How is it possible? I went to a Chinese restaurant with no rice on the menu. China is huge and the food is diverse. In many areas, rice is not the staple food.
The restaurant I went to is called North West Chinese Food. It’s located in College Park in Maryland. The restaurant serves only noodle dishes. Some of them were quite spicy. One of their specialties is knife cut noodles. See them in the first photo.
But, because of demand, the owner is opening another restaurant which will feature dishes with rice.
Annapolis is the capital of Maryland and makes for an easy tourist outing from Washington, located just 30 miles to the east. One day, we went. It was a perfect day with blue skies and light breezes.
The downtown is adorable. Parking is not. One of the main attractions is the Naval Academy.
Lots of shops and antiques to gasp at.
There are boat tours and water taxis.
We ate on the south side and while it was quieter, we did not think the food was anything special.
We did stop at a cafe, Curated, and that was lovely. A young golden haired youth was sitting at the next table reading a Torah, a copy of Milton’s works, and a notebook in which he was taking concise notes with an old fashioned ink pen. No cell phone in sight. I wondered if he was a wraith, a time traveler, dropped into our world by the fumes of my coffee… it turned out that he was studying the connection between Milton’s assertions about the role of poetry in the Torah. He was going to do a doctoral thesis on this. We talked briefly about poetry. Then he left us to our breakfast. A bit later, a very modern young woman, cell phone attached to hand, sat down next to him. She asked what he was doing. He told her. At the blank look on her face, he asked if she had heard of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She said that she thought she had. Clearly no spark there. She got up and left quickly after that.
I remarked to my friend that artsy young men like that one were so unusual in the greater Washington area but probably not so out of place in New York City.
From inside Curate cafe.
If you visit Annapolis, you might not meet any interesting scholars, but you can absorb the history anyway.
As I have mentioned, I like old school places and there seem to be fewer and fewer of them in the greater Washington, DC, area. But, maybe I just need to look harder?
One day I was exploring up in the College Park area in Maryland. I had traveled for over an hour on the public transportation system taking two trains and a bus when I arrived at the location for my next bus. I was right in front of Rita’s Ice, Custard, Happiness. I decided to try out the frozen custard. Of the three offerings on the menu, ice indicates frozen ice cream types, frozen custard is an ice cream made with more egg yolks than regular ice cream, and happiness is the result of those two things.
I got a peanut butter milkshake as that is possibly the most “American” thing I could think of. It was thick and sweet.
Rita’s is the kind of place I would expect in a beach town but it is on a busy street (if one tries hard and closes one’s eyes, one can imagine that the traffic is the ocean?). Even so, they continue, so much so that they are now open all year round. To the side of the large parking area is a picnic area.
I asked a local if she had heard of Rita’s and she assured me that “everyone’s heard of Rita’s” which was sort of comforting to hear.
In the US (and in 120 other countries), you will see these little boxes with free books. They are part of Little Free Library, a non profit organization.
I have seen some towns where they have boxes with free tools or free food. I like this idea.
If you are really into seafood, then there is a place for you in DC. At the Le Diplomate restaurant, they will serve you two or three level towers. We got the three level, for 4-6 people. It cost around $180. The photo doesn’t do it justice. When they brought it out, I took video and that was much more impressive (check out the video on YouTube or Instagram).
We asked for warm butter to dip our lobster, crab, and shrimp. While all seafood can be eaten raw, some of the items are cooked such as the mussels, shrimp, lobster, and crab. The oysters, clams, salmon, and scallops are raw.
We had this as our main course and it was a lot of food for three people. We also got other cheeses, cheese balls, and dessert. We also got complimentary champagne.
One of the things I like about living in the Washington area are all the parks and greenery. Having lived in Rome where there are lots of streets with no plants or trees, it is nice to live somewhere where there are plants everywhere, and lots of free parks.
Many of the parks have picnic areas and bathrooms. Many have parking lots. Plus the parks are free. Some are educational including signage about the history that took place along that road or about with information about the plants that grow along that path. Other parks are nature preserves and can be a bit “wilder” with hills, boulders, and forests.
