Actually, I quite like Cincinnati-style chili. And for the record, Nebraska's food has an awkward name because they are trying not to say "Runza," our only native fast food chain.
I would be inclined to put #51 rather higher, say between #42 and #43, although #46 would probably go above it on grounds of being mostly harmless.
46 is from eastern European roots, not out of the British meat-pie tradition.
Haha. I think I commented in that thread in the most predictable way possible. Yes, my fair homestate has a signature food that is so local that one can't expect some rando to know it, I guess. We've already don the the porkroll (Taylor ham)/egg/cheese on a hardroll thing here, though.
1,7,11 should be lower. 14 should obviously be higher. 22, 24 should obviously be much higher. 27 and 28 should also be higher. 28 should possibly be number one. I had to stop there because I was just too angry.
Also, boiled dinner is pretty good and why can't Nevada have Indian Tacos? Poor Nevada, those are tasty.
Don we now our gay pork sandwich fa la la la la
Man, there's some minging-looking stuff on that list. I'm assuming there's actually tons of better stuff from most of the states? Or that some of those are oddly tasty despite being made to sound horrific?
9: oh it's on now Mr. Deep-fried Haggis.
(Seriously some of those are probably terrible but most of the ones I've had are good. Now I will go through and figure out which ones I've had.)
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Yay! The Harvard commencement live stream! I only know about it because of Blume but I can recommend it to anybody, only because they get two professors to do a Macy's Thanksgiving Parade-style play-by-play, and man, it's goofy as hell. They are currently talking about Lean In
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I'm not even sure what scrapple is, but I am sure I've not eaten it.
9 - Yes. (And, I mean, New York-style pizza is New York's over beef on weck, but Connecticut doesn't get New Haven pizza? Foul! I cry foul!)
12 - It's a poard game where you try to sbell words for boints.
12: Think low quality sausage mixed with cornmeal.
Alarmingly, the wikipedia page for scrapple has haggis in the "see also" section.
28 is why the author will die by my hands.
I have no memory of what salt water taffy tastes like, even though I dutifully ate it a bunch as a kid at the Jersey shore.
Okay, counting inauthentic versions, I have had: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 45, 48, 50, of which 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 37, 48 are notable pleasing. 50 has its moments, too.
Scrapple is awesome. The very best way to make a pig into a loaf.
some of those are oddly tasty despite
It's the goopiness of many American regional foods that distinguish them from the foreign cuisines I'm familiar with. They're as good as any hot meat-fat combination might be, and as disgusting as any goopy food can be. But it's kind of the tourist trap list of foods: yes, those exist, but hardly anyone eats that stuff regularly.
If I want a loaf of pig, I'll get Spam.
re: 10
Deep-friend haggis is genuinely delicious. But there are lots of proper non-fast-food traditional Scottish dishes that are fantastic. Lots of them involving smoked fish, or other seafood. And various beef and lamb dishes. Even a couple of [very nice] traditional puddings/desserts.
That's kind of what I mean. The cliché about Scottish food is i) everything is deep-fried, and ii) haggis. But if you were picking a national dish [and weren't picking some kind of curry], you'd have a dozen or more genuinely delicious, fairly classy traditional dishes that would sit quite happily at the same level standard European things like bourguignon, or wiener schnitzel, or paella, or what have you.
So I'm hoping that the same applies to many of the states?
21: to be fair, I think people in New England actually do eat a fair bit of clam chowder. And I certainly fucking hope people in Maryland eat a lot of crab cakes!
Similar insofar as it's a list, this has been driving me up the wall lately. I don't think a single one of those 26 word-meanings is exclusive to Texas, and a couple of them aren't even that useful in Texas.
So I'm hoping that the same applies to many of the states?
Oh, sure. But this list is definitely picking at "deep-fried haggis" level. No wait. The "deep-fried Mars bar" level.
23: it varies. Some of them, like the various hot dog preparations, are fair food/fast food and should be thought of as such. Some of them, like lutefisk, are genuine regional specialties that are genuinely disgusting (okay, from what I hear. I haven't had lutefisk). Some of them, like clam chowder or pulled pork, are genuine local specialties that are genuinely fantastic by any standard.
