Birria ramen, West African spice on Southern comfort food, and why “American cuisine” was always a fusion experiment. The most American dish I ate this year was invented by a Mexican cook, served in a ramen bowl, and seasoned with a technique from Japan. Birria ramen should not make sense. It sells out nightly.
As the country turns 250 this week, there will be no shortage of essays about “American food”, the burger, the barbecue, the apple pie that was, inconveniently, English. But the honest history is more interesting. American cuisine has never been a recipe book; it is a 250-year-old open-source project, continuously forked by every group that arrived hungry and homesick and started cooking. The hot dog is German. The pizza slice is Neapolitan. Barbecue itself carries Caribbean, African, and Indigenous fingerprints. The canon was always a mashup.