Depending on what time you go and which park you choose, the traffic can get busy. On the paths that are split down the middle, you have to walk on the side with the traffic going in your direction (counter to when you walk toward oncoming traffic) and you will hear the “on your left” or “passing” as the cyclists whizz past you.
Now that I have lived in the Washington, DC, area for over a year, these are my favorite restaurants. They are not in any particular order.
The hamburger meat at Franklin’s is locally sourced and tastes like real meat.
Franklin’s, Hyattsville, MD: American food in an old mercantile. The restaurant owns several shops and a tiki bar. It’s a whole day outing. Serves locally sourced meat.
Ruthie’s All Day, Arlington, VA: Southern food. They have excellent “white sauce” wings. Outdoor seating.
Woodmont Grille, Bethesda, MD: American food. Dark wood and they ask you not to speak too loud. Classy place.
Penny Royal Station. Mt. Rainer, MD: American food. Another secret place.
Caphe Banh Mi, Alexandria, VA: Vietnamese food. Serve banh mi with liver pate. One of the few places that still serve have this “classic” style.
Mandu Erang, Annandale, VA: Korean food. It’s an old school place in a tiny house in the middle of a parking lot.
Mum Aroi, Baileys Crossroads, VA: Thai food. Best authentic place we’ve found so far. “Mum aroi” is “it’s tasty” in Thai.
Le Diplomate, Washington, DC: French food. Busy, but the cheese balls and the seafood tower are worth the crowds.
L’Ardente, Washington, DC: Italian food. Best “cesare” salad evah!
IndoChen, Alexandria, VA: Indian Chinese food. Stick with the Indian food. The chicken breast marinated in yogurt is a weekly food for me.
Y Noodles, Falls Church: a new place that serves authentic (no tea served here!) spicy noodles and other Chinese food from Chongqin.
Cielo Rojo, Takoma Park, Maryland: High class, world class, cosmopolitan, Mexican food. Also includes a vegan menu. Really good food.
If you can find 14 friends, you can book a private tour. Otherwise, just wander around and read the labels, then google more info… and repeat. This exhibit shows how many American women, artists, dancers, lesbians, African Americans, writers, and freedom lovers moved to Paris to find the freedom to be themselves.
Learn about Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, and many other women who were trailblazers in the women’s movement.
This exhibit runs through February 2025 and entrance is free at the National Portrait Gallery.
I wrote about barbecue before (link here), but recently I had some of the juiciest most tender can’t-even-hold-together-on-a-fork brisket ever. Also, it was so tender and tasty that a vegetarian ate it. Now, that is good! The place is called 2FiftyTexas Barbecue. The beef is extra tender because it is Wagyu. That seems like overkill.
Here is part three of the where I got to in my draft book about the history of America told through immigrant food. This is about three sisters.
For the next chapter in American history, we jump a century or so. After Columbus, there were other groups who attempted to conquer the “new land” of the Americas. Columbus had sailed for Spain.
Captain John Smith should get more play in American history as he made a lot of it. On May 14, 1607, he established Jamestown in Virginia. This was the first town of European settlers in the Americas to survive to this day. The earlier attempt at Roanoke failed in 1593. There had been attempts to settle in parts of the coast along what is Virginia today. The “Lost Colony” of Roanoke is a mystery. The 100 settlers left there probably were starving and assimilated with the natives who lived in the area. From 1492 to 1586, there were bloody battles between the natives who lived in America and the privateers/pirates/buckaneers who attempted to claim the land for their kings and queens. They were also looking for gold. When the rumor started that “Eldorado” or the land of gold existed, the race was on. But that is a story about South America. Maybe the subject of a different book.
Some of these explorers include Giovanni da Verrazzano who landed on the American coast in 1524 and in 1578, Queen Elizabeth I granted permission for Sir Humphrey Gilbert to conquer lands “unclaimed by Christian kingdoms.” When he died at sea, his charter was taken over by his brother and half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh. There are lots of myths about Sir Walter Raleigh and it makes for imaginative films. Interestingly, he could not leave the queen’s side, so all his “conquering” was done through other men. Roanoke Colony was founded in 1685. In 1586, Sir Francis Drake, returned to England after visiting Roanoke. It was at this time that tobacco, maize, and potatoes to the English court.
