While Americans have excelled at adopting and reinterpreting food from other places, what have other places done with American cuisine?

. . . Pasta might be Italian, but spaghetti with red sauce is an American classic. Abroad, though, the simplest spaghetti dishes have gone through some surprising transformations.

In Cuba and in China, spaghetti sometimes comes with ketchup in place of actual tomato sauce. (Another Cuban variation: spaghetti with “white sauce” that turned out to be mayo.) In Senegal, some families now eat spaghetti with butter, fried eggs and a cube of Maggi spice, a sort of all-purpose bouillon cube, sprinkled on top.

But the Japanese city of Nagoya has the most creative take on spaghetti: they take normal noodles with red sauce, pan fry them, and top that with sweet, fresh whipped cream.

Read the article “Doritos Nachos, Corn Pizza: How Other Places Imagine American Food” on atlasobscura.com.