New York City: A Food Biography (Big City Food Biographies)
New York City, without question America’s food capital, has reveled in consumption from the outset. Beginning in the eighteenth century, citizens observed holidays with feasting and “drinking excessive amounts of liquor.” The Erie Canal brought midwestern grain and meat to city dwellers, whose numbers began to swell with immigrant hordes who adapted American bounty to their native lands’ culinary traditions. Germans taught Irish maids to cook more widely, and then Italians and Chinese introduced their own highly sophisticated kitchen techniques. Swelling merchant and manufacturing classes demanded French sophistication and elegant restaurant dining. Flocks of Eastern European Jews gave the city’s boroughs the sort of delicatessen fare celebrated in literature, theater, and movies. New York’s newspapers, broadcasters, and publishers further spread the city’s culinary influence across the nation. Today, tens of thousands of restaurants, groceries, bakeries, and street-food stands continue to feed an ever-changing culinary landscape. --Mark Knoblauch