But what were the Americans eating? The natives were eating the richness of the land they lived in. They ate mainly corn, beans, and squash. These three are called the “three sisters” but the natives also fished and hunted. The natives in the first encounters with the English were part of the larger Algonquian peoples.
The natives ate many foods that are rare today (porpoise, whale, seal, moose, beaver, and other animals that are still part of the native diet) but they also ate things that we non-natives also eat such as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, nuts, scallops, mussels, clams, crabs, trout, bass, flounder, and cod.
The three sisters, maize, beans, and squash (gourds) were planted together and formed part of the mythology of several native cultures including the Seneca Nation.
The Iroquois and the Cherokee called corn, bean, and squash the three sisters’ because they nurture each other like family when planted together. These agriculturalists placed corn in small hills planting beans around them and interspersing squash throughout of the field. Beans naturally absorb nitrogen from the air and convert it to nitrates, fertilizing the soil for the corn and squash. In return, they are supported by winding around the corn stalks. The squash leaves provide ground cover between the corn and beans, preventing weeds from taking over the field. These three plants thrive together better than when they are planted alone.
These are not the food of immigrants. These are the foods of people who were already here. Of course, the immigrants took on the foods that the indigenous people taught them about, told in a dramatic story that is celebrated as Thanksgiving. The Puritans arrived famously on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Modern day America is based on a group who found England to be too lax. No wonder America is so puritanical. But I digress. These puritans are why Americans celebrates Thanksgiving (in Canada it is on the second Monday in October). Thanksgiving in the United States is a big deal. It’s the biggest holiday.
Next time, I may try to make a three sisters salad.
Continuing the history of American food… from last time…
“1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
In the port city of Genoa, as a young boy, Christopher Columbus, helped out at his father’s cheese stand. When Christopher was about 14 years old, he began an apprenticeship with a merchant family. This lead to his career at sea. He moved to Portugal as an adult and eventually convinced Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand of Spain to fund his search for a westward route to the Orient — source of the expensive spices, including pepper. Once Columbus saw gold, he wanted gold.
The three ships that Columbus captained were famously the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Actually, they were the Santa Clara, the actual name of the Pinta is unknown, and the Santa Maria. The Nina was the nickname given in honor of the owner, Juan Nino. The Santa Maria’s nickname was the “Gallega” as the boat was built in Galicia. And the Pinta actual means painted one or prostitute.
Whatever one thinks of Columbus, scholars consider his “discovery” of America to be the start of the modern era.
The massive exchange in flora and fauna is called the Columbian Exchange.
Today, we think of Genoa and think of pesto and pasta. More broadly, of Italy, we think of tomatoes and pasta. Here are some of the things that did not exist in Europe at the time: the tomato, the potato, maize/corn, vanilla, cacao, the turkey, and tobacco. And these are some of the things that went FROM the old world to the new world: citrus, apples, bananas, mango, onion, coffee, wheat, and rice. Can you imagine anywhere in the Americas without bananas, rice, and beans?
The United States was not a country at this point. Columbus claimed what he found for Spain. Columbus ate what sailors ate, from dried meats, fish, beans, hardtack (a dried bread), olive oil, wine, cheese, nuts, and it was noted that he was fond of figs. Often to purify foods, they would use vinegar. Columbus landed in what is modern day Caribbean. He noted in his log that the natives ate fish and “bread which tasted exactly as if it were made of chestnuts.” This is an interesting description because in the north of Italy where Columbus was from, they eat, even today, lots of chestnuts. They even make pasta from chestnuts. Chestnuts are easily found whereas wheat is not as easy a product. Perhaps the bread that Columbus had in Hispaniola was made of sweet potato and cassava, two of the mainstays of the Taino Indians who lived on Hispaniola, the island that is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This is where Columbus landed.
Columbus would be familiar with the texture of products made from chestnut and sweet potato bread would be similar in sweetness and texture. Today, most people think of the American sweet potato as a bright orange thing used for casserole or pie. It is associated with the South and the African American communities who descended from slavery. There are sweet potatoes that are not orange and do not have as sweet a flavor. The texture is also harder and less like pumpkin. Speaking of pumpkin pie, Jacques Pepin said that growing up in France, he only thought of pumpkin/gourd as a savory food ingredient but once he moved to America, he found out how great it was as a sweet ingredient.
