When The National Dish Is The Language Of The Menu

'You never Know it might be the effect of their pioneer history. All that rancid belly of pork which frightened them off food, and made them think that anything that you could actually taste must have something wrong with it. Sometimes the only way of identifying the food in America is by eye, rather than palate. It has to be food shaped. Where has all the flavour gone?

One theory is that it has been syphoned out of the cuisine and put on the menu. There your hamburger is a Kingburger, a Bulgy burger. A Hugeburger, is not cooked, but  smoked oh so slowly over crackling hickory logs prior to nestling within, being cuddled between, or indeed graciously amassed upon, two  super-soft bake oven baps and served knee deep in sweet mustard sauce.

That is why when it arrives, piping hot, from your hosts genial charcoal heart, I should  say hearth, it tastes of nothing. Drowned in rhetoric, the flavour dies. The national dish of America is the menu.'

-Robert Robinson on American cuisine