise-y type of spread with pickle relish, cabbage and celery bits in it. It’s usually spread on a sandwich with some kind of cheese or potted meat. But since my mother’s family was poor (9 kids), they didn’t have cheese or meat in the sandwich. Just the spread. My mother said in summer the stuff would get hot while she was in school and that it tasted rancid. She said it took everything in her to refrain from retching. But she had nothing else to eat. She’d only had a piece of toast for breakfast. Dinner was going to be something equally disgusting (like kidneys), so she had no choice but to eat whatever she was given.

My mother grew up in the US, but family was from Northern Ireland - part of the UK. Anglo Irish food.

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Able_Capable2600@reddit

Just lucky, I guess.

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AdImmediate6239@reddit

Because British food sucks. Why do you think Gordon Ramsay is so angry all the time?

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DunebillyDave@reddit

Because America is a melting pot.

We have people from all over the world who have brought their excellent recipes and food traditions.

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One important thing is that we have many more agricultural opportunities that they don’t. We have every climate and geographical setting possible in one country. We also have many more species of animals to feed off of.

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Superb_Item6839@reddit

Our culinary traditions are more influenced by French, Spanish, Italian, and Mexican food.

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TreyHansel1@reddit

Everyone always forgets Germans on these lists. Did everyone just collectively forget about beer, pretzels, bratwurst, hotdogs, and hamburgers? You know, the very typical American backyard barbecue?

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Pinwurm@reddit

Early American dishes were informed by locally available ingredients. Corn, cranberries, salmon, lobster, turkey, cattle - way fewer sheep here than in the UK or New Zealand.
The reliance on native foods led American cuisine to divorce itself from British traditions very early on (like the first Thanksgiving).

And also, a lot of "classic Americana" dishes (fried chicken or catfish), trace back to Scottish immigrants and enslaved Black people that adapted these cooking techniques to feed their masters. Barbecue also has deep roots in pan-African culinary traditions.

These days, only like 10% of Americans have British ancestry. The waves of immigrants from Italy, Germany, and China bigly expanded our sense of cuisine. Immigrants opened restaurants catering to their communities, blending their flavors with local ingredients and crossing cultural boundaries. This fusion is why foods like pizza, hot dogs, and General Tso's chicken are now seen as quintessentially American.

Other British colonies didn’t experience the same levels of mass immigration and didn’t have the same systems that made entrepreneurship affordable and accessible.

Also, traditional British food largely sucks. The best thing Brits got is what they call Indian food, which is actually anglicized Bangladeshi food. And it's fucking delicious.

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TreyHansel1@reddit

Barbecue also has deep roots in many pan-African culinary traditions.

Not really. Barbecue as we know it(smoked meats) is the result of German immigrants smoking meat in the traditional German way but using the local trees as the source. I mean there aren't mesquite trees in Germany after all lol. And now that I think about it, I don't think there's hickory trees there either.

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coffeewalnut05@reddit

Berries, seafood and cattle are all native staples of British cuisine

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sithgril66@reddit

That food taste bad. I don’t want to eat eel I want tacos.

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Bawstahn123@reddit

A lot of the things thought of as "traditionally British" (and therefore common across the Commonwealth of Nations) mostly came into wide, commonplace existence in the mid-to-late 1800s, an appreciable amount of time after the US divested from the UK.

It is also important to note that the US and the UK did not like each other for most of the 1800s, so cultural exchange was limited

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Dontbelievemefolks@reddit

Chicken pot pie is a thing and very American

sausage is popular, but hotdogs are much more popular and especially breakfast sausage is available everywhere

Tea is somewhat popular and sweet tea/ice tea is very American

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TreyHansel1@reddit

sausage is popular, but hotdogs are much more popular and especially breakfast sausage is available everywhere

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palbuddymac@reddit

We had better options?

1 in 5 Americans are decendent from Latin American heritage.

So then you can understand why English cuisine isn't more popular in the US

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Arleare13@reddit

French Tacos have become VERY popular.

I tried those in Paris once... not a fan. O'Tacos actually tried opening a location in New York City a few years back, and it didn't last long.

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Confetticandi@reddit

In addition to the timing of our independence and massive waves of immigration throughout our history, the US wasn’t just founded from British colonies.

Half the country was once either France or Spain or Mexico.

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Efficient-Judge-9294@reddit (OP)

Yeah, u guys do invade a lot of countries.

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Confetticandi@reddit

Better than being the country invaded and left with a colony complex I suppose.

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protossaccount@reddit

Why isn’t all British food British in origin?

mattcmoore@reddit

Hot take for a comment about Yorkshire pudding.

The REAL traditions - not something that started during WWI

Meat pies are not traditional. What’s next - why didn’t we inherit curries and Quality Street boxes?

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BAC2Think@reddit

America inherited food traditions from everywhere including the Brits

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TrulyRenowned@reddit

It’s pretty hard when there are only so many ways to spice up your morning beans. I mean, you could go for the spud with beans it in for lunch. Or maybe the peas and fish for dinner?

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ArcticGlacier40@reddit

Because, if you'll be allow to re-use the very old joke:

"The British conquered half the world for spices and never use any,"

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WoodwifeGreen@reddit

Someone in a FB group I'm in said the British invaded all those countries for their spices but still season everything with potatoes.

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SquashDue502@reddit

I’m sure they tried but original colonists likely didn’t have access to the same ingredients that were available back in Europe and had to adapt.

We use wayyy more squash and corn in American cuisine because they came from the New World. Europeans don’t really eat corn, it’s seen more as fodder for animals, and they don’t use squash in much (and it’s super expensive unless you’re talking zucchini’s).

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motherlymetal@reddit

It's already spilled tea.

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SacredMushroomBoy@reddit

Thanksgiving meal is essentially a carvery. But many things did carry over.

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mkdive@reddit

Beans on toast.....no thank you.

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jamey1138@reddit

Mostly they did.

If you look at the food culture of England in the 16th-18th centuries, it’s very stratified along class lines. For working class people, it was a daily loaf of hearty bread, a lot of boiled grains, a lot of cheese, brassicas, root vegetables, beans and maybe a few cuts of meat a week. That’s quite similar to the diet for most Americans, even today.

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madogson@reddit

We had British culinary traditions, but then we dumped them in the Boston harbor in protest. For a large chunk of American history, we actively rejected British cuisine because it was seen as being sympathetic to the monarchy. That's why we drink coffee and not tea.

That's why any British cuisine that does exist in America is under a different name and Americanized.

Americans were already coming up with their own culinary practices early using the food available in the new world (pumpkins, squash, tomatoes, potatoes) way before any of those became popular in the new world.

There was a huge cultural shift in the 1800s all over Europe that resulted in very recent culinary practices (changes in oven constructions, new cooking appliances, etc.)

Townsend on YouTube actually takes about this shift often in their cooking videos.

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rabbifuente@reddit

Check out Townsends on YouTube. All about the 18th century in America and goes extensively into cooking and how European cooking influenced the US

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Turdulator@reddit

Because beans for breakfast is unhinged behavior.

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DingBat99999@reddit

Canadian here.

Because we have access to mexicans

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Efficient-Judge-9294@reddit (OP)

Because we have access to mexicans

Sorry, what’s that supposed to mean????

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eingyi2@reddit

Mexico is right there, and mexicans make the best tasting food on the planet. It's no wonder why Americans don't eat british "food"

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green_goblins_O-face@reddit

people seem to forget that the French, Dutch, Spanish, etc all had footholds in the colonies. It wasn't all England on day 1. Depends where and when we're talking tho and dishes can vary state to state. For example,

Florida belong to Spain, before going to England in the 1760s.

New York and New Jersey was originally dutch, till the late 1600s

The French Ran Texas and Louisiana to name a few states.

And its not like as soon as a new country rules over you, you IMMEDIATELY adopt their cuisine. Not to mention the availability of ingredients.

I'm no historian in this matter, but from what little I know, English culture wasn't here long enough to dominate the zeitgeist. Only long enough to influence it

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Crusoe15@reddit

Aside from it having simply been too long since the revolution, America is more than just a former British colony. Many, many foreign cultures influenced American culture from the beginning. Remember that American is sometimes known as the melting pot. Throw everything in and mix it all together, see what you get.

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542Archiya124@reddit

I would guess it's the same reason why Americans decided to change their English into something different than British English?

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andmewithoutmytowel@reddit

I was watching an old episode of Top Chef the other day (Boston) and they made a "first thanksgiving" meal with ingredients native at the time. Colonists made due with what was around, and add 400 years and a ton of immigration, and that's what you get.