New world foods for sale in Italy.
The Europeans were accustomed to eating carbohydrates in the form of gruel, pottage, pasta, or bread. Columbus was accustomed to a mediterranean diet. On his second voyage to the Americas, Columbus brought things he thought he could eat like wheat, rice, barley, oats, coffee, sugar cane, citrus, melons, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, beef cattle, and other agricultural animals like horses. (As an aside, when horses first arrived with the conquistadors in South America, the natives had never seen them before. If you find yourself in the cathedral in Cusco, Peru, take a look at the horses in the painting. They look look like llamas as the artists had never seen horses before so they painted them like llamas.)
Can you imagine American food without fried chicken and watermelon?
Columbus and his men enjoyed some of the new world foods immediately (such as a corn maize drink called atole which one can still find, or the more well known horchata) but others took many years to become common place foods in Europe. The most famous is the potato which was considered poisonous for many years.
So when America started as a country, it was not one. It was a few islands touched by Columbus and an unknown sphere claimed for the Spanish King and Queen. This map is from Wikipedia but it shows where Columbus may have set foot in Hispaniola and Cuba (Haiti/Dominican Republic and Cuba) but there was no United States yet.
Columbus made four trips to the new world but the exchange of products he started changed history forever. With the arrival of the Europeans, millions of native Americans died from diseases that they had never encountered before. Those first Indians met by Columbus, the Taino, also all died out. The Indians are called Indians because Columbus wanted to think he made it to India, the source of spices, or so he thought.
In 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon, who had sailed with Columbus, landed in Florida. St. Augustine in Florida is considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited European settled place in America. Ponce de Leon was the first governor of Puerto Rico. He also discovered the Gulf Stream. According to myth, he was searching for the fountain of youth, but that is most likely a myth. Not much is known about what he ate but as he was part of the Columbian Exchange, I assume he ate what Columbus ate.
The foods of the Americas are integral to the modern foods of America from corn, French fries, ketchup, guacamole, but not apple pie. We will get to that in a few hundred years.
In 2023, I moved to Alexandria, Virginia, a historic old town across the river from Washington, DC, the US capital. As I scarfed Vietnamese pho, drunken Thai noodles, Korean barbecue, Taiwanese bubble tea, Russian blinis, Mennonite milk, Neapolitan pizza, mini crepes from Hue, Vietnam, hamburgers charred perfectly, Greek salads, Lao sausage, Spanish tapas, Peruvian rotisserie chicken, Salvadoran pupusas, Uyghar spaghetti, New England meatloaf, clotted cream from England, and dim sum from China… I realized how much I knew about the diverse foods that make up American food but how little I knew about American history. I decided to write a book about the history of America. Through immigrant foods. Then, I realized, this was too vast a topic to undertake in one book, plus I have other things to do in my life… so instead I decided to write about the foods of early American history — from 1492 to 1792. Then, I got to chapter three and realized that I was not going to get anywhere near finished in a year. So instead, I’ll post what I wrote on this blog.
Vietnamese food
Some would say that the history of the USA should go back to the land bridge from Siberia when the ancestors of the native Americans, indigenous people, first nations, walked to the Americas. Some might say that the Vikings should be included in a history of America. Leif Eriksson was the first white European to set foot on North America, around the year 1,000 CE. Five centuries before Columbus, who never set foot on North America. Leif did not influence American food history. Some say that a history of America should include the Pacific Islanders who canoed to Hawaii a thousand years ago. For this book about the melting pot of American foods, I will start with 1492. This is when the bounty of what Christopher Columbus found in the Americas entered the European lexicon and mouths. Why European? Victors write the history and the Europeans were the invaders of America for several centuries.
I will start somewhere easy as the United States of America is a young-ish country so we only need to go back to 1450 CE (current era or AD). The USA did not come into existence until 1775 but for ease of history, I will refer to it as the USA even from before 1775.
Next time, I’ll start at 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Christopher Columbus was not Italian. Italy didn’t exist as a country until a century after the United States became a country.