25: I've hunted doves before, and not in Texas.
My love for scrapple is probably bit idiosyncratic, I admit (we have it on Christmas morning every year). But yeah, some of the rest (gumbo! Texas brisket!) are just sheerly excellent.
Deep-friend haggis is genuinely delicious.
And the teabags want to keep you people around?
9: What looks particularly disgusting? We'll let you know if it's secretly tasty.
Bull testicles taste like nothing.
24 - I ate a lot of crab cakes when I both lived in Maryland and ate meat, so there you go. (Also soft-shelled crabs, mmm.)
It's too bad no state claims fried gator tail. I had some gator tail when I was in Florida that was delicious as hell, way better than I've had before.
28: NO. No one is allowed to know about hot weather or country music except US TEXANS. #23 is probably the most egregious example, being a phenomenon most appropriately rooted in Atlanta.
I thought the absurdly sweet tea was the entire south. Other than racism, the biggest problem with the south is that if you order iced tea and forget to say "unsweet", it comes with 15 tons of sugar.
32: The MD crab related program activities were all great pretty much. In college we'd just buy bushels of them and cases of beer and plant ourselves in the sun all day.
I have never had burgoo. I'm really not much of a stew person in general. On the plus side, it lowers the chance I'll get BSE from squirrel brains!
36: yeah, sitting around with beer hitting crabs with hammers is just really a delightful way to pass them time.
1 is obviously correct. 15, 20, 24, and especially 41 should be higher. 43 should be still lower. I've heard 47 described but have not, fortunately, encountered it in the wild; I understand that it can easily be mistaken for random-Midwestern pink jello fluff, which is somehow not on the list at all, though I'm not sure who you would blame for it.
Well, I brought a slice of Malnati's deep dish pizza for lunch today.
I'm trying to think of something I'd think of as a real regional specialty that's serious food around here, and not coming up with much. But I think that might be a feature of NY as an immigrant place -- the things that pop to mind are things like Jewish deli food, that are Eastern European, not NY.
I vaguely recall trying, and liking, lutefisk. Haven't really sought out a repeat experience, though.
41: What could be more American than appropriating them as your own.
Even living in Chicago, while I liked stuffed pizza, I was never quite sure if it's a formally distinct thing from deep-dish pizza or what. Stuffed pizza is good as being basically lasagna; deep dish pizza always seemed lame because of too much soft bready crust.
41: manhattan clam chowder is a sad failure among clam chowders of the northeastern US, but if you ignore the chowder-shaped elephant in the room it's pretty good on its own terms.
There's the festival, that I never go to, but I think you'd actually have to look pretty hard to get rocky mountain oysters if you wanted some. Not like getting crabcakes in Maryland or something.
My dad used to buy them from a place in Fort Worth and cook them up, so I've had them. But only in Texas.
What about egg creams? I guess those aren't "food" per se. Are those eastern european in origin?
46: I went to a restaurant in Montana that had them but I didn't order them, which I've since regretted.
45: As parochial as I can be, I understand that pitting tomato soup against cream soup is a loser.
Lou Malnati's deep dish is the best of the deep dish -- by leaps and bounds -- because it slows its roll with respect to breadiness and cheesiness. (Although I always get the thin crust Malnati's -- with hot giardiniera -- because it is still better.)
That pulled pork fell outside of the top ten completely undercuts the scientific validity of this list.
47: Are those NY only? They're certainly American, because the story behind the name is Depression fake-luxury.
Now I want an egg cream; I haven't had one since the old-school luncheonette in the neighborhood got sold and became less old-school.
I should try real deep dish pizza, I guess. I am not at all convinced by it.
41 & 51 are right. I always try to steer visitors away from (shudder) Uno or Gino's East.
Deep dish pizza seems to have been invented by, or at the behest of, a Texan.
When I've been in NYC by myself I've often eaten pizza by the slice, and like it just fine. It's closer to, but different from the midwestern interpretation of it I grew up with in Columbus. I literally never ate pizza in Canada, but that was many years ago.
