How did "entrée" (which, after all, means "starter" in French) come to mean main course in American !
In America the word eventually came to refer not to the 'made dish' (which was often a ham) but to the main course (usually a ham or some other meat).
Answers: Actually, there is indeed a good explanation for why Americans do this. They got it from the English. At some point in the 18th century, the English began using entree to mean "a ‘made dish’, served between the fish and the joint". But in French, entrée was defined as "qui se servent au commencement du repas" ("serving as the commencement of a meal"). So the English got it wrong first, and that "wrong" meaning simply stuck in America once it arrived here, while the French doubtless harangued the English so much about misuse of the term that the meaning was corrected in the U.K. (well, maybe not, but...).
In America the word eventually came to refer not to the 'made dish' (which was often a ham) but to the main course (usually a ham or some other meat).
It might mean 'starter' but as you can see below it was originally as follows:
The word entrée is French. It originally denoted the "entry" of the main course from the kitchens into the dining hall. In the illustration from a French fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Histoire d'Olivier de Castille et d'Artus d'Algarbe, a fanfare from trumpeters in the musicians' gallery announces the processional entrée of a series of dishes preceded by a covered cup that is the ancestor of the tureen, carried by the ma?tre d'h?tel. The entrée will be shown round the hall but served only to the high table (though it does not stand on a dais in this hall), where the guests are set apart by a gold-and-crimson damask canopy of estate.
In traditional French haute cuisine, the entrée preceded a larger dish known as the relevé, which "replaces" it, an obsolescent term in modern cooking, but still used as late as 1921 in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire.