10. Chocolate-chip cookies
Today the name most associated with the killer cookie might be Mrs. Fields, but we actually have Ruth Wakefield, who owned the Toll House Inn, a popular spot for home cooking in 1930s Whitman, Massachusetts, to thank for all spoon-licking love shared through chocolate chip cookies.
Was Mrs. Wakefield making her Butter Drop Do cookies when, lacking baker’s chocolate, she substituted a cut-up Nestle’s semisweet chocolate bar? Or did the vibrations of a Hobart mixer knock some chocolate bars off a shelf and into her sugar-cookie dough?
However chocolate chips ended up in the batter, a new cookie was born. Andrew Nestle reputedly got the recipe from her -- it remains on the package to this day -- and Wakefield got a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Can you feel the serotonin and endorphins releasing?
9. Blueberry cobbler
Also charmingly called slump, grunt, and buckle, cobbler got its start with early oven-less colonists who came up with the no-crust-on-the-bottom fruit dish that could cook in a pan or pot over a fire.
They might have been lofting a mocking revolutionary middle finger at the mother country by making a sloppy American version of the refined British steamed fruit and dough pudding. Cobblers become doubly American when made with blueberries, which are native to North America (Maine practically has a monopoly on them).
We love blueberries for how they sex up practically any crust, dough, or batter, maybe most of all in cobblers and that other all-American favorite, the blueberry muffin.
8. Delmonico’s steak
There are steakhouses all over the country but perhaps none so storied -- with a universally acclaimed steak named for it no less -- as the original Delmonico’s in New York.
The first diner called by the French name restaurant, Delmonico’s opened in 1837 with unheard-of things like printed menus, tablecloths, private dining rooms, and lunch and dinner offerings. Among other firsts, the restaurant served the “Delmonico Steak.” Whatever the excellent cut (the current restaurant uses boneless rib eye), the term Delmonico’s Steak has come to mean the best.
Lightly seasoned with salt, basted with melted butter, and grilled over a live fire, it’s traditionally served with a thin clear gravy and Delmonico’s potatoes, made with cream, white pepper, Parmesan cheese, and nutmeg -- a rumored favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s.
7. Chicago-style pizza
Naples gave us the first pizza, but the City of Big Shoulders (and even bigger pizzas) gave us the deep dish. The legend goes that in 1943, a visionary named Ike Sewell opened Uno’s Pizzeria in Chicago with the idea that if you made it hearty enough, pizza, which up till then had been considered a snack, could be eaten as a meal.
Whether he or his original chef Rudy Malnati originated it, one of those patron saints of pizza made it deep and piled it high, filling a tall buttery crust with lots of meat, cheese, tomato chunks, and authentic Italian spices.
Thin-crust pizza made in a brick oven has its place, but if you lust for crust, nothing satisfies quite like Chicago-style.
6. Nachos
The bane of diets and the boon of happy hours -- could there be a more perfect calorie-dense accompaniment to a pitcher of margaritas?
Less rhetorically: why does Piedras Negras, Mexico, just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, host The International Nacho Festival and the Biggest Nacho in the World Contest every October?
Because it was there that Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya invented nachos when a gaggle of shopping wives of American soldiers stationed at Fort Duncan arrived at the Victory Club restaurant after closing time.
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