Foreign food in late 1930s USA, and eating in college

[longlivehumour]

A couple of food-related questions. The setting is a fictional college in Connecticut, in the late 1930s: not Ivy League, but old enough.

A) What sort of foreign food would excite comment when eaten in 1930s upper-middle-class America? I mean food, not cuisine - ordinary fare in its original culture, but not something most Americans would eat,

Comments

[orange_fell]

"ethnic food only became mainstream around the 50s"

This is true. I have cookbooks written in the 1960s that list broccoli as something you can find only at an Italian grocer's shop. WASPy whitebread Americans had palates about as exciting as . . . well, white bread. So basically, just about any "foreign" food could excite comment.

But there were also fun regional dishes. Somebody from the South or the Midwest would be unfamiliar at first with New England's chowders and clambakes and cranberries. Raw oysters at a seafood shack in coastal Connecticut might bring out a "Why would you eat that??!" from an out-of-stater

[laitsah]

I've only read cookbook recipes dating during the two world war periods due to limited supplies. Quite inventive, especially since there was a lot of leaning on typical, old-fashioned British style foods for young wives who could not lean on the help of African Americans.

But I have access to article, and have downloaded it. If you want, I can email it to any email that can receive attachments.

[parmalokwen]

Check out this video of non-Jews trying Ashkenazi Jewish food. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqYGGqTC_Us It might be almost exactly what you're looking for, with a few caveats

[houseboatonstyx]

In the 1950s in a small town in Texas, an Italian deli was considered foreign and daring. Spaghetti and tomato/meat sauce was too hot!

[frenchpony]

There's a wonderful book called Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana that has lots of sections on life in mid-century America, including one on "Chop Suey," that describes the rise of Chinese restaurants in the 20th century. Chinese food was cheap and exotic, but one of the things that the book mentions is how most Western diners stuck to things like chop suet, chow mein, and egg foo young (my dad still mourns the loss of good egg foo young at most Chinese restaurants), and would consider things like preserved eggs, sharks' fin soup, or duck's feet to be massively exotic. Those things wouldn't even be on the English menu, and if you wanted to try them, you'd have to point to another table of Chinese diners who were eating them.

You'd probably eat Chinese food with a fork, and you wouldn't know the difference between Chinese regional cuisines like Cantonese, Szechwan, Hunan, or Mandarin. (For the record, I believe that "traditional American Chinese" food is based on Cantonese cuisine and tends to run sweet.

[full_metal_ox]

Although there's a greater awareness now of the distinctions between Chinese regional cuisines and more acceptance of such ingredients as tofu, the likes of preserved eggs, shark's fin soup, and duck's feet are still deemed pretty danged exotic among whites in my neck of the woods (Dayton, Ohio.)

(For an even more in-depth history of Chinese food in the U.S., check out The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. (sic) Lee; here's a sampling of the subjects Lee addresses:

...The Biggest Culinary Joke Played by One Culture on Another, on the surprising origins of chop suey and a historical retrospective on how it saved the Chinese

[marycatelli]

By that point, there was some drift toward an American variety.

A wise soul observed that any ethnic restaurant in America probably is really hyphenated, and how much close it is probably depends on how recently the immigrants arrived, because it evolves over time.