imported sauce dries up. The new U.S. manufacturers think there’s
no reason not to sell tomato sauce to all Americans, and they do
so very successfully. It’s the same story with dry pasta, parmesan
cheese, and macaroni and cheese. The fact that these foods become American is also ironic, considering
that nutritionists did their best to change eating habits of Italian
immigrants. They thought their cooking was too spicy, reeked too
much of garlic, and was not well balanced because there were so
many vegetables and people didn’t consume enough meat and milk.
Thankfully, they failed, and in a complete reversal of fate, everyone
started eating Italian food. That’s the result not only of restaurants,
but especially of mass-manufactured Italian-American food.Jewish Food
Another example of an ethnic cuisine that has gone mainstream is
Jewish food from eastern Europe. The cuisine of eastern European
Jews is not terribly different from what their non-Jewish neighbors
in Europe were eating—it was just adapted.
Obviously, they didn’t eat pork, but they could eat beef, which
was made into a whole variety of cured products like corned beef,
pastrami, and pickled tongue—all the things we associate today
with a kosher deli, as well as dill pickles and knishes. Another thing
that all of their neighbors ate was dumplings, but uniquely, the Jews
made them out of matzo meal into matzo balls (knaidlach), which
are eaten in chicken soup. Although there are many Jewish dishes that never went mainstream,
the most fascinating one that did is the bagel, which is boiled and
then baked, so it has a very hard, crunchy exterior and a soft inside.
It is not a round bread with a hole, nor does it need to be toasted.
The traditional way to eat them is with cream cheese and lox, and
some people put a slice of onion on it. Apart from poor imitations, the bagel changed in the United States
with a variety of fl avors. Originally, bagels were plain or topped