Wait that is totally weird. I just half-asleepily defined burgoo to Bave last night or the night before in the course of talking about senior skip day and going to the races. They used to serve a non-varmintful version at I think the thoroughbred track though maybe it was the trotters. Now I'm just typing words I hope make me sound mysteriously provincial.
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Is a side effect of dying, for Maya Angelou, that now every blandly inspirational pair of sentences is going to be attributed to her on facebook forevermore?
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re: pizza versions
I've had pizza in Italy, oddly enough, that tasted _exactly_ like the sort of cheap deep-fried pizza they do in some Scottish chip shops. Something about the very hot oven gave the cheese and tomato the exact same slightly caramelised taste and texture.
I also kind of like Cincinnati chili. It's not chili in any meaningful sense, but as a sui generis spaghetti sauce with all the other accoutrements, it's not terrible. I'd put it above savory jello.
58: As far as I can tell, yes. The dude from high-school who only ever posts "crush it!" inspirational quotes superimposed over Miami Heat players is now posting MA quotes.
I don't understand the regional subtleties of barbecue, which is annoying because some of it is wonderful and some of it is disgustingly sweet. I've had pulled pork that tasted more like a sundae topping than meat, and didn't know if it was terrible pulled pork, or if it was supposed to be like that.
I had some really good pizza in Scotland once.
Also, I thought Nevada's regional specialty is whatever is being served at the buffet at the casino hotel.
Pulled pork as an actual sundae topping seems pretty promising.
59. I've also eaten pizza in Naples which was entirely innocent of either tomatoes or cheese. I think people tend to be unnecessarily restrictive about the stuff.
In North Carolina, you can buy pulled pork from a business named after testicles.
I can guarantee almost no pulled pork sandwiches I've encountered contained a fistful of raccoon fur, but I can't speak for all of 'em. (Durham has some truly fantastic pulled pork, by the way, the local best of which is available from a former Arby's storefront left almost surreally unmodified when resurrected, the pork for which is smoked in a purpose-built hut in the back yard. There is nothing gross about pulled pork other than the fact pigs are pretty smart and their living conditions are really revolting.)
Shrimp and grits is never as good as it sounds despite containing two objectively great foods. Best Carolina gazes down its nose at South Carolina for its trumped up signature food.
Surely no one actually gets emotionally invested in this kind of list, though? Who cares what someone else thinks of burritos or Scrapple or whatever? I only care if I can use it to colonize Mars.
67.last: so, you care about scrapple specifically.
I ate scrapple once. If you like meatballs but wish they had less meat and were liquified, you'll love it.
67: How sweet is NC pulled pork?
If you like meatballs but wish they had less meat and were liquified
I don't know what the hell somebody fed you, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't scrapple and am now worried for you.
Although I always get the thin crust Malnati's -- with hot giardiniera
Giardiniera on pizza! Sounds great!
It was a fried substance in slices. Presumably before being fried it was some sort of meat loaf, but as far as I could tell it was a mushy breadlike substance covered with breading.
NC pulled pork, or "barbecue", isn't sweet at all, unless you add so-called "barbecue sauce". NC ingredients are pork, vinegar, and red pepper.
Man, there's some minging-looking stuff on that list. I'm assuming there's actually tons of better stuff from most of the states? Or that some of those are oddly tasty despite being made to sound horrific?
I think that Minnesota should have local dishes that reflect, like, the way the state is now. Everyone is all "oh, hot dish, lol, everyone in Minnesota eats that!" But honestly, my family is from Chicago and Indiana, and I grew up eating basically hot dish because it was cheap. I have had hot dish in Minnesota basically as a comedy sketch "grandma always made this" dish at holiday dinners a couple of times.
My point being, why can't we have sambuusas be our state dish? We have the largest population of Somalis in the US, for one thing, and for another - everyone loves sambuusas! I bet more sambuusas are eaten here per capita than hot dish, and I know plenty of non-Somali people who eat sambuusas at least weekly.
You could also make a case for Indian tacos or fry bread or something. I feel like Hmong dishes would be reasonable choices except that I feel like a larger percentage of Minnesotans eat sambuusas regularly, since there's just not a lot of Hmong restaurants/food trucks/etc.
Also, sambuusas are fried, which is a nod to our "we like everything fried" state fair culture.
Come to that, if we can't have sambuusas, why not fried cheese curds? Far, far more people eat those than eat hot dish.
Of course, we can't have sambuusas as our state dish because racism, that's why.
re: 65
Yeah, I've had some like that in Florence, although I don't think Florence is particularly associated with pizza.
I had some pizza in Genoa which was both delicious -- the topping and dough were both really tasty -- and yet strangely wet, because they used a lot of fresh tomato and the top of the pizza was soggy with water.
Of course, we can't have sambuusas as our state dish because racism, that's why.
Or because sambusas are properly historically rooted elsewhere?
pulled pork that tasted more like a sundae topping
I have no idea what you were eating, but it definitely is not supposed to be sweet. Shitty barbecue sauce may have been the culprit. However, it's relatively common for a pulled pork sandwich to be topped with cole slaw, which can be sweet.
74 gets it right, though there are two styles of barbecue in NC: Lexington (very runny vinegar-based sauce containing some tomato but not a lot and definitely not sweet) and Eastern (what 74 describes).
South Carolina's signature sauce is mustard-based and is fucking fantastic. Every year for a friend's post-Thanksgiving dinner I make dry pulled turkey barbecue with a variety of sauces on the side and my SC-style sauce is what people just destroy. I'm always left with a little Lexington-style sauce and a ton of Eastern-style sauce left over.
TYPICAL IMPERIALIST, TRYING TO CLAIM SAMBUUSAS ARE YOUR STATE DISH. WHILE LEAVING WHAT AS THE STATE DISH OF SOMALIA, EXACTLY?
SAMBUUSAS MUST BE STOLEN FROM THEIR HOMELAND BECAUSE RACISM
Scrapple isn't any worse than fried liver mush, which is magnificent and tastes almost exactly like the haggis I had in Scotland.
Or because sambusas are properly historically rooted elsewhere?
But what exactly is "historically rooted" anywhere in the United States besides various Native foods? And of those, only the ones that have no Old World additions, right? And we'd have to leave out any migration among native people, too, even to get to that point - if Ojibwe people came here from somewhere else, or drew some of their cooking from Dakota people, that then is "properly rooted" someplace else. It's hardly as though people were cooking hot dish here in 1850, let alone pre-contact.
And for that matter, does hot dish really originate in Minnesota? Or is it just some thirties/forties/fifties pan-US casserole variant that was particularly popular in low-income hinterlands where there wasn't a lot of choice of vegetables?
I think that if we're going to pretend that there are "original" state dishes and that state borders actually mean something, we're so far into fictionalizing history and food that we might as well nominate the sambuusa.
Or at any rate, the fried cheese curd.
Texas bbq is sweet-ish. Very peppery sweet.
OT: It looks like the old car is dead and gone. And I just put a brand fucking new battery in it.
84: Isn't it just the heartstrings-nostalgia test? Sambusas don't induce nostalgia in Minnesota, I assume. But they probably do in Somalia.
Googling livermush, it looks quite like Lorne sausage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorne_sausage
Lorne sausage is delicious. You can get 'Angus' lorne sausage, which omits the pork, and uses steak mince.
There's historically rooted elsewhere, and there's imported without modification, though. Deep-dish pizza is obviously Italian in some sense, but not in the sense that you can find it more easily in Italy than in Chicago. I don't actually know at all what a sambuusa is, but I don't think you can call it a MN regional specialty until someone fresh off the plane from Somalia would be at least a little surprised by the MN version. (Maybe this has already happened? In which case I'd call it a MN regional speciality, sure.)
Everything on this list is there because of nostalgia to some extent. "Hot dish" is on there 100% because of nostalgia. Might as well say "Jello raisin salad".
I bet somebody fresh off the plane fro Somalia would be surprised if you threw a sambuusa at him on the jetway.
