Meals that made America great – Hot German Potato Salad
How food from around the world found a welcome home in the US - as featured in America The Cookbook
German-Americans make up the largest of the “ancestry”groups in the USA, estimated at some 46 million in number in 2014. This accounts for a third of the German ethnic population across the world. They started arriving as early as the 1670s, before coming over in their millions from 1830 to 1870, settling across the country from Pennsylvania to Oregon. Their influence is felt in such institutions as Kindergartens and the Christmas tree but also in the culinary sphere - in those most American of dishes, hot dogs and Hamburgers, as our new title America The Cookbook makes clear.
These delicacies are by no means the sum total of Germany’s contribution to the vast stew of American cuisine, however. There were pretzels, Lebkuchen (a classic Christmas cookie), The St Louis Gooey butter cake, accidentally created by a German-American baker after he put too much butter in a coffee cake recipe. They also had the idea of adding bacon to potato salad to create Hot German Potato Salad. Comfort foods are certainly a Germanic speciality but very often the terminology alone adds to their irresistibility - take “Spaetzle”, which is the German for “little sparrows”. Fortunately, no small birds died in the making of this recipe - Spaetzle are tiny dumplings.
For more on the surprising routes some recipes have taken to end up on the plates in the US, as well as plenty recipes, both homegrown and recently imported, order a copy of America The Cookbook, here.