American and British culinary dialects are quite different. I’m not just talking about aubergines and eggplant, arugula and rocket, cookies and biscuits. I’m talking about all the different cuts of meat, the types of sugar and salt. Indeed, there are a wealth of examples I could give, but today I am going to talk about one flavoring in particular.

“What is it with you people and cinnamon?” my friend Nicola wrote to me, after I described to her chocolate brownies I bake, to which I add half a teaspoon of the spice. And she has a point – when I think of the classics of American baking, so many of them use cinnamon, either as the dominant flavor (cinnamon rolls) or as a vocal supporting player (apple pie). When I searched for “cinnamon” in the recipe archive of the hugely popular American blog Smitten Kitchen, there were dozens of results, ranging from banana bread to plum torte to espresso chiffon cake.

But when you look more closely at 19th-century American history, the answer to Nicola’s question appears. Sure, the United States began when we revolted against the British, and we still speak the same language. But as the frontiers opened up and America started to move west in the 1800s, our immigrants came from further east. Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes settled the flat expanses of the upper Midwest, while Germans, Czechs and other Middle Europeans settled across swathes of what we know as Middle America, ranging from Wisconsin in the north to Texas in the south. Along with their other talents, they brought their beer (we favor lager over ale for a reason), their sausage (they’re why British-style bangers are almost impossible to find), and most of all, they brought their baking, full of flavorings like poppy seeds, cardamom, and cinnamon.

These tastes might have been just a regional quirk if not for The Joy of Cooking. Joy is the American equivalent of Delia Smith’s Cookery Course, if Delia had written the first edition in the 1930s instead of the 1980s. It’s been continuously in print for over 70 years and sold over 18 million copies, and It’s where you look first if you want to know how to make gravy, or a roast, or pie crust. Most importantly, it was written by Irma Rombauer and illustrated by Marian Rombauer Becker, who hailed from St Louis Missouri, and were the descendants of German immigrants. So this Mitteleuropa-inflected Midwestern food became the staple cuisine of kitchens across America.

That said, I put cinnamon in my brownies after years of enjoying Mexican hot chocolate. But that’s a story for another day.