Lorne sausage immediately goes onto the to-be-eaten list, then. I'm assuming the similarity in flavors is mostly derived from the seasoning and the fat used to cook it (liver mush is often fried in a little butter, because the point at which liver mush is being prepared is well past the point of being concerned for health) since it's basically just ground up meat scraps and the spices a manufacturer can add to them.
re: 92
If you've ever taken the skin off of a good quality pork and beef sausage and used that to make a patty [to serve with a sauce with pasta, say] the texture is similar. It's held together, barely, by fat and pressure.
Virginia hams should really be ranked higher to the extent that this whole exercise isn't stupid.
Yeah, SC barbecue is great. In general, though, I just go for whatever is the hottest barbecue sauce, and then add bonus hot sauce because for my money, it wasn't successfully dressed pork if you can't still feel the burn upon its exit.
My mother found this book before we went on a family road trip that told you where to get regional cuisine which I guess at the time you'd usually just eat at chain restaurants instead, and anyway we tried the mustard barbecue at a place called Maurice's Piggy Park and all found it strange and a little gross. I might like it now, though. I was fourteen or something.
Aw, I remember having giardiniera on pasta at mutual-friend-of-mine's-and-neb's (I think.)
Isn't it just the heartstrings-nostalgia test? Sambusas don't induce nostalgia in Minnesota, I assume. But they probably do in Somalia.
But nostalgia for who? Hot dish doesn't induce nostalgia in me or indeed in most of the people I know - it's far more of a depressing joke that we're saddled with than anything else. Many older white US-born Minnesotans want to narrate a Minnesota that is predominantly Scandinavian/Germanic/Protestant where people eat gross and depressing food because tradition, but although we're still very much a majority white state, state culture is shifting more and more to reflect the fact that there are, like, non-Norwegians living here.
Choosing this dated, almost-impossible-to-make-non-gross dish that virtually everyone dislikes (every year there's some kind of "update your hotdish with a bechamel and fresh green beans!!" recipe in the paper and it's still not very good) and that is strongly associated with white culture - that's certainly a political statement. I'm saying that to me it is plausible to make a different political statement about Minnesota, one that is less in line with the shrinking percentage of Scandinavian-Germanic white people who are consciously invested in hegemonic whiteness.
My sense is that sambuusas have changed somewhat here - there are a lot more varieties, for instance.
Haven't we discussed this stupid bullshit before? Also the Mission style burrito sucks so much and is a fucking abomination of non Mexican food, proof that Amerricans in general and Bay Areans in particular are gross obese morons. Tacos por vida.
Belle posted a recipe for Carolina bbq, back in the day.
Malnati's is pretty good; all the other deep dish pizzas are fucking gross blobs of runny cheese running over forgettable ingredients. Thin crust pizza can be, though often isn't, way better than deep dish. Oh, ingredients I can taste! It's actually pretty easy and much more fun to make pizza at home, unless you're an "it's has to be made in an over hotter than the sun" snob.
I was thinking, 'oooh, what's a sambuusa? Sounds interesting.' But no, it's a samosa. Which is perfectly nice, but not exciting and new.
103: Similar (stuff in pastry) but not the same. I am more familiar with the Ethiopian iteration of sambusa, but it doesn't taste like a samosa at all.
I was thinking, 'oooh, what's a sambuusa? Sounds interesting.' But no, it's a samosa. Which is perfectly nice, but not exciting and new.
The ones around here are only nominally like samosas - different fillings, obviously, plus the exterior tends to be much crisper, thinner and flakier. They're definitely triangle-shaped filled fried things, but they're really not that samosa-like.
#10 Marionberry pie is the most amazing food ever and I weep for the poor saps in the other 49 states who don't get fresh picked marionberries.
Deep-dish pizza is atrocious and the hotdish of pizza.
I have to agree with Halford about the general superiority of tacos to Mission-style burritos.
I wasn't picked. I was set up.
It's a shame that the subject of Germanic-American comfort food was so poisonously politicized by the odious James Lileks.
Tacos are better, but burritos are more convenient. Typically classist elitism to dismiss burritos.
Is Halford even allowed to eat either? I guess tacos are way more acceptable than burritos.
