Profiling 48 classic American foods ranging from junk and fast food to main dishes to desserts, this book reveals what made these dishes iconic in American pop culture. Americans have increasingly embraced food culture, a fact proven by the rising popularity of celebrity chefs and the prominence of television shows celebrating food themes. This fascinating overview reveals the surprising story behind the foods America loves. The Story Behind the Dish: Classic American Foods is an engaging pop culture resource which helps tell the story of American food. Each chapter is devoted to one of 48 distinctive American dishes and features the story of where the food developed, what inspired its creation, and how it has evolved. The book not only covers each food as a single entry, but also analyzes the themes and events that connect them, making the text useful as both a reference and a narrative on the history of food. 48 entries on the development, popularization, and adaptation of each dish Numerous recipes Historical photographs of American foods Recommended reading lists for each chapter

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America revolves around the 1840 presidential election when, according to campaign slogans, candidates were what they ate. Skillfully deploying the rhetoric of republican simplicity-the belief that plain dress, food, and manners were signs of virtue in the young republic-William Henry Harrison defeated Martin Van Buren by aligning the incumbent with the European luxuries of pate de foie gras and soupe a la reine while maintaining that he survived on "raw beef without salt." The effectiveness of such claims reflected not only the continuing appeal of the frontier and the relatively primitive nature of American cooking, but also a rhetorical struggle to define how eating habits and culinary practices fit into ideas of the American character. From this crucial mid-century debate, the book's argument reaches back to examine the formation of the myth of republican simplicity in revolutionary America and forward to the popularization of cosmopolitan sophistication during the Gilded Age. Drawing heavily on cookbooks, domestic manuals, travel writing, and the popular press, this historical framework structures a discussion of ways novelists use food to locate characters within their fictional worlds, evoking or contesting deeply held social beliefs about gender, class, and race. In addition to mid-century novelists like Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Warner, the book examines popular and canonical novels by writers as diverse as Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Susanna Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Harriet Wilson. Some of these authors also wrote domestic manuals and cookbooks. In addition, McWilliams draws on a wide range of such work by William Alcott, Catharine Beecher, Eliza Leslie, Fannie Merrit Farmer, Maria Parloa, and others.

The thirty-first Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery discussed wrapped and stuffed foods from every possible angle, and from every possible geographical perspective. This may include sausages on the one hand, or stuffed ravioli on the other. It may also go as far as pies and sausage rolls. In geographical terms the Symposiasts were willing to look at cultures as disparate as Turkey, the United States, seventeenth-century England, Korea and Italy. There is also a pancultural discussion of stuffing and wrapping foods in avant-garde or molecular gastronomy. Contributors include the Chinese expert Fuschia Dunlop, the Greek cookery writer Aglaia Kremezi, the celebrated food writer and cultural historian from America Laura Shapiro, the Australian food historian Barbara Santich, the Israeli commentator and historian Susan Weingarten, and the English anthropologist David C. Sutton. Titles of some of the papers include: The Pillsbury Bake-Off: Stuffed and Wrapped in 1950s and 1960s America; Chicken Kiev: Material, Social and Discursive Wrappings; Samuel Pepys's Venison Pasties; Barbarian heads and Turkish dumplings: the Chinese word mantou; A Knish Is Just a Knish - or Is It? The Evolution of a Street Food to Haute Nosh and Before Dolma: A Taxonomy of Medieval Arab Stuffery.

The thirty-second Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery discussed food and material culture from every possible angle, and from every possible geographical perspective. Scholars assembled from countries around the globe, hailing from the UK, USA, Turkey, Italy, France, Brazil, Japan, Israel, and Germany. The topics of some of the papers are: Aesthetics and politics of the kitchen in fascist Italy; Why kitchen utensils matter; Computer-engineered food; The bamboo tea whisk in Japanese tea culture; Cooking under fire, 1914-1918; Sugar sculpture in Italian court banquets; Mongolian milk spoons; Elite consumption trends in ceramic tableware in Georgian Ireland; Vessels and equipment used by street food vendors of Istanbul; Perfuming the table in old Baghdad; Salt cellars and the origins of etiquette; Utensils in the classical Greek world; The everyday cooking pot of late antique Palestine; Tools and learning the language of cooking; The rise of the picnic hamper; The story of mixers and mixing; Beefy British bovril, plasmon and quality Cadbury's cocoa essence; Towards an anthropology of bimby food processors in Italy.

The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2011. In keeping with this happy event, celebration was the subject of this year's meeting. Symposiasts have taken their usual broad and generous approach to the topic. So papers range in geographical relevance from highland Equador through Transylvania, Anatolia, Congo-Brazzaville, Iceland, and old Los Angeles. Chronologically too, several periods are addressed: ancient Rome, Ptolomaic Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, Georgian Dublin, and Victorian London. The occasions of celebration considered run from wedding breakfasts, birthday parties, Easter, harvest festival, and Passover, while the sorts of celebration include banquets, drinking bouts, the Icelandic thorrablot, and election day feasts. Authors include from America, Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, Anthony Buccini, Sharon Hudgins, Charles Perry; from Turkey, Aylin Tan and Priscilla Mary Isin; from England, Robert Appelbaum, Andrew Dalby, Christopher Grocock, Gillian Riley, David C. Sutton, and from Israel, Susan Weingarten.