Ethnic Foods: Ethnicity and American Foodways

The massive immigration of 1880–1924 brought an entirely new level of diversity to American kitchens, along with renewed efforts at “Americanization through homemaking,” to borrow the title of a 1929 pamphlet aimed at Mexican American students in California. In addition, the United States continued to add ethnic foods by conquest and migration, seizing multiethnic Hawaii and holding Puerto Rico and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. At the beginning of the “new immigration,” Scandinavians and Germans, some from eastern Europe, moved into rural areas in the prairie states. Where a group stayed together in a climate similar to their homeland, as did Germans from Russia in the Dakotas or Czechs in Texas, rural communities preserved many ethnic foodways. A small group like Luxembourger Americans tended to melt into Dutch and German American communities in Chicago or Dubuque, but retained distinctive peasant breakfasts and staples such as fried buckwheat dumplings (sterchelen) and scrambled pancakes (durchaunder) in Winona County, Minnesota.