The best inauthentic Mexican food in California is fish tacos. Non-fish tacos in LA are mostly... eh, they're fine.
It's actually pretty easy and much more fun to make pizza at home, unless you're an "it's has to be made in an over hotter than the sun" snob.
Yeah. Dating an Italian sucks because it means I eat no pizza. American pizza is not worthy,* and making pizza at home doesn't cut the mustard.
*It is kind of cute to see someone actually offended by the mediocreness of a pizza. As an American I just kind of take it for granted that something flat with too much cheese on top will be called a pizza in a restaurant. Italians apparently still have principles about these things.**
**Because I'm a sadist, I also enjoy buying parmesan cheese from Wisconsin and putting it on a dish that calls for pecorino. You can hear the screams of disgust at least two houses down.
Mission style burritos are now everywhere in America thanks to Chipotle, Qdoba and Moe's, and only a small minority of the customers of any of those places are aware that these burritos are associated with California (as opposed to just being a new way to Americanize and homogenize Mexican food).x
The MSB isn't particularly associated with California by Californians, it's associated with a few blocks in San Francisco that figured out how to supersize things for obese morons. We had regular size burritos.
I like enchiladas myself. Because mole.
Oh god, I love mole so much. That is my go-to order at restaurants.
117 - I think they're kind of stringy, myself.
AFAICR I've never had burgoo, been offered burgoo, or otherwise encountered the word at all in Kentucky.
120: But hot brown, though? That's what I'd expected on a list like this if they don't go with just chicken.
95 gets it exactly right.
101: That recipe looks great. My sauce relies on regular yellow mustard instead of ketchup and thus comes out a genuinely distressing shade of golden-brown but the smell - the smell - is like walking past Heaven's cracked windows.
Another sad truth is that aside from street tacos, which admittedly are pretty great, the Mexican food in Texas including but not limited to Tex-Mex is generally (not universally obvs) better than in California.
35 Other than racism, the biggest problem with the south is that if you order iced tea and forget to say "unsweet", it comes with 15 tons of sugar.
I remember once when my mom ordered "unsweetened tea" in a restaurant in Chicago and it took a whole set of follow-up questions for her and the waitress to get on the same page about what was being requested.
121: Yes, I've had hot brown and would have expected it on the list.
The process of making sweet tea is like one of those kiddie science project super-saturated liquids where you then put the string in and watch the solute crystalize.
Cafe Pasqual in Santa Fe is a tourist trap, but for good reason: their food is fantastic and their mole recipe is possibly perfect. I once bought all five hundred ingredients, thinking I'd make it at home, but didn't.
52 gets it exactly right. Mmmm, pulled pork.
Even before I renounced "sweet" as the province of the weak and the dead, I never understood sweet tea, which is not only gross in general but particularly gross on a hot day, which is what it is designed for, right?
127: Mmmmmmmmmm mole. I wonder if I have it in me to make that recipe at home.
41, 51, 55: Lou Malnati's doesn't do stuffed pizza, do they? That's what I always think of as the actually characteristic-to-Chicago style.
Sifu is entirely correct about scrapple. It's one of the only possible defenses for the existence of that state. The only reason it could be knocked out of the top ten that I can think of is that like many other things in the state it's only Pennsylvanian by virtue of everyone else giving up on it a long, long time ago. In older cookbooks it's clearly taken to be a distinctive pan-American food (older meaning "when pan-American indicated a much smaller geographic region")
Also I think hotdish gets treated a bit unfairly. It's basically just a broad subset of casserole, which is not a bad sort of food at all. And I think it's hard for people outside of the general Minnesota region (including parts of Wisconsin and literally dozens of people in the Dakotas) to appreciate the appeal, because it really only shines in conditions you don't find in most states. It's food for when some ancient prehistoric animal part of you bubbles up from deep in your ancestral memory and says "Holy fuck it is cold. So cold. Eat something really, really starchy right now or you will die." In those weather conditions, after, say, a nice walk outside a well made hotdish can be very satisfying.
You can buy bags of mole. That's what we do.
