St. Louis cuisine

St. Louis cuisine, the food culture of the Greater St. Louis area, has a long history and broad range of influences. The cuisine's influences primarily stem from Italian, German, Irish, and French cuisines, but it includes many American contributions. The cuisine includes unique forms of pizza, barbecue, ravioli, pork, and pastries.

St. Louis has a history going back to an early French settlement in 1764, but its cultural styles are seen as centering most significantly around immigrants from Italy, Germany, and Ireland. People from those countries immigrated heavily during the city's significant growth in the nineteenth century. Oktoberfest, sauerkraut, and bratwurst are still popular, as are Irish pubs, and Italian restaurants on The Hill dominate the local culinary topography.

The city was the home of Irma Rombauer, the author of the highly published cookbook The Joy of Cooking.

A number of foods are specific to, or known to have originated in St. Louis:

One food that originated in the St. Louis region of The Hill is toasted ravioli, which is a ravioli coated in breading and toasted dry or fried, instead of being boiled or baked wet.

St. Louis has a unique and regionally popular variation of pizza known as St. Louis-style pizza. The pizza's traditional characteristics include:

Supposedly originating with a botched cake recipe in the 1930s, gooey butter cake and gooey butter cookies are popular in the region. The bottom layer of the cake is flat and dense, made with a box cake mix. The top layer is the "gooey butter" and is made from powdered sugar and cream cheese. The cake is typically dusted with powdered sugar once cooled. Nationally, food enthusiasts largely became aware of the cake when Paula Deen published the recipe in one of her cookbooks.

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