Made In America - Bill Bryson [124]
For many immigrants, and for the Italians in particular, the restaurant business became an attractive way to establish a foothold in the New World. Trattorie – family-run restaurants – became a feature on street corners in every large city, some of them growing into large and celebrated establishments like Mama Leone’s and Sardi’s in New York and Colisimo’s in Chicago. Most, however, stayed small, like G. Lombardi’s on Spring Street in New York, which would now be forgotten to history except that one of its early proprietors had the uncommon prescience in 1905 to introduce Americans to a dish for which they would develop an abiding addiction: the pizza.11
Many ‘classic’ Italian dishes are in fact New World creations. Chicken tetrazzini – chicken in a cream sauce on spaghetti – was named for the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini but invented in New York. The caesar salad comes from Tijuana. It was devised by a restaurateur named Caesar Cardini who, so the story goes, whipped up the salad from leftover ingredients when a party of hungry guests descended on him late one night. Fettuccine primavera was born in the kitchen of New York’s Le Cirque restaurant. Veal parmigiana, clams Posillipo, fettuccine Alfredo, even spaghetti and meatballs were all products designed to satisfy the American palate. ‘By the 1950s,’ as one writer has put it, ‘Italian-American food was all but unrecognizable to visitors from Italy. A businessman from Turin might peruse a menu in an Italian restaurant in Chicago and not be able to decipher a single item.‘12
A similar situation obtained with many other well-loved ‘foreign’ foods. Russian dressing is unknown to the Russians, as is the American variety of French dressing to the French. Vichyssoise was invented not in France but in New York in 1910, and Liederkranz cheese sprang not from Germany, or even from Austria or Switzerland, but from Monroe, New York, in 1892. (The name, meaning ‘wreath of song’, commemorates a local choral society.) Chilli con carne was unknown in Spain until introduced there from the New World. Salisbury steak has nothing to do with the English cathedral city (it was named for an American, Dr J. H. Salisbury), nor does Swiss steak have even the tiniest alpine pedigree. Chop-suey (based on the Cantonese word for miscellany) first saw light not in China but in San Francisco in the late 1800s, though the word itself does not appear in print until 1903. The fortune cookie was invented in Los Angeles in the second decade of this century. More recent still is chow mein, which first appeared in 1927, though the pidgin word chow dates in print from 1856 and the slightly more emphatic chowchow is first recorded in 1857.13
As America became increasingly urbanized, people took to eating their main meal in the evening. To fill the void between breakfast and dinner, a new and essentially American phenomenon arose: lunch. The words lunch and luncheon (often spelled lunchon, lunchen, lunchion or lunching) have been around in English since the late 1500s. Originally they signified lumps of food – ‘a lunchen of cheese’ – and may have come from the Spanish lonja, a slice of ham. The word was long considered a deplorable vulgarism, suitable only to the servants’ hall. In America, however, ‘lunch’ became respectable, and as it dawned on opportunistic restaurateurs that each day millions of office workers required something quick, simple and cheap, a wealth of new facilities sprang up to answer the demand. In short order Americans got diners (1872), lunch counters (1873), self-service restaurants (1885), cafeterias (1890s), automats (1902), and short-order restaurants (1905).
The process began in 1872 in Providence, Rhode Island, when one Walter Scott loaded a wagon with sandwiches, boiled eggs and other such fare and parked outside the offices of the Providence Journal. Since all the restaurants