Twenty Great American Dishes
By 
I was a bit skeptical when I first opened this CNN list of twenty great American dishes, but I gotta say, other than missing anything with Hatch green chile, this is about as perfect of a list as you can come up with. You’ve got super basic comfort foods, like PB&J. And honestly, is that not a great dish? It’s a perfect dish for what it is! You’ve got big conceptual types of food like BBQ, which exists in about 20 different ways. I happen to love fried okra. The Cobb salad is a perfect choice, even if it’s something I rarely order, but why not include it? Fry bread is a Native obscurity that exists all over the place in the Southwest and is delicious; including an obscurity like this that also adds to the diversity of the offerings and includes Indigenous food is great. Burgers? Apple pie? All you need is mom. Poke, God bless Hawaiian food, that’s all I gotta say. I don’t personally care for grits too much, but of course it defines a whole reason of the country. I’m not sure that I knew spaghetti and meatballs was an American dish and I wish the story had gone into this a bit, but yum.
Like, there are things I might include instead of some of these, but there’s certainly not a bad choice in here.
Thoughts from the peanut gallery?