If you think debates surrounding barbecue are heated, just attend a chili cook-off. The opportunities for good-natured differences abound in this most democratic of dishes. Everything is at issue - how it is made, how it is served, how it is eaten. Chili also represents an inordinate American fondness for the one-pot meal, here captured with incomparable richness and depth. Chili already is the state dish of Texas, but that hasn't ruled it out of consideration as the national dish of the United States.
Chocolate chip cookies.
The most popular mistake in American cookery. Shortly after she and her husband bought the old Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass., in 1930, Ruth Wakefield whipped up a batch of brown-sugar cookie dough, into which she chopped chunks of a chocolate bar, thinking they'd melt in the heat of the oven. They didn't, though they turned softly gooey. The cookies were an immediate hit. Countless variations appear in cookbooks and on restaurant menus, even of the interpretation credited for the dish's overall popularity, Southern fried chicken.