The food historian in me cringes when people describe American food as “hamburgers and hot dogs,” as if two dishes could possibly represent everything American cuisine has to offer. The description is not so much wrong as incomplete, ignoring centuries of migration, adaptation, and creativity in favor of a single mid-20th-century snapshot. Conveniently cropped out are the diverse regional traditions that underpin our national food heritage.
To be fair, hamburgers and hot dogs certainly conjure images we’ve come to associate with the American Dream. Think middle-class families gathered around picnic tables, pitchers of lemonade sweating in the heat, baskets brimming with soft buns, and squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard. Those heady scenes are products of their time, emerging during the boom years following World War II. National magazines like Life and Ebony capitalized on them, running in their pages idealized portraits of domestic abundance that, intentionally or not, projected an image of culinary uniformity.
But American food has always been plural, its dishes sharpened by political, economic, and social clashes that catapulted people and ingredients across vast bodies of water and unforgiving landscapes. Though held in memory and preserved in practice, culinary traditions remain in a perpetual state of transformation, adapting in ways dynamic, resilient, and uniquely American.
Take gumbo, the iconic soupy stew of New Orleanian origin born on the outskirts of European empire in the 18th century. The dish traditionally relies on three thickeners: Roux, the slow-cooked mixture of fat and flour foundational to French cooking, reflects the culinary techniques brought to the Crescent City by European settlers. Filé powder is made with ground sassafras
leaves, which were foraged by the local Choctaw people and used to flavor and thicken dishes long before French colonists showed up. Okra, which lends the stew its distinctive mucilaginous texture, is central to many West African regional cuisines; those traditions were carried to Louisiana by enslaved peoples via the brutal transatlantic slave trade.
French migrants who craved roux-based dishes faced a practical problem. European flour often spoiled before it reached the Port of New Orleans. As a result, filé and okra became primary thickeners of the dish that became known as gumbo. Even after flour grew more readily available, cooks—many of them enslaved African women—did not abandon filé or okra. Instead they incorporated multiple thickeners, layering traditions one atop the other.
At what point did gumbo become American? Was it American from the start? Not until it reached its modern form? The answer is somewhere in the murky middle.
My best guess is that it happened sometime between 1885, when the first Creole cookbooks La Cuisine Creole and Creole Cookery codified and canonized gumbo, and the mid-1940s, when Campbell’s successfully marketed its chicken gumbo soup nationally. It’s an imprecise answer, I admit. But gumbo’s halting half-century-long acceptance arc is not an exception to the American story. It is the model.
