USA Sweet USA

A while back, an Italian cooking blog, Il dolci di Caia, ran a contest for fellow Italian food bloggers: come up with recipes for dolce della tradizione americana -- that is, "desserts in the American tradition." Scroll down the page there for a list of links to the results.

It's interesting to see them wrestle with the American food thing: cake pops, Naples biscuit S'mores, torta di fango del Mississippi, Whoopies Pie al lemon curd, and a momentarily puzzling panettone americano that turned out to be lemon chiffon cake.

Notable absences: pineapple upside-down cake, dump cake*, icebox cake, Key Lime pie, pecan pie, prune whip, Nilla Wafer pudding. Understandable absences: Grape-Nuts Pudding, Jello Poke Cake, Ritz Cracker Mock Apple Pie.

Biggest divergence from the results an American food blog would have gotten if it ran the same contest: only one of the entries is red-white-&-blue, and none of them are ironic. I have to assume that Italian cooks have less trouble than we would believing in an identifiable tradizione americana.