My foreign-American food anecdotes

Megan McArdle has a food post up today, on her experience of a Frenchified hamburger.  And after making a few comments on that post, I thought I’d share my own related anecdotes here, from my time in Germany and various travels.

Steak americain

So a number of years back, I was at a training session in Brussels, and the group I was with went out to dinner, but I was on a stingy per-diem, not keen on spending much of my own money, and it was a pricey steak & seafood restaurant.  I saw “steak americain” on the menu and thought, “great, this is probably some kind of meatloaf; just up my alley.”  Happily, I was informed, before I ordered my meal, that this was what we in the U.S. know as steak tartare, which I was not so adventurous as to want to try.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter does indeed exist in Europe, but it’s not something my husband grew up with, which meant that, somewhere along the way, we declared that he had officially become Americanized when he learned to like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (and root beer), rather than being disgusted by them.  (He now will eat peanut butter out of the jar, with a spoon, periodically.)

Then, when we lived in Germany, I struggled with what to pack for my boys’ mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack at kindergarten, so I often settled for PB&J sandwiches, figuring they would pass muster as reasonably healthy, but easier to prepare and more likely to get eaten than other snacks I might send with them.  But I got complaints from the teachers, and ultimately my husband figured out that, not familiar with this American classic, they considered peanut butter to be similar to Nutella in terms of nutrition, and, yes, I wouldn’t want to see a kid bringing Nutella-bread every day, either.

Hawaiian Toast

American cheese?  Europeans sneer at it as “not really even cheese”, right?  American bread?  The same, eh?  But here’s a little-known German recipe:  Hawaiian toast.  (I am not making this up:  it was served by my in-laws, and appears on German menus.)  How do you prepare it?  Take “toastbrot” (that’s American-style bread, suitable for popping into a toaster), toast it, and layer on ham, pineapple, and American cheese (called “Toast Käse” because you put it on toast), then pop it in the oven ’til the cheese melts.

How does it taste?  Well, about like what you’d expect it to taste.

German McDonalds

When you go to a Chinese restaurant, they play up the Chinese-ness, and often enough it’s run by actual ethnic Chinese people.  An Olive Garden restaurant wants you to believe you’re experiencing Tuscany for an hour or two.  But McDonalds restaurants outside the U.S.?  They don’t really play up their Americanness.  For the most part, so far as I could tell, Germans (and Europeans, in general) experience them a just a “regular” restaurant, which they patronize for their convenience and family-friendliness.  Sure, there are German “fast food” restaurants, typically deli-type places where you could get a Leberkäse sandwich but have to stand in the Steh-cafe to eat it, or streetcorner Döner Kebap stands, but McDonalds is nearly in a class of its own in terms of providing cheap food, served quickly, and with table seating.  Besides which, they have Playplaces for the kiddos in Germany just as much as in the U.S.

Wagner Pizza

Germans don’t have nearly the same degree of freezer/convenience foods as we do in the U.S., but there’s a massive frozen pizza market, and one of those manufacturers is Wagner.  I can’t speak to their current advertising, but when we lived there, they were running a set of commercials that were hysterically funny.  Here’s an example from youtube:

Did this advertising campaign work?  No idea.

How about you?  Please share your anecdotes in the comments!

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APeanut-Butter-Jelly-Sandwich.png; By Evan-Amos, minor alteration by anetode to add transparency. (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons