The Surprising Real Origins Of Your Favorite Ethnic Foods

This chow mein is delicious. Thank you, dear. Wait! I forgot the lechon noodles. Over the course of centuries, foods from around the globe have found their way to American soil, and foreign cuisines have mixed and mingled like singles at a cocktail party. New dishes have been born from the love of food, and Americans everywhere have misattributed their origins. I think we'll start with a round of Nagasaki's. From spaghetti and meatballs to chop suey and the beloved fajita. Today on Weird History Food, we're investigating the real origins of ethnic foods. But before we get started, be sure to subscribe to the Weird History Food channel, and let us know in the comments below what other food-related origin stories you would like to hear about. All right, start corning your beef. It's time to uncover the true beginnings of some of America's most delicious dishes. Originally called German's chocolate cake, this delicious little pecan and coconut-filled delicacy wasn't named after Germany at all. It was named after Sam German, a 19th century baker based out of Texas, which is not in Germany. Last time I checked, anyway. German invented his own sweet baking chocolate bar for Baker's Chocolate Company in 1852. The company named their newly acquired product after German. But the bar would live out a humble existence for over a century, as most chocolate bars do. For instance, we could all be taking bites out of Dr. Good Bar, but he settled for the quiet life of a mere mister. It wasn't until 1957, when a home baker sent her very own German's chocolate cake recipe to a Dallas newspaper, that the German's chocolate cake craze began. The home baker's recipe was published to newspapers across the nation. Somewhere in the frenzy, newspapers lost the apostrophe and the S, and began printing it as simply German chocolate cake. Ever since, unsuspecting Americans have been served up the Trojan horse of Texas cuisine. It just goes to show that you don't need to be European to be posh and elegant. Lone star cooking can be classy as all get out. Spaghetti, meatballs, and marinara sauce are as Italian as Rocky Balboa. But before anyone ever thought to make the classic spaghetti and meatballs combo, turn of the century Italian immigrants were hard at work growing their meatballs larger than anyone had ever seen before. Back in Italy, meatballs were traditionally smaller than golf balls. They were mashed together with whatever meats that cooks could get their hands on. Called pulpettes, these predecessors to the modern meatball were popular for their versatility among Italy's lower classes. They were often made with turkey or fish or whatever other meats could be scraped up and served. And they were usually served as a standalone dish. But with meat being much more affordable in America, the small Italian pulpette turned from a kitchen sink commodity to a baseball-sized beefy delicacy. A meatball you could really sink your teeth into, or hurl across home plate. At the same time, canned tomatoes were commonplace in American cuisine. And Italian immigrants were quick to make them a staple part of their diets too. Marinara soon became the paragon of Italian-American sauces. And spaghetti and meatballs, a distinctly American dish, was born. Oh, yeah. And about spaghetti, it's thought that the Italians first imported noodles from Asia, possibly China, around the 13th century. While some believe they were brought to Italy by Marco Polo, which is dumb. That never happens in the Netflix series. Others believe they got to Europe through nomadic Arab traders. Either way, the Italians took to the Asian noodle like John Wick to a new dog. And by adding durum wheat to the recipe, the Italians made the Asian noodle all their own. So began the love affair that would launch 350 varieties of pasta across the Mediterranean. Many of these varieties would eventually find themselves stateside. And one variety in particular would take America by storm, spaghetti. Spaghetti was just the thing Italian-Americans needed to accommodate their new countrymen's insatiable desire for carbohydrates. They piled it onto plates, slapped some meatballs and marinara sauce on top, and another American legacy was born. It took good, old-fashioned ingenuity to put spaghetti with meatballs. But it took genius to change Alfredo sauce into the creamy wonder it is today. That's right. The Alfredo sauce you have come to know and love has its origins in California, not in Italy. While a form of Alfredo was and is still made in Rome, its Italian form consists of butter and grated Romano cheese. It's a far cry from the thick and creamy Alfredo sauce that lines America's grocery store shelves today. But how did this change happen? Well, in the 1920s, Hollywood stars Mary Pitford and Douglas Fairbanks visited Rome on their honeymoon, where they fell in love with the Italian version of Alfredo sauce. When they returned stateside, they told everyone who would listen about their discovery. Pitford and Fairbanks' gushing praise began an Alfredo hype train. And the California elite raced to Rome to try out the sauce for themselves. Some attempted to recreate the magic at home. And by adding cream and garlic to the recipe, they created a sauce all their own. They replaced the original recipe's egg noodles with fettuccine, added some chicken to the mix, and voila. The average American family could at least try this foreign delicacy out for themselves, while being none the wiser that the dish they were enjoying was nothing like it was in Italy. But here's a hint for you. If your pasta has chicken in it, it's probably not authentically Italian. Italians don't generally mix their pasta with their chicken. And when they do, it's usually to cater to American tourists. Cheap meat was often given to Mexican workers on Texas ranches as a form of payment during the 1930s and 40s. This was less than ideal because you can't