The first impoverished German immigrant to fold oats into leftover ground meat didn’t do so out of culinary whimsy; nor did they expect their descendants to attend Cincinnati’s Goetta Festival centuries later. Enslaved West Africans in colonial Peru who reconfigured their captors’ leftovers couldn’t have known their hardscrabble bread pudding would be forever embedded in Peruvian cuisine. Most shockingly, food-stretched American mothers defied every presumptive rule of baking and respectability by making cakes from tomato soup during World War I; nonetheless, the recipe was celebrated by a struggling nation and…
