8 American Foods That Didn’t Originate Here (and 5 That Did). How Many Can You Guess, Californians?

Quick, name the most American food you can think of.

Whatever you picked, there’s a decent chance another country invented it first.

Every Californian cookout serves a lineup of classics with foreign passports, plus a few homegrown originals nobody suspects.

These are the American classics born somewhere else, and the handful born right here in the United States.

1. Apple Pie

Nothing outranks apple pie in American food mythology. England wrote the recipe first.

The earliest known apple pie recipe appeared in England around 1381, in a cookbook called The Forme of Cury.

It called for figs, raisins, pears, and saffron alongside the apples.

No sugar, either, since sugar cost too much.

Dutch and British settlers carried their pies to the colonies, and the marketing did the rest.

2. Hot Dogs

Frankfurt, Germany, says it’s been making the frankfurter for more than 500 years.

Vienna raises its hand for the wiener, which is right there in the name.

German immigrants brought the sausages to New York in the 1860s and sold them as dachshund sausages.

The bun, the ballpark, and the name are American additions.

Everything else about your Fourth of July hot dog speaks German.

3. French Fries

Belgium and France are still fighting over the fries.

Belgian folklore says villagers along the River Meuse fried potatoes in the shape of little fish when the river froze over.

French historians point to Paris street vendors selling fried potatoes around the time of the Revolution.

Both countries agree on one thing: America didn’t invent them.

4. Ketchup

Ketchup started as fermented fish sauce in Asia.

The name traces to kê-tsiap, a Hokkien Chinese word for preserved fish sauce.

Dutch and English sailors hauled it home in the 1600s, and British cooks spent a century imitating it with mushrooms, walnuts, and oysters.

Tomatoes only entered the picture when an American scientist published the first tomato ketchup recipe in 1812.

So the bottle in your fridge is an American remix of a very old Asian idea.

5. Peanut Butter

The Aztecs and Incas were grinding roasted peanuts into paste centuries before anyone here thought to.

A Canadian chemist named Marcellus Gilmore Edson patented the modern version in 1884.

His patent described a spread with “a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment.”

Appetizing.

America built the lunchbox empire on top of it, but the invention came from elsewhere in the hemisphere.

6. Doughnuts

Dutch settlers brought olykoeks to New Amsterdam before it was even called New York.

The name means oil cakes, which is honest advertising.

Ring doughnuts came along in the 1800s, reportedly worked out aboard a ship.

Boston cream, maple bars, the pink box: All-American upgrades to a Dutch import.

7. Bagels

Bagels rolled out of Poland’s Jewish bakeries centuries before New York claimed them.

Eastern European immigrants carried the boiled-then-baked recipe across the Atlantic in the late 1800s.

New York gave bagels fame, water-bragging rights, and a schmear.

Poland gave them existence.

8. Coleslaw

Coleslaw is Dutch down to its name.

Koolsla means cabbage salad in Dutch, and Dutch colonists brought their version to the New York colonies.

The mayonnaise came later. So did the barbecue plate.

Your picnic’s most patriotic side dish speaks Dutch.

American Originals

Now, let's look at five foods that were invented in the United States.

1. Fortune Cookies

Chinese restaurants serve them, but China had nothing to do with fortune cookies.

Japanese immigrants get the credit, and the strongest claim belongs to Makoto Hagiwara, who served them at San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden in the early 1900s.

An American cookie, a Japanese family, a Chinese-restaurant tradition.

Only in the U.S.A. does dessert need three passports.

2. German Chocolate Cake

Germans want no part of the credit, and they shouldn't.

German chocolate cake is named for Samuel German, an English-American chocolate maker who created a sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's company in 1853.

The cake itself came from a Dallas homemaker, whose recipe ran in a 1957 Dallas newspaper.

Sales of the chocolate jumped by as much as 73%, and General Foods spread the recipe nationwide.

Somewhere along the way, the apostrophe-s fell off German's, and a Texas dessert picked up a European accent it never earned.

3. Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ruth Wakefield ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. In 1938, she published the first chocolate chip cookie recipe.

While reworking a butterscotch cookie, she folded in pieces of a Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate bar.

She called it the Chocolate Crunch Cookie.

The name didn't stick. The cookie did.

4. Buffalo Wings

Buffalo wings are named for Buffalo, New York, not the animal, and the city has the receipts.

Teressa Bellissimo fried the first batch at the Anchor Bar in 1964, tossing spare wings in butter and cayenne for her son's late-night friends.

Wings were soup scraps before that night.

The scraps got the last laugh.

5. Banana Split

Latrobe, Pennsylvania, 1904.

A 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist named David "Doc" Strickler was working the soda fountain at Tassell Pharmacy when he split a banana lengthwise and built a sundae on top.

Soda fountains across the country copied it.