Theme: American foods

California roll

A section of the world's largest California Roll. Whatever the size, this is America's favorite sushi.
Courtesy Chris Martinez/Stringer
So much more than the gateway sushi, the California roll isn't just for wimps who can't go it raw -- although that's essentially the way it got its start in Los Angeles, where sushi chefs from Japan were trying to gain a beachhead in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
Most credit chef Manashita Ichiro and his assistant Mashita Ichiro, at L.A.'s Tokyo Kaikan restaurant, which had one of the country's first sushi bars, with creating the "inside out" roll that preempted Americans' aversions by putting the nori (seaweed) on the inside of the rice and substituting avocado for toro (raw fatty tuna).
The avocado-crab-cucumber roll became a hit, and from that SoCal beachhead, sushi conquered the country. After leading the charge for the sushi invasion of the 1980s, the California roll now occupies grocery stores everywhere. Wasabi anyone?
Meatloaf
The most humble of comfort food. Who would have imagined when the recipe for "Cannelon of Beef" showed up in Fannie Farmer's 1918 "Boston Cooking School Cook Book" that every mom in America would someday have her own version?
Fannie made hers with slices of salt pork laid over the top and served it with brown mushroom sauce. (In her day, you had to cut the meat finely by hand; the advent of commercial grinders changed all that.)
However your mom made it -- we're guessing ketchup on top? -- she probably served that oh-so-reliable meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans.
And you were probably made to sit there, all night if need be, if you didn't eat all your beans. A better threat might have been no meatloaf sandwich in your lunch tomorrow.
Grits

Grits can be pudding, breakfast or dinner.
Courtesy Kate Hopkins/Creative Commons/Flickr
People who didn't grow up eating them wonder what the heck they are. People who did grow up eating them (and that would be just about everyone in the South) wonder how anyone could live without them.
Grits, beloved and misunderstood -- and American down to their Native roots. They're the favored hot breakfast in the so-called Grits Belt, which girdles everything from Virginia to Texas and where the dish is a standard offering on diner menus.
Grits are nothing if not versatile: They can go plain, savory, or sweet; pan-fried or porridge-like. Simple and cheap, grits are also profoundly satisfying.
Which might be why Charleston's The Post and Courier opined in 1952 that "Given enough [grits], the inhabitants of planet Earth would have nothing to fight about. A man full of [grits] is a man of peace." Now don't that just butter your grits?