Imagine the US without New York–style cheesecake, hot dogs, or Chicago deep-dish pizza – it just doesn't bear thinking about, does it? But have you ever stopped to wonder how these favorite dishes came about? We've dived into the interesting history of America's most iconic foods to find out the secret to their success.

Several tales have been told about the history of one of the country's favorite sandwiches, but one of the most compelling stories comes from Omaha, Nebraska. During the 1920s, hotel owner Bernard Schimmel prepared snacks for his friends playing poker and, for Reuben Kulakofsky, he made a corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing sandwich. And the rest, as they say, is history. However, Kulakofsky's family argues Schimmel simply delivered a deli platter with the ingredients, and then Kulakofsky created the sandwich that went on to become famous.

Pumpkin pie is traditionally eaten at Thanksgiving, and a pivotal point in the history of the dessert was when 1796 book American Cookery by Amelia Simmons included a recipe for 'pompkin' – pumpkin in pastry, spiced with nutmeg, allspice, and ginger, and sweetened with molasses. Its place on the Thanksgiving table was secured when McCormick & Company started selling pumpkin pie spice blend in the 1930s, making it easier than ever for aspiring cooks to make the popular dish.

Philadelphia’s most famous food must be the Philly cheesesteak. The story goes that one day, hot dog vendors and brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri got bored of grilling hot dogs and experimented with beef in an Italian-style roll. A cab driver saw what they were doing and ordered one. Demand for the meaty sandwich grew so much that, in 1930, the brothers opened Pat’s King of Steaks, the first steak sandwich shop in Philly, which remains popular to this day. Shop manager Joe Lorenzo is often credited with adding cheese to the sandwich, cementing its iconic status.

These days, Heinz is synonymous with ketchup but, when businessmen Henry J Heinz and Clarence Noble first teamed up in 1869, their first product was bottled grated horseradish, which Henry grew in his garden. It wasn't until 1876 that they released the famous sweet and savory tomato condiment we all know and love. Originally called 'catsup', it contained just five ingredients, including sun-ripened tomatoes.

Deep-dish pizza was invented in Chicago in 1943, when Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo opened Pizzeria Uno and decided to serve up something a little different: an Italian-American pizza. The pie had a thick crust and was cooked in a deep pan with layers of cheese, meat, and sauce, making it a satisfying alternative to a thin and crispy pizza. A decade later Riccardo died, and Sewell took the credit and people still dispute who the true inventor was: Riccardo, Sewell, or Rudy Malnati, an employee at the pizzeria at the time.

The now-ubiquitous Big Mac launched in 1967 and was developed by Jim Delligatti, owner and operator of a McDonald’s franchise in Pittsburgh. Made with two beef patties, special sauce (a variant of Thousand Island dressing), iceberg lettuce, American cheese, pickles, and onions, and served in a three-part sesame seed bun, the burger recipe has remained the same ever since. At first, the idea was met with resistance by some McDonald’s executives but today it’s one of the company’s bestselling items.

Corn Flakes were invented thanks to a failed attempt to make granola. Kellogg's company founders and brothers John and Will Kellogg accidentally flaked wheat berry with Will continuing to experiment until he flaked corn and realized he was onto something. The recipe was perfected, and Corn Flakes was eventually rolled out globally, becoming one of the most favorite breakfast cereals in the world. Pictured is an early Kellogg’s advert from 1908.

Developed in 1912 by the National Biscuit Company (today known as Nabisco), Oreos launched at the same time as Mother Goose Biscuits and Veronese Biscuits – now both long forgotten. The cream-filled chocolate cookie sandwich went on to become the bestselling cookie in the world, with other countries introducing interesting flavor fillings such as blueberry and green tea ice cream.

Made with a cracker crust and cream cheese, cream, eggs, and sugar, a New York–style cheesecake is baked and traditionally served plain, without toppings. Arnold Reuben, a German-Jewish immigrant, claimed to be responsible for the recipe, saying he was inspired by a cheese pie he was served at a dinner party. He began selling it in his Turf Restaurant in 1929, where it quickly gained popularity.

Buffalo wings have, perhaps surprisingly, only been around since 1964. The accidental invention of deep-fried spicy wings, served with celery and blue cheese dip, is all thanks to The Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. There are three versions of a similar story: Teresa Bellissimo served wings with her special sauce and a celery and blue cheese dip because that's all she had available; she invented the recipe after the bar received an unexpected shipment of wings; or she made the dish for her son as a late-night snack. Whatever the truth, they're more popular than ever; Americans get through over one billion wings on Superbowl weekend alone.

That favorite Southern dish, shrimp and grits, has roots in Native American culture, and was originally a very regional dish, mainly eaten at home. Then, in 1985, an article written by Craig Claiborne in The New York Times changed everything. He highlighted Bill Neal's Southern food at the chef's restaurant Crook's Corner, in particular calling out the spicy shrimp on cheese grits with bacon, mushrooms, and scallions. Since then, the humble dish has appeared on menus everywhere.

Foodie and avid gardener Edmund McIlhenny planted some pepper seeds on Louisiana's Avery Island, a former salt dome owned by his wife's family, to create a sauce to spice up the dull diet of the Reconstruction South. He called the sauce 'Tabasco', a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean 'place where the soil is humid'. In 1869 he grew enough to make 658 bottles of Tabasco, which he sent to grocers around the Gulf Coast. People started drizzling it over oysters and its popularity spread to San Francisco and New York. By the late 1870s, the sauce was available across the US and Europe. Now it's available in over 195 countries worldwide.

