Stolen Recipes: How War, Migration, and Desperate Invention Created the Foods America Calls Its Own

You’ve eaten the hamburger, poured the ketchup, and sliced the apple pie. But do you know who
really invented them — and why the answer involves a Mongol war horse, a nineteenth-century
British mushroom obsession, and an English settler who had never seen an apple in America?
Stolen Recipes is a propulsive work of narrative nonfiction that pulls back the tablecloth on
American food mythology, revealing the global conflicts, immigrant ambitions, and wartime
accidents that made the United States one of the most culinarily complex nations on earth.
Each chapter follows a real person at a real crossroads of history: the Syrian immigrant who
popularized the hot dog at the 1904 World’s Fair, the German-American butchers who survived
two world wars by disguising their sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage,” the Chinese railroad workers
whose cooking techniques quietly transformed the American West, and the Italian prisoners of
war who left a pasta-making tradition behind in rural Texas. These are not myths or culinary
legends — they are documented, sourced, and surprising, the kind of history that makes you
rethink everything on your plate.
Perfect for fans of Mark Kurlansky, Tom Standage, and Sarah Vowell, Stolen Recipes is history
at its most delicious and its most human. Whether you are a food lover, a history enthusiast, or
simply someone who has always suspected that America’s story is far stranger and richer than
the textbooks admit, this book will change the way you eat, think, and remember.