My family still makes soda bread and corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's day, but corned beef and cabbage isn't even Irish - it's Irish-American. Anyone I've ever met from Ireland hadn't had corned beef until they came to the US.

coffeewalnut05@reddit

Pot pies, fruit pies/cobblers/crumbles, mashed potatoes, cheeses, pasties, chowder, and banana pudding all originated in British cuisine. A lot of southern desserts seem similar or the same as ours tbh

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Agile_Property9943@reddit

You can’t take credit for overall cheese lmao South America had potatoes before the UK you think they never thought to mash up one?. Chowder is a French word so I’m assuming it’s French in origin Everything else you can say but those you cannot singularly have lol

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coffeewalnut05@reddit

Cheddar cheese is the most popular cheese in the U.S., it originated in England. And no, mashed potatoes as we know it originated in England and later the recipe transferred to America.

Traditional cuisine in Cornwall has chowder, as they’re big on seafood and catch a lot of their own. Cornwall has many historical and cultural links with northern France. So yes, chowder is traditional in both French and southwestern English cuisines.

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Agile_Property9943@reddit

Cheddar cheese is not the only thing eaten here which is why I said cheese overall. Mashed potatoes are pretty much the Americas lol you can argue about it idc if you think people are stupid enough to not mash up a vegetable that is grown there that’s on you. Sooo… french? Like I said? Thanks

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coffeewalnut05@reddit

No, but it remains true that it’s by far the most popular.

There’s no evidence that mashed potatoes originated in America. Mashed potato recipe isn’t just mashing up potatoes, you add milk, butter/cream and that’s a British influence.

You can’t take credit for overall cheese

No, but cheddar is English.

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Agile_Property9943@reddit

Right which is one type which is why I said overall. Hello?

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Fantastic-Bother3296@reddit

Because we didn't send our best or brightest.

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notthegoatseguy@reddit

Fish And Chips is pretty much a bar food staple. I've been to numerous restaurants (that also serve alcohol/have bars in them), breweries, and brewpubs that serve the dish.

I read a history of American cooking that said we basically did inherit British culinary traditions and tried to codify them in the Boston Cooking School cookbook, but immigrants from other countries refused to fall in line.

In the mid and late 1800s, there were huge social movements to try to "better" the lives of immigrants. One idea is that the men were going to the pubs to get drunk because the women weren't good cooks. So they tried to get women to cook bland British foods that they thought were good for people. Immigrants proved not that easy to control, and not that excited to give up spices.

Also, there were indigenous foods that were cheaper and more available, like corn, pumpkin, cranberries, turkeys, etc. I only read one book so there's probably a lot more to the story but that's as much as I learned.

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real_agent_99@reddit

Tea was very popular among Irish immigrants. But they're generations out now, so that influence has faded. There are many, many other immigrant cultures that didn't revolve around tea.

I think that there's a large portion of us having different access to modifiers, such as spices, and generally having to adapt to the land. There's a bunch of stuff we use in foods that were unique to the American continent which we quickly adopted as staple foods. Sugar was a cash crop in Caribbean, since sugar cane was easier to grow and had a higher yield than anything in Europe.

In many aspects, America gave large sections of the world new food to create new recipes. It's also not like America doesn't have things similar to the British. For example, fries (or chips) are a staple food over here. We'd rather pair it with a grilled burger than with more fried food. If anything, America and Britain share many of the same side dishes, but we change up the main course of those side dishes.

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Gingerbrew302@reddit

I've never feel more nationalistic than when I see that gooey mass of green pea snot next to a pile of beans and soggy toast. British food is perplexing to me, I have no idea what spotted dick is, but y'all can keep it.

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OppositeRock4217@reddit

Because America had a revolution against the British. They got rid of so much of the British traditions as a symbol of the revolution

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NeiClaw@reddit

Regardless, there are some British staples that never caught on here like Yorkshire pudding. Which is odd because my grandparents (born in the late 1800s) and parents always had made a traditional Sunday roast with peas and carrots.

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Zxxzzzzx@reddit

DOI I'm English.

But Americans do eat a roast a couple of times a year, not as much as we do, but they still eat them. Especially this time of year.

mydb100@reddit

NAA, but it comes down to 2 things. 1 The U.S. stopped being a colony in the late 1770's and during the colonial period had LOTS of Dutch influence. 2 Wave after wave of White Europeans immigrating N.Z. and Oz have a way higher percentage of the population that can trace themselves back to the UK than most other former colonies. The ones that can't might be 3rd Gen with the odd 4th Gen, but most likely 1st and 2nd Gen immigrants.

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Willothwisp2303@reddit

You posted this just so we could shit on British food, right?

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GanAnimal@reddit

Because this is how you get 447 redditors (at the time of writing) to shit on British food.