We've got a bunch of friends in town who are of the opinion that all local tex-mex is completely terrible, and that it's hard to get good tex-mex in this region.
I...I don't know what they're holding out for. I think, tautologically, this is good tex-mex and what they want is something else.
Anyway, it's somehow made me develop much lower self-esteem about our local cuisine. I think it's delicious, but I shouldn't gloat because that's not universal.
(The cheese tends to be shredded nasty, the tomatoes tend to be grocery store cardboard, and the lettuce is shredded iceberg. But the verde sauce! The enchiladas! The migas mexicanas! The mole! The best things just don't involve un-melted cheese, chopped tomatoes, or iceberg lettuce.)
Oh god, the caldo de pollo. Real caldo de pollo with the whole ears of corn and whole pieces of chicken on the bone is amazing.
Why are my friends such assholes.
MMMM. When I was a kid we had a butcher who sold us bacon, sausage and scrapple. I've had lots of good bacon and sausage since then but not much good scrapple. The key is to fry it so the edges become crisp; it's awesome with pancakes or waffles.
I love MD crabs but I'm too lazy to enjoy getting the crabmeat out of them. So, crab cakes for me. Often they are awful (just bread crumbs with a little crab so the truth-in-labeling guys don't get on you), but sometimes they are sublime.
I think the point of calling the MA dish "New England Clam Chowder" is to distinguish it from the similarly named item that is contaminated with tomatoes by barbarians. The most common NE version has a white sauce, but RI style, which just uses the natural liquids of the ingredients, doesn't and still fits (due to lack of tomatoes) into the "New England" genus. Many New England things are defined by their not being New York things, after all. Unless you wander west of the Connecticut River.
Do I have to have the talk about authenticity and Mexican food with you people again?
120: I've certainly seen burgoo on a number of menus in Louisville, though the only time I had it, it was home-cooked. Oddly, just saw it on a menu in DC recently, as "Kentucky Burgoo Stew" which is awfully pleonastic.
25: that list is stupid and annoying, though I'll admit that #6 was a problem for me when I first moved to Texas. And now I sound like an idiot because I still feel compelled to order "hot tea" even in normal places.
Halford is right, though. It's good here but better in Texas.
I remember hot browns as kind of gross despite their oh so appetizing name.
All conversations lead to Taco Cabana.
Do they make sambuusas with walleye?
141: Agreed on gross, but it exists and whatnot.
131: I'm not sure what you're thinking of, but typical Chicago deep dish is thick crust that goes up the sides of the pan, mild cheese, sausage (may be skipped or exchanged), and seasoned crushed tomatoes on top.
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Smearcase, I've been listening to Webern conducting the Berg Violin Concerto, obviously a very old recording, on my ipod this morning.
This is the kind of recording I'd never have owned before the internet.
I've been following through pretty much my whole adult life on the suggestions I got in college music appreciation, of what the good stuff was. We used Joseph Kerman's textbook, I remember.
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145: I'm talking about stuffed pizza, like you get at Giordano's, which I've never seen outside of Chicago at all. What you're calling deep-dish exists pretty much everywhere in America, although I guess maybe it originated in Chicago.
I first encountered deep dish at the old location of The Medici, at 57th between Blackstone & Harper, where Florian has been since. It was ok, but Malnati's is better.
I don't think I've ever figured out the difference between a mission-style burrito and a burrito. There's enough variation within and between places I've been. Is mission-style just the larger or "super" or whatever option? I rarely eat burritos from places that don't primarily serve them.
Chipotle and Moe's I think of as chain-style burrito. Maybe not worse than some others, but somehow feeling more mass packaged.
I love MD crabs but I'm too lazy to enjoy getting the crabmeat out of them. So, crab cakes for me. Often they are awful (just bread crumbs with a little crab so the truth-in-labeling guys don't get on you), but sometimes they are sublime.
I love getting the crabmeat out of crabs (and lobster meat out of lobsters). Provided I have bowls of water and an ample supply of napkins. It's like hunting for lazy people. Or I suppose it's more like gutting and boning a fish for squeamish people.
