The French are spinning American food

The results may not be authentic to the US, but are nevertheless grand

Spring twilight comes late to northern France, and around 9, when we left the Marine Le Pen rally, a hush was settling across the countryside. This, the candidate had said, was the real France, and it was certainly the France that American tourists long for, untouched by the homogenising forces of global travel.

I confess, I had a certain curiosity as to how a provincial French restaurateur would interpret my native cuisine. The answer, in case you’re wondering, is “oddly”. Not nearly as odd as the “Mexican” food you find in Europe: It looks just as it should, but don’t try taking a bite... In Saint Quentin’s Le Golden Pub, the American food was at least both food and American. Sort of.

I settled on a meal as quintessentially American as the stars and stripes, or the Solo cup: a burger, a soda and a banana split.

I pause here to note that I’m not that American who goes abroad and complains that nothing is as good as it is at home. This meal was, in fact, delicious, at least an 8 out of 10 in the category of bar food. In any case, my hope upon finding an American-themed bar was not that I would find good food, but that — after a lifetime of experiencing American renditions of other cultures’ cuisines — I would see how the French do American food. 

Volumes are written about the terrible things that Americans do to other cuisines, whether it be the teeth-aching sweetness of General Tso’s chicken, or the Godzilla-like growth of the American burrito. In most of the conversations I’ve had about this, the assumption is that there must be something wrong with Americans, that we cannot enjoy foreign dishes the way they were intended to be eaten. Or even worse, that we are culinary imperialists, plundering the recipes of other nations, and then screwing them up. What the heck is an “Asian salad”, anyway?

But every cuisine gets lost in translation, and always for the same reasons. The source’s ingredients are hard to get in a foreign land; the original skills are hard to teach to foreigners; local palates are hard to please with food that seems entirely strange. And local knowledge — like “bagels are a breakfast food” — doesn’t necessarily get transferred along with the recipes. I hardly need to point out that France has a formidable food culture, full of good chefs and great restaurants. But it’s no better than we are at replicating someone else’s tradition. The result is the culinary equivalent of Franglais.

Which is all to the good, as the results of these translation errors are often grand. With rare exceptions like succotash, every great “American” dish is someone else’s native food, altered beyond all recognition. The hamburger itself seems to have come from German immigrants, but upon these shores, it gained a bun (slightly sweet), tomato ketchup, and a slice of dill pickle. Thus armed, it strode forth to make global culinary history. 

Telling Americans to stop appropriating someone else’s cuisine is demanding an impossibility; almost everything we eat has been appropriated from somewhere. Other cultures’ chefs should appropriate freely as well!