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2 main reasons:

The USA parted ways with the British nearly 250 years ago.

Millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth came here since. Regional cuisine is heavily influenced by the immigrants who settled there.

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Current_Poster@reddit

The whole tea thing happened partly due to a sort of social movement in the post-Revolutionary period to not do things the British did, and partly because we did have a nice trading network with Indonesia and so on, until the British blockaded all our trade-ships in the ports during the War of 1812. After that, trading inside the hemisphere for coffee was a better bet.

We did have meat pies, but tbh sandwiches, hamburgers, etc. are better on-the-go foods, and they got out-competed in that niche.

Fish and chips, as noted elsewhere, wasn't adopted by the British until the 1860s. We have it in New England, of course, but I think we started about the same time.

Most Americans have no ties to Britain. People grossly underestimate how much of a melting pop the US is.

There's probably far more people from other countries that have migrated to the US and had many generations of kids with people from different countries. Unsurprisingly the US has adopted all forms of food and merged all of them together.

Americans eat all types of foods. That's why we're called fat.

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PA_MallowPrincess_98@reddit

THANK GOD we didn’t inherit Beans on Toast!🙏🏼🫘🍞

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Dasinterwebs2@reddit

Don’t mind me, just here to upvote the posts clowning on the Bri’ish

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RickySlayer9@reddit

Cause we have tastebuds ofc

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CatOfGrey@reddit

You might consider posting your question on "Ask Food Historians".

A traditional Thanksgiving Dinner is a reproduction of a typical English "Roast", just with food sources from the Americas, like a Turkey instead of chicken, pork, or beef. So I will argue that we did inherit the British traditions, but we also inherited other things....
By the late 1700's, we had a variety of other people's, and a variety of other food traditions. A third of our population was Black, either African or Caribbean. Most were slaves, but they still had profound impact on food culture. We also had substantial populations from Germany, and influence from French colonies in the region, eventually both North from Canada and South from Louisiana.
As the US expanded westward, we picked up food ingredients and cooking techniques from Native Americans, sometimes combined with Spanish influence.

Random thoughts:

fish & chips

Remember that Britannia is an island. The United States is not. Remember that chips come from potato, which was introduced to England and Europe in the 1600's or so: potato is a "New World" invention, not a European-based tradition. See also: tomato in Italy.

custards

Ice cream has traditionally contained a base of cream and eggs. It's custard, though we've probably cheapened our mass-production recipes in this time period.

puddings

There are too many definitions of English puddings for me to handle. A modern equivalent of a product with meat and other 'extenders' that is held together with a binder, and baked or steamed is the US staple of meat loaf.

meat pies

IPerhaps the issue is backwards: I could argue that a meat pie isn't a British tradition, it's a British version of food enclosed in something bread-like, so that it was portable and could travel.

You might be describing a Mexican "Taco" or "Burrito", remembering that the latter literally means "a small version of an animal that carries something for you". You might be describing an "Egg Roll" or other portable version of a dumpling. You might be describing a "Calzone", which is named for 'trouser leg', also a reference to 'food in your pants pocket'. You might be describing "Hot Pockets".

Oh, and the cold version: a sandwich.

afternoon tea

A really really really rough breakup will cause that. Than you meet again and have another messy fight. Not all that long after. You’re not trying to be just like that person after that

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deebville86ed@reddit

We do have british food here. It's not usually hard to find British cuisine if you want it. It's just that no one usually does. I know at least 20 pubs I could go and get fish and chips, shepherds pie, bangers and mash, sticky toffee pudding, etc.

Plus I'd imagine back in the 1700s, people just ate whatever was immediately available, wherever they lived. No one was on the internet griping about who's food was better, nor did they care what other people were eating

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CamiJay@reddit

Because we haven’t followed British traditions since like 1776 & would rather make our own traditions as a way to distance ourselves from European culture. Mainly bc Britain was treating us like shit and we got tired of it lol.

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Mountain_Air1544@reddit

The 2 big reasons are 1. America is older than many of the things you listed 2. Different cultural influences

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cheshirecatsmiley@reddit

Because we made better choices.

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Technical_Plum2239@reddit

British foods have morphed a bunch. And we did have lots of fish and chip and oysters. We also took some British dishes and fixed them. Like you guys had Apple pies - but different. Then you started making "New England style apple pie".

But we often took whatever we liked best. "Irish style" bread.

vernelli@reddit

We like flavor.

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flareon141@reddit

Some we did. House of commons is like the House of Representatives. House of lords is like the senate.

We put gravy on lots of things. I don't understand your question.

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Dame-Bodacious@reddit

In addition to the things mentioned above (divergent evolution, different immigrants, etc) you have to consider the physical climate and geography.

The UK is a small, wet island that's very far north and warmed by the Atlantic current. It gets very little sunlight and has been under intensive Western-style cultivation for 2000 years.

The US is a continent sized country with wildly different regions, from near tropical to desert to prairie to mountains (don't @ me, the UK's mountains are hills). And, until European settled here, it was mostly under very different sort of cultivation, one that focused on more sustainable mixed use areas like food forests.

Who ever told you we don't fry fish is fucking lying. It's extremely common bar food.

There are a few differences between fish fry and fish and chips, though:

The fries/chips will probably be cut into thinner strips, rather than the chunky blocks. We do have Steak Fries that are cut more like your chips, though.
The customary vegetable is usually coleslaw, rather than mushy peas.
We normally use tartar sauce instead of malt vinegar.

The British North American colonies were the smallest by land area, and even during the British Colonial era, there was always a mix of culinary influences from Africa, France, Spain, all of the British Isles, Germany--and let's not forget the Native Americans. It's a common misunderstanding that the British were the dominant influence--aside from providing a basis for revolution--in the European Colonial era of the country.

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GEEK-IP@reddit

We were smart! 🤣

There were local foods, peppers, tomatoes, corn, etc. There was African influence. There were people from all over Europe (admit it, the Italians are the best cooks in Europe!)

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LoyalKopite@reddit

Because British food of 1700s was horrible.

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Objective_Twist_7373@reddit

Cottage pie—-meet American shepherds pie

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The American cuisine has German, Italian, and Mexican influence. Our soul food developed based on what was available.

The British cuisine has burgers so in some areas, the UK has changed more to America's taste in some areas. While I like a good fish and chips, it's not really a cuisine that is fully worth copying. There is a good place in town that makes pasties but there's also tacos, dumplings, pizza, pasta, and our cuisine that has more flavor.

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Intagvalley@reddit

They made a determined effort to distance themselves from things British. They even changed a bunch of spellings. That's why the U.S. has a bunch of different words that are spelled differently than the rest of the English speaking world.

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Gatodeluna@reddit

A reminder that America and England fought a literal war over wanting freedom from British kingly rule at a time when what kings wanted, they got. Newly minted Americans were more eager to do their own thing with foods that didn’t exist in the Old World, and in a sense to not copy or continue with the way things were done in England. Americans of the 18th and 19th C didn’t want to keep the traditions, they wanted to express their independence. None of the other countries were fighting to leave, there was no animosity, so no reason not to emulate the ancestral ways.

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greeneggiwegs@reddit

There’s individual answers for a lot of these but the main reasons are 1. They weren’t common food at the time of independence 2. They weren’t culinarily feasible in the Americas or were easily replaced by local food 3. A lot of the current US wasn’t even part of Britain so the influence would be mixed with whatever settlers there were eating (which included other European food as well as native food)

azuth89@reddit

We left much earlier and had far more influences.

Even in the original 13 English were far from alone, we have had MANY large immigration waves from all over the world since and much of what is now the US were never british colonies in the first place, having absorbed a lot of spanish, spanish-descended and french areas.

England's influence is strongest in the enlightment ideas and some legal concepts that were brought over in the creation of the government, the people involved there were mostly coming from that school of thought either being british descended or primarily educated by those who were.

The day-to-day cultural items, be it names, food, religion, traditions, stories, etc..... are all much more mixed.

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EclipseoftheHart@reddit

Very different immigrant groups settled in very different places! You see more British influences on the East Coast, particularly New England, in my experience.

yukonnut@reddit

Why would they want to….mushy peas etc. America has found its own shite

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moving0target@reddit

If those traditions were a thing when people were coming to the Americas, there were a huge variety of people with all sorts of other traditions arriving all the time.

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cwilliams6009@reddit

“Culinary traditions of the British“. A phrase I never thought I would actually see in the wild.

Because immigrants showed us other food that was better

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terryaugiesaws@reddit

Following the American Revolution, the newly independent United States was effectively "kicked out" of British trade routes due to the "Prohibitory Act" passed by the British Parliament, which essentially banned all trade between the former colonies and Great Britain, effectively cutting off access to the established British trade network; this act was a direct response to the American rebellion and was seen as a form of economic warfare.