Spice Cuisine: American Spices and Seasonings

Over centuries of immigration and integration, American cuisine has become as diverse as its people. Different regions have cultivated their own cuisines, each as broad as the cultures that thrive there. The United States has become a melting pot of foods from around the world—melding cooking styles and ingredients to form innovative and sometimes odd fusions.

Wikipedia, a free internet encyclopedia, lists the following varieties as a sample of different styles of American cuisine: American Chinese, barbecue, California, Euro-Asian, fast food, Midwestern, New England, New York City, Pennsylvania Dutch, Puerto Rican, Southern, Cajun, Creole, soul food, Tex-Mex, Southwestern, and Suburban.

Within this vast array of styles, these foods are considered to be uniquely American: Boston baked beans, brownies, buffalo wings, Chicago-style pizza, chocolate chip cookies, chop suey, corn dogs, corn on the cob, fortune cookies, fudge, grits, gumbo, hot dish, hush puppies, jambalaya, macaroni and cheese, peanut butter, pecan pie, pralines, Philly cheese steak, pumpkin pie, scrapple, shoo-fly pie, sloppy joes, sweet potato casserole, turkey and cranberry sauce, and whoopie pies.

With such diveristy of foods, it would be difficult to narrowly focus the wide range of spices and herbs used by American cooks. Almost every conceivable seasoning flavor is in use in some form by some type of American cuisine. The following list are those spices and blends we feel typify some particularly American dish, and herbs and spices that are native to America.

For ways to use these spices and seasonings, check out our American recipes section.

American Variations

Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten--every piece of fruit--had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone's knees, someone's aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her about this before?

-Alison Luterman, "What They Came For"