I always think it’s funny how many British foods never made it across the Atlantic to become common foods in the US. I’ve certainly heard of steak and kidney pie, but have no interest in tasting it – when I was growing up, my mother thought it was important for us to eat liver regularly, but in the Seventies, reports started coming out about the inadvisability of eating one of the filter organs and she stopped making it. Considering the percentage of people who claim English ancestry, we eat a relatively small percentage of foods that are specific to the Brits. Apparently, even English immigrants to the US abandoned native British foods (including mushy peas and warm beer) in favor of the foods their neighbors were eating.
And living on the Pacific Coast, my diet is probably much more influenced by Asian, Pacific, and Hispanic cuisines than, say, New England, the Mid-Atlantic region, or the Midwest. Southerners might not want to acknowledge it, but many of their foods are influenced by Caribbean and African sources. New Orleans was colonized by the French. Spain colonized Florida and Texas and there are remnants of that influence remaining.
I remember reading that the creators of boxed cake mixes could have included powdered eggs in the box, but the act of adding fresh eggs made the cook feel like they were actually baking a cake rather than merely reconstituting a factory-prepared concoction.
;–)