With an ambitious sweep over two hundred years, Paul Freedman’s compelling history implies that there happens to be an American cuisine.

For centuries, skeptical foreigners-and even an incredible number of Americans-have believed there is no such factor as American cuisine. In latest decades, hamburgers, warm dogs, and pizza have been thought to define the nation’s palate. Not, says meals historian Paul Freedman, who demonstrates that there surely is an exuberant and diverse, if not always coherent, American about American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way cuisine that displays the history of the nation itself.

‘A book to be savored’ (Stephen Aron), American Food is also a repository of anecdotes that may delight meals lovers: how dried out cereal was created by William Kellogg for those who have digestive and low-energy complications; that chicken Parmesan, the beloved Italian favorite, is actually an American invention; which Florida Crucial lime pie goes back and then the 1940s and was predicated on a formula developed by Borden’s condensed milk. Even more emphatically, Freedman implies that American cuisine will be nowhere without the continuous influx of immigrants, who’ve popularized from tacos to sushi rolls.