pay rent with meat. And it is difficult to keep in your wallet for any amount of time. Perhaps not surprisingly, this meat was also fatty and unappetizing. So ranchers began marinating it to improve its flavor. They would grill this marinated meat up, toss it into some tortillas, and serve it to their workers. It soon became a staple meal for ranch hands across the state. And it was the best-kept secret of Vaqueros for decades. That is, until 1969, when a man named Sonny Falcon decided to blow the lid off this secret and go public with it. He opened a fast food stand and sold these tortilla-wrapped treats at a local festival. Nearby restaurants, inspired by Falcon's creation, began selling their own version of it as well. The product tore through America like mild sauce through a colon. And soon, everyone across the country would come to know and love this newly available food. They called it the fajita. The fajita has since grown into a high-ticket menu item that includes shrimp, chicken, and better cuts of beef. Though the popularity of the original cheap meat recipe made skirt steak, once a scorned cut of beef, into a valued American commodity. How about La Choy chop suey vegetables in your special Oriental recipe? La Choy makes Chinese food. Sweet American. Why not? Since America's founding, poor immigrant communities have attempted to recreate tastes of their homeland with whatever ingredients are available to them. And so it is with chop suey, another American staple that's often mistaken for authentic Chinese cuisine. While some legends hold that the dish was invented by Chinese statesman Li Hongzhong during an 1896 visit to America, most experts agree that chop suey predated Hongzhong's disdain for American cuisine by at least a decade. They believe the dish has more down to Earth origins, or perhaps more accurately, in the Earth origins. Chop suey most likely emerged from a Cantonese-American mining camp in the 1880s. Restricted by local California ingredients, these immigrant workers attempted to recreate flavors of their homeland using only what was available to them. And so chop suey was born. Roughly translating to assorted mix, the dish is a hodgepodge of vegetables and meats covered in sauce. It usually contains meat, eggs, beansprouts, cabbage, and celery. But it can also have mushrooms, water lily roots, and onion, depending on what's available and how you feel about mushrooms. Chop suey's popularity grew until it became a ubiquitous part of American Chinese cuisine. Every St. Patrick's Day, Americans celebrate Irish heritage by drinking U2's combined weight in Guinness and indulging in authentic Irish corned beef and cabbage. Only there's nothing authentically Irish about it. Before the British colonized Ireland, the Irish generally didn't eat beef. Many in Gaelic Ireland considered cows to be sacred animals, or at least too valuable to kill, and only relied on them for field work and milk. When they did want meat, they ate pork instead. But when the British marched into Ireland with their beefy ways, they took control of Irish farmland and raised cattle there to export back to England. This, in turn, drove the price of beef down in England. And English farmers struggled under the competition in order to protect domestic production. The 1663 and 1667 Cadillacs were passed in England, banning the importation of cows from Ireland. The market was forced to adapt, and British entrepreneurs created the process of corning. This process entailed dry curing beef by using corn kernel-sized chunks of salt. The salt dried the meat out, making it last longer before it rotted. With this new method available to them, the British could process and cure beef within Ireland and then export and sell the products elsewhere without having to export whole cows. The Irish themselves couldn't afford this new beef product. They were stuck eating potatoes and cabbage, while the British and French reveled in their newfound delicacy of corny, salty beef. But as America emerged and people from around the globe began migrating across the Atlantic, Jewish Americans took the British corning process and perfected it into the process we still use today. And like the Italians with their meatballs, Irish-American immigrants could afford meat for the first time in many of their lives. Enticed by the British commodity that they were never able to eat back home, these immigrants sought out corned beef like they were hunting for Beanie Babies in 1998. You know, if Beanie Babies had been stuffed full of meat and corn. They began to buy the Jewish-American form of corned beef, and they mixed it with potatoes and cabbage for a nostalgic taste of home. It would probably be more authentic to call the dish Authentic New York Corned Beef and Cabbage. But because it came from Irish-American communities, people assumed it came from Ireland itself. In 1880, baker Samuel Bath Thomas attempted to recreate the English crumpet for an American market, presumably on a dare. He invented the toaster crumpet. It was flatter and less cakey than its English counterpart, but the product was an immediate success. Upscale hotels and restaurants began advertising Thomas's toaster crumpet as an overseas delicacy. But by the turn of the century, they'd changed the name from Toaster Crumpet to English Muffin in order to make it sound more prestigious. English Muffin sounds like it can get a last minute table reservation. Toaster Crumpet sounds like it's working the valet stand. It would be another century before Thomas's company began to sell their English Muffin in England. It first reached British markets in the 1990s, roughly the same time as another famed American-British export, King Ralph. Are you crazy? What would I be doing in here? So what do you think? Which of these food origins surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments below. And while you're at it, check out some of these other Weird History Food videos.