Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

It’s easy to make assumptions about the origin of food based on its name. French onion soup, for example, with its caramelized onions and melted Gruyere cheese, is obviously French. Sausage-covered Scotch eggs could only have come from Scotland–who else would claim them? But sometimes names can be misleading. Many popular dishes with foreign-sounding names were actually born on American soil.

English muffins, for example, aren’t English at all. They aren’t even muffins. They were invented by British ex-pat Samuel Thomas Bath in his New York City bakery in 1894 when he exchanged the baking soda in crumpets for yeast. The English weren’t even aware of English muffins until they started importing them from the U.S. in the 1990s. Even so, they don’t call them English. In the U.K. they are sold as American muffins.

Swiss steak, a clever way to dress up a cheap cut of meat, has nothing to do with Switzerland. (I bet you couldn’t pay a Swiss person to eat it.) Swissing means pounding or rolling, which is how the tough meat is tenderized before braising it with vegetables and gravy. The recipe first appeared in an English cookbook in 1915 and rose to popularity in the U.S during World War II, when tender cuts of meat were expensive. Although Swiss steak went on to occupy a prominent partition in TV dinners, it has since gone out of favor.

If you think you’re going to find coconut pecan frosted German chocolate cake in Germany, you’re wrong. The name comes from Sam German, an English-American who invented a sweet baking chocolate for Baker’s chocolate company in 1852. Pleased with his work, the company called his creation “German’s chocolate.” “German’s chocolate cake” got its claim to fame in 1957, when a Texas woman published her now infamous recipe in a Dallas newspaper. Over time, the name lost its apostrophe and gained a new country of origin.

There are also foods so similar to another country’s cuisine, we assume they were imported. Take chimichangas. A Mexican restaurant favorite, they have never even been to Mexico. Although several people lay claim to their invention, the most popular theory involves Monica Flin, a Tucson restauranteur with French parents. As the story goes, when she accidentally dropped a burrito into a vat of hot oil, she yelled “chingada,” a Spanish swear word. Trying to cover up her potty mouth, she coined the nonsense word, “chimichanga,” and now the deep-fried treats are available from the same menu as enchiladas and tacos.

Growing up, my favorite imposter was spaghetti and meatballs. It’s easy to assume that dish floated over on a slow boat from Rome, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a flabby-armed grandma from the old country to claim it. Before Italian immigrants made it to the New World, they kept their pasta separate from their meat, thank you very much, spun around a fork and doused in thick, clingy sauce. Even marinara, the tomato-based gravy that serves as the base for nearly everything in American Italian restaurants, isn’t native to Italy. It was named after the sailors, or marinaros, who ate it on their long journey across the ocean. The trifecta of spaghetti, marinara, and meatballs didn’t come together until the 1920s when Italian immigrants took advantage of cheaper meat prices and turned the dish into a suburban staple.

There are many more examples, like French fries, which are about as French as chili con carne, which actually comes from Texas. Häagen Dazs ice cream was invented by a Polish Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn in 1960, who also invented its Danish-sounding nonsensical name. Fortune cookies were created by Japanese restauranteurs in California and then taken over by Chinese immigrants, who served them alongside other frauds like General Tso’s chicken and sweet and sour pork.

Apparently, false advertising is as American as apple pie, which is actually French.