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Comment by edgineer | Hacker News Reader

Article mentions canned bread. I just tried one the other day, a surprisingly normal looking grocery store can given to me by a Massachusetts native who grew up often having toasted canned brown bread with butter. It was not quite as bad as I was expecting.

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I haven't thought about canned brown bread in 42 years since I moved from Maine to California. I'll guess your can was made by B&M Baked Beans.

This makes me want to order a can on Amazon along with some Drake's Devil Dogs.

Canned brown bread is actually kind of delicious (for what it is).

Never had canned bread, but I have long assumed that most of the mushy disgusting stuff that is referred to as “bread” or “rolls” in the US must come from wartime factories that were never turned off, maybe because the population never demanded anything better.

We… we just aren’t too sophisticated about bread here. Or any foods other than barbecue. My Chinese wife has been laughing at my hatred of American cuisine for the last 30 years.

McDonald's is peak American cuisine and I'm not even kidding.

Yeah, because there's nothing worthwhile in US regional cuisine like I dunno, gumbo?

I've been to a cajun restaurant and I've been to a Jamaican restaurant.

Based on those, it would be no great loss if cajun cuisine was completely forgotten, though it's possible it was just a terrible restaurant.

There really is a problem with American food, and it's the people who design and eat it. For many years I've watched Indian restaurants open locally with great food, and then get blander and blander and blander over time. I can only assume they do it because their guests complain when the food they serve has detectable flavors.

I've eaten lots of Cajun food but I've never had Cajun food from a restaurant. A decent cook can make an excellent pot of gumbo or jambalaya, and a crawfish boil can be a delicious and wonderful backyard event.

You had to have eaten at a terrible restaurant.

Cajun cuisine is probably the second best regional cuisine in existence.

For amazing creole/cajun food - Jewel of the South on St. Louis Street in New Orleans is just top shelf (they're really small, so plan ahead). The last time I was there I had sweet breads, blood sausage, and some desert that was in french, so I don't remember what it was. It was (to be slightly dramatic) life changing. Being from the midwest, I have had sweet breads and blood sausage, both, but never, ever, ever anywhere close to as good as at the Jewel.

The owner used to be my landlord about a decade ago. I’ve heard nothing but good things about this and his other place, Manolito.

He was there when I was there and we had drinks. A family member of mine worked with him in the past, so I got to sit with those two old foodies/restaurant beasts who had spent their entire lives either in kitchens or as managers/owners and listen to wild-ass stories about what it was like to work food-service in New Orleans before New Orleans went PG rated post Katrina.

It was absolutely one of my favorite travel memories.

If he told you the Hunter S. Thompson story that must have been something to behold.

What’s the best regional cuisine?

Midwest, but specifically the cuisine of German/Irish immigrants from the early 1900's who were already poor when the great depression hit.

The middle of Illinois, North Missouri, parts of Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin is where to find it.

Hearty fall dishes full of fat, flavor, and the feeling of being home. Light summer dishes with local and wild greens.

Not the "regular" fried midwest foods, but dumplings, ox-tail soup, cabbage soup, so many beans, so much pork belly, cattail flour flatbread, fresh watercress and mustard greens; those sorts of things.

Szechuan

Of Chinese regional cuisine, I actually favor Xinjiang, though that is in large part because the need to be halal prevents them from serving pork.

Xinjiang cuisine also avoids the slimy glop coating that is so common in ethnic Chinese cuisine. [A problem that gets much worse if you have food delivered - the food doesn't get drained, and it's packed into delivery containers pretty tightly, so your food arrives bathing in a deep sea of sauce that would have, if served on a plate, fallen below the actual food.]

My second choice would be Hunan food.

If you ever go by Rosemead, CA I highly recommend the China Islamic restaurant there.

I'm starting to understand that the internet is mostly just people arguing over subjective things.

s/the internet/life/, but yeah. And?

It's a combination of things. The "Pullman Loaf" (as in Pullman railcars) became common for sandwich breads in the 19th century and established a common target for what bread should look like in the US and UK - white, sweet, fluffy, thin crust.

Later, we were successfully marketed "Wonder Bread" as a clean(as in sanitary) and convenient product, and that set another standard, one sold to housewives. It was basically applying the same strategy that built McDonald's in its early years. At the time of Wonder Bread's introduction, many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel", mixed homogenously and exposed to pests. All the early packaged foods, including the canned stuff and the sliced bread, were establishing a new norm of the manufacturer guaranteeing freshness to a sell-by date. It was PB&J on sliced bread for lunch and macaroni and cheese for dinner that got a lot of the US through the Depression years.

Continental Europe was simply less interested in this genre of bread - they had competition from other varieties of grain, and different kinds of bread dishes.

Samuel Motherfucking L motherfucking Jackson enters the Motherfucking chat.

What we think of as bread in the UK is different though - vast majority of bread sold in the UK is made with the Chorleywood method[1]

Mostly as a result of high quality wheat depending on imports vs the varieties we grew at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

> At the time of Wonder Bread's introduction, many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel", mixed homogenously and exposed to pests.

I cannot remember this. (And wasn't around for the introduction of Wonder Bread.)

But I was disturbed to see recent commentary saying "why in the world does food come inside so much disposable packaging?"

That answer should be obvious to everyone. Modern food comes inside disposable packaging because the other way spreads disease. You could argue that we should have less of that, or more of it. But if you can't even imagine why the shrinkwrap is there... how do you get through the day?

>many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel"

What does this mean? It's impossible to Google, thanks to the restaurant chain by the same name.

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