ecue sauce from the Southside of Chicago has its own fire and soul. The Texas has a competition each year for the hottest barbecue sauce (the recipes are kept secret).
America has two strong advantages when it comes to food. The first is that as the leading agriculture nation, she has always been well supplied with fresh meats, fruits, and vegetables in great variety at relatively low prices. This is one reason why steak or beef roast is probably the most "typical" American food; it has always been more available. But good Southern-fried chicken also has champions, as do hickory-smoked or sugar-cured hams, turkey, fresh lobster, and other seafood such as crabs or clams.
In a country with widely different climates and many fruit and vegetable growing regions, such items as fresh grapefruit, oranges, lemons, melons, cherries, peaches, or broccoli, iceberg lettuce, avocados, and cranberries do not have to be imported. This is one reason why fruit dishes and salads are so common. Family vegetable gardens have been very popular, both as a hobby and as a way to save money, from the days when most Americans were farmers. They also help to keep fresh food on the table.
The second advantage America has enjoyed is that immigrants have brought with them, and continue to bring, the traditional foods of their countries and cultures. The variety of foods and styles is simply amazing. Whether Armenian, Basque, Catalonian, Creole, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, traditional Jewish, Latvian, Mexican, Vietnamese or what have you, these traditions are now also at home in the U.S.A.
There seem to be four trends in America at present, which are connected with foods and dining. First, there has been a notable increase in the number of reasonably priced restaurants, which offer specialty foods. These include those that specialize in many varieties and types of pancakes, those that offer only fresh, baked breakfast foods, and the many that are buffets or salad bars. Secondly, growing numbers of Americans are more regularly going out to eat in restaurants. One reason is that they are not many American women do not feel that their lives are best spent in the kitchen. They would rather pay a professional chef and also enjoy a good meal. At the same time, there is an increase in fine cooking as a hobby for both men and women. For some two decades now, these have been popular television series on all types and styles of cooking, and the increasing popularity can easily be seen in the number of best-selling specialty cookbooks and the number of stores that specialize in often-exotic cooking devices and spices. [2., 52]
A third is that as a result of nationwide health campaigns, Americans in general are eating a much light diet. Cereals and grain foods, fruit and vegetables, fish and salads are emphasized instead of heavy and sweet foods. Finally, there is the international trend to "fast food" chains, which sell pizza, hamburgers, Mexican foods, chicken, salads and sandwiches, seafoods and various ice creams. While many Americans and many other people resent this trend and while, as many are expected, restaurants also dislike it, many young, middle-aged, and old people, both rich and poor, continue to buy and eat fast foods.
Hot Dogs
Tad Dorgan, a sports cartoonist, gave the frankfurter its nickname in 1906. Munching on a frank at a baseball game, he concluded that it resembled a dachshund's body and put that whimsy into a drawing, which he captioned "Hot dog".
Sausages go all the way back to ancient Babylon, but the hot dog was brought to the USA shortly before the Civil War by a real Frankfurter - Charles Feltman, a native of Frankfurt, Germany, who opened a stand in New York and sold grilled sausages on warmed rolls - first for a dime apiece, later, a nickel.
The frank appealed to busy Americans, who - as an early 19 th century comment put it - tend to live by the maxim of "gobble, gulp and go". Nowadays Americans consume more than 12 billion frankfurters a year.
Hamburgers
Modern hamburgers on a bun were first served at the St. Louis Fair in 1904, but Americans really began eating them in quantity in the 1920s, when the White Castle snack bar chain featured a small, square patty at a very low price. Chopped beef, tasty and easily prepared, quickly caught on as family fare, and today hamburger stands, drive-ins, and burger chains offer Americans their favorite hot sandwich at every turn.
The history of the hamburger dates back to medieval Europe. Early German sailors brought a Tartar dish of shredded raw beef seasoned with salt and onion juice from Russia to Germany. The lightly broiled German chopped-beef cake, with pickles and pumpernickel on the side, was introduced to America in the early 1800s by German immigrants in the Midwest. [...
