Why do we use the phrase that something is “as American as apple pie” when apple pie itself was invented before America was even founded? (This 1361 English recipe reads like a Twitter micro-recipe — “Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis,” it begins, and ends with instructions to “bake wel.”)

Back in 1989, Russell Baker ran a New York Times contest “to discover a new cliche for the outmoded expression ‘as American as apple pie,’” offering a frozen apple pie as a reward. He was disappointed with the results.

And 20 years later, the increasingly quaint-sounding but still widely used idiom is defined by the Cambridge University dictionary as meaning to be typically American, although what that means is as diverse as the recipe for apple pie.

The once-nostalgic phrase is just as often used to make a political point about who we have become, “as American as apple pie” used to describe torture, bank nationalization and socialism, to name a few.

In a country as diverse as ours, is it even possible to use a single dish as a metaphor to capture the essence of the nation? From a purely food point of view, which dishes seem most American to you?

Posted by kristin in recipes, minced words | | Subscribe to this feed