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What’s your favorite holiday dish? Mine is a Thanksgiving classic: the sweet potato casserole, topped with a generous heap of marshmallows. It’s a divisive food—you either love it or think it’s sickly sweet overkill. Very American, right?
Actually, the dish has surprisingly international origins. It’s a product of the business strategy of two German brothers who brought mass-produced marshmallows to the United States in the early 20th century. The Rueckheims—famed for Cracker Jack—enlisted the help of a prominent cookbook author to design recipes that used marshmallows, and so the dish was born.
What’s your favorite holiday dish? Mine is a Thanksgiving classic: the sweet potato casserole, topped with a generous heap of marshmallows. It’s a divisive food—you either love it or think it’s sickly sweet overkill. Very American, right?
Actually, the dish has surprisingly international origins. It’s a product of the business strategy of two German brothers who brought mass-produced marshmallows to the United States in the early 20th century. The Rueckheims—famed for Cracker Jack—enlisted the help of a prominent cookbook author to design recipes that used marshmallows, and so the dish was born.
The sweet potato casserole is a good reminder that migration, trade, conflict, and other facets of international affairs shape—and are shaped by—food. This edition of Flash Points considers the intersection of cuisine with geopolitics and economics. Don’t miss FP Deputy Editor Jennifer Williams’s list of cookbooks that double as “immersive explorations of the people, cultures, and stories behind the headlines.”
7 Cookbooks for Foreign-Policy Wonks
Cookbooks remind us that countries are more than their politics, FP’s Jennifer Williams writes.
The dishes on the menu for the inauguration of Lai Ching-te.Courtesy of Liz Kao
Taiwan’s Dinner Table Diplomacy
One of the courses at Lai Ching-te’s inauguration banquet is rumored to be a playful nod to Chinese President Xi Jinping, Clarissa Wei writes.
The Foods That ‘Changed’ the World
Bronwen Everill considers what happened to all those bestselling individual food histories.
María Jesús Contreras illustration for Foreign Policy
The Influencer Chef Dividing Syria’s Diaspora
Chef Omar has popularized Damascene cuisine online and in his Istanbul restaurant, Joshua Levkowitz writes. But is he linked to the Assad regime?
People drink in a festival tent of the Oktoberfest beer festival in Munich, southern Germany, on Oct. 3, 2019.Christof Satche/AFP via Getty Images
How Europe’s Temperance Movement Saved Beer
Socialists fought for prohibition to stop workers being exploited, Mark Lawrence Schrad writes.