A hungry and hungover Wall Street broker, Lemuel Benedict, walked into New York City's Waldorf Hotel in 1894 and ordered buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and hollandaise sauce, before assembling his breakfast dish himself. The hotel's head chef was so impressed that he made Eggs Benedict a permanent fixture, swapping the toast for an English muffin and crisp bacon for Canadian bacon. It remains a quintessential brunch dish today.

Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn, Whitman, Massachusetts, invented the chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s, with the recipe first appearing in her 1938 cookbook Tried and True. There are a few different versions of events; one suggests that Wakefield added chunks of bittersweet Nestlé chocolate after running out of chopped nuts. Whether she meant to invent the cookies or not, Nestlé bought the rights to the recipe, and the Toll House name, for a dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate. 

James Lewis Kraft didn’t invent macaroni cheese or processed cheese, but he was the first to patent emulsified and powdered cheese. After he saw a salesman selling grated cheese and boxed pasta, he had the idea for Kraft Dinner Macaroni & Cheese. Hitting the shelves in 1937, during the Great Depression, it was an instant success, as a family of four could eat dinner for 19 cents and, in the first year, eight million boxes were sold. Today, over a million boxes are sold daily. 

The Waldorf salad, which was originally a mix of apples, celery and mayonnaise, took New York City by storm when it was created for the eponymous hotel’s debut event in 1893. The original recipe is outlined in maître d' Oscar Tschirky’s cookbook, The Cookbook by Oscar of the Waldorf. However, since its conception people have added chopped walnuts, grapes, and blue cheese, with the salad now found on menus across the world.

Just how did pink lemonade come about? Two common stories both link its invention to traveling circuses in the mid-1800s. One suggests that, as a boy, famed circus promoter Henry E. Allott accidentally dropped red-colored cinnamon candies in a vat of freshly-made lemonade. The second theory claims a lemonade vendor ran out of water, so he grabbed a bucket of water in which a performer had washed their pink tights. Luckily, these days the pink color comes from berries or red food dye.

The first cheese puffs were, rather unnervingly, invented in an animal feed factory, The Flakall Company of Beloit, Wisconsin in the 1930s. Workers noticed that puffed corn was produced when machines were cleaned by feeding moist corn through the grinder. An employee named Edward Wilson decided to take some home, seasoned them and thought they tasted good. The factory decided to move into making snack food including these cheesy Korn Kurls and changed its name to Adams Corporation to disassociate itself from its animal feed past. Cheetos took the snack into the mainstream and remain America's cheese puff of choice.

Despite earlier attempts to crack the ready meal market, it wasn’t until Swanson Foods over-ordered and were left with 520,000lbs of excess turkey after Thanksgiving 1953 that TV dinners became a success. Annoyed bosses requested staff find a clever way to stop the meat going to waste and salesman Garry Thomas was the person to come up with the idea. Elaborate marketing campaigns, including packaging shaped like a TV, cemented its success.

There are a few claims on the invention of the crispy-on-the-outside, gooey-on-the-inside creation that is the chocolate brownie. Some people say it was accidental – the result of melted chocolate added to biscuits or cake made without enough flour. But the story favored by many, and cited in Betty Crocker's Baking Classics, is that a housewife in Bangor, Maine, was baking a chocolate cake and it collapsed. Instead of discarding it, she cut it into bars and served it, receiving rave reviews. Now, it’s one of the world’s favorite baked treats.

The invention of potato chips is contested, but the most popular story claims that the salty snack was created at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853. Wealthy steamship owner Cornelius Vanderbilt sent his French fries back to the kitchen for being too thick, so cook George Crum made them again, this this time shaving the potato as thin as possible and frying it to a crisp. To Crum's surprise, Vanderbilt loved them, and they became Moon’s Lake House's signature dish. However, more recently it’s been said the restaurant is merely where potato chips gained popularity.

Most accounts of the soda float’s invention date back to the late 19th century and start with a Philadelphia soda shop owner named Robert Green. Supposedly he was at an exhibition and ran out of cream for his carbonated water, syrup, and cream drinks so used ice cream instead. However, there are quite a few contenders to this story, including George Guy, one of Robert Green’s employees. Guy claims to have absentmindedly mixed ice cream and soda, much to his customer’s delight. Whatever its origin, the soda float is still a retro classic best enjoyed on a hot day.

The story of the hot dog begins in the 1860s. It’s widely believed the first sausage in a bun was sold from a food cart in New York City but it didn’t really gain widespread popularity until Nathan Handwerker opened a hot dog stand in Coney Island in 1915. Wrapped in bacon, covered in cheese, or topped with chili, the classic frankfurter and bun combination is now a staple of American restaurant menus around the country and across the world.

The story of Coca-Cola isn’t a straightforward one, but it starts in 1886 with pharmacist John Pemberton. The drink was originally advertised as a brain tonic to relieve headaches and exhaustion, and it contained ingredients including coca leaf and kola nut, hence the name Coca-Cola. But its commercial success is attributed to Asa Griggs Candler who bought the company in 1888 and is responsible for its successful marketing. 

While a few s’mores-like foods appeared before the treat we know and love today, the official recipe came from the Girl Scouts cookbook Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts in 1927. Intended to teach girls how to be good scouts, the most inspiring instruction in the book was to 'toast two marshmallows over the coals to a crisp gooey state and then put them inside a Graham cracker and chocolate bar sandwich'. Originally called Some More because you normally want more, over the years the name was shortened to s’mores.

Now discover the retro ingredients we wish would make a comeback