That said, the best crab dish I ever had was crabmeat on toast in Maryland. In the UK it would have been a tiny thing with maybe a crabcake's worth of meat if you were lucky, and it would cost a fortune. This thing was $13 dollars or something ridiculous and it was a foot long, four inches wide and with a layer of crabmeat an inch thick on top of the toast.
150: Is one of the things rice inside the burrito? Or do you get that in a non-Mission burrito too?
151: Try getting lobster meat out of crabs.
Cralobfish - It's the seafood turducken
147: I wouldn't call that Chicago style myself. I'd call it stuffed deep dish or something. The recipes I see on a quick search for Chicago style pizza don't do the double crust that Giordano's does, and it's not the type of thing that's served at most of the big pizza places (Malnati's, Uno/Due, Gino's East, Connie's, etc.). I think it's more of an exception than the rule.
Huh, I didn't realize that recording was out there. It's not a piece I've ever bonded with but yay old recordings so I'll see if it's on Spotify.
Apparently sometime since the phonautograph someone did an April Fool's day hoax involving recordings of Chopin playing Chopin. I know, I know, how too droll!
Florian closed a few years ago
I thought so, but made the reference for the benefit of those who spent some years in Hyde Park but don't get back much anymore. Which is me, although we're there dozens of times in the year, just not enough to know every space unless we happen to notice it.
I expect I'm the only mineshaft Maroon whose memories go back to the mid-seventies.
My daughter's moving down there in the fall, so I may get re-acquainted with the neighborhood.
AFAICR I've never had burgoo, been offered burgoo, or otherwise encountered the word at all in Kentucky.
Another reminder that, despite formal geographic boundaries, essear's home town is not in any meaningful sense part of Kentucky.
(That said, 140 is right--even limiting things to Louisville, burgoo is practically everywhere. I'm not sure how you missed it.)
Scrapple's wonderful! It's not an everyday meat--it can be salty and cholesteroliffic--but I have it once or twice a year when I visit my folks. Being a pan-American tradition doesn't seem quite right, as it was largely German-American and hence probably mostly confined to the greater Mid-Atlantic.
The list misses the great Westsylvanian tradition of putting French fries in everything. (Or its close cousin, putting pirogues on everything.)
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I wonder if our friend VW has anything to say about Northwestern's investigation of its founder's responsibility for the Sand Creek Massacre?
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158: My response is a combination of location within the state, lack of interest in stews, and being from a family that's both not from the region and almost completely unwilling to eat in restaurants, at least when we were growing up. I didn't try Cincy chili or the local scrapple equivalent until adulthood and burgoo would be in that category too were I burgoo-curious.
#10 Marionberry pie is the most amazing food ever and I weep for the poor saps in the other 49 states who don't get fresh picked marionberries.
I looked at the list wondering what they would have for WA and OR, and figuring (correctly) that WA would have to involve salmon.
But, if you're going to claim that marionberry pie involves fresh picked marionberries, I would claim that the the true local NW Washington dish would be grilled freshly caught salmon (growing up we had a family friend who was a fisherman and would occasionally bring fresh fish over, but you can find fishermen at the harbor selling salmon off their boats) which can be sublime.
AFAIK cedar-plank salmon is just the restaurant version, and it's a significant step down.
Of course choosing salmon, in any form, means that it doesn't represent the Eastern half of the state, but they're used to that.
152: it's most of the stuff in the burrito. Non-Missions-style burritos are, like, meat and cheese (or maybe just meat?).
I believed that was real until I hit the word "potatoes".
(Or its close cousin, putting pirogues on everything.)
Really? Like sandwiches and salads? Or is there some other more traditional thing?
re:159
My copy of the United States Regional Cookbook (courtesy of the WPA!)* contains a scrapple recipe in the "Southern" chapter, labeled "corn meal mush and pork". It's almost identical to the Scrapple recipe in the "Pennsylvania Dutch" chapter ("of stolid country cookery") , just less specific about which parts of the pig are involved and calling for a little bit more sage. So I'm guessing that it was pretty standard up and down the coast even if it wasn't always under the same name, which isn't so strange for corn meