Food

Love mac and cheese? Most Americans do. It’s considered a favorite dish in nearly every US state and is among the top five side dishes served during Thanksgiving dinner.  

Here’s how this creamy comfort food came to America:

According to historians, Thomas Jefferson, one of this nation’s founding fathers who was also an inventor and the third US president, traveled to France during the Revolutionary War. Accompanying him was his enslaved cook, James Hemings, who studied cooking there. (James was Sally Hemings’ older brother.) Jefferson fell in love with many pasta dishes, including mac and cheese. 

But here is when history gets a bit muddy. Some say Hemings created the recipe and then brought it back to the US. Others believe he modernized it. Either way, thank Hemings the next time you eat mac and cheese – whether it’s baked or out of the box –  and also Jefferson for popularizing it.

While many popular foods were invented in different countries, there are plenty that were created right here in the US. I’m getting hungry just thinking about them.

Brownies: The Palmer House, a hotel in Chicago, was the birthplace of the brownie. In 1893, Bertha Palmer, a socialite and philanthropist whose husband owned the hotel, requested that its pastry team create a dessert that could be easily boxed, transported, and then served to women attending the World Fair’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

Grilled Cheese: This sandwich is believed to have been created in the US in the 1920s. Loaves of bread were inexpensive and processed cheese had gained popularity.  During the Great Depression in the 1930s, this sandwich remained popular. It only had two main ingredients, was inexpensive, and easy to prepare. (Do you do the cheese pull? This involves pulling apart the stretchy and gooey cheese)

Ranch Dressing: This story is a pipe dream or in this case, a pipe fitter’s dream that came true. Steve Henson, a plumber from Thayer, Nebraska, invented Ranch dressing in the early 1950s. While working in Anchorage, Alaska, he cooked for his work crews. That’s when he perfected his buttermilk salad dressing, now known as Ranch dressing. Since 1992, Ranch dressing has claimed the No. 1 spot as America’s favorite salad dressing. 

Cereal: This was initially created to improve the digestive health of patients at medical hospitals. In 1863, a vegetarian named Dr. James Jackson created granula to serve to his patients at his hospital in upstate New York.. It consisted of pieces of hard, graham flour dough that were soaked overnight. Years later, Dr. John Kellogg, a surgeon who ran a health spa in Michigan, was inspired by granula and created his own version called granola. Dr. Kellogg and his younger brother then accidentally created a flaked cereal they named Corn Flakes. They had rolled out wheat dough, forgotten about it overnight, and discovered that it had turned into thin flakes. 

Popsicles: This hot-weather treat was accidentally created in 1905 by Frank Epperson, an 11-year-old boy who lived in San Francisco. Frank used a stick to stir soda water powder with water in a cup. But he left the mixture on his porch overnight with the stick still inside the cup. It froze. After finding the cup the next morning, he licked the mixture off the stick, naming it, “Epsicle”. Years later, his children called it “Popsicle”. The name stuck.

Chocolate Chip Cookies: In the late 1930s, Ruth Wakefield and her husband ran the Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts. As the story goes, she was baking a batch of chocolate cookies for the inn but ran out of baker’s chocolate. She then grabbed a Nestle chocolate bar and broke it into chunks, hoping they would melt into the dough while the cookies baked. They didn’t. Instead, she created a cookie that’s still famous almost 100 years later.

Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich: The recipe for a P&J sandwich by Julia Davis Chandler was first published in 1901 in the Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. The recipe called for currant or crab-apple jelly. The sandwich grew in popularity. More than a decade later, many World War I soldiers (1914-1918) began spreading peanut butter and concord grape jelly on their bread ration. The sandwich was high in protein, easily portable on long marches, didn’t require refrigeration, and perhaps best of all, tasted good!

Tuna Melts: No one really knows for sure but….several sources believe that the following story really happened. In the 1960s, a cook at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Charleston, South Carolina, accidentally spilled some tuna salad onto a grilled cheese sandwich. One bite later, the tuna melt was born. According to a 2024 Buddig poll (released by Talker Research), tuna melts rank as the fifth most popular sandwich in the US. (I just had one for lunch!) 

Did you invent a special sandwich or dish? Mo wants to know. Email the recipe to info@adventuresofmo.com along with your first name, age and state you live in and we’ll publish it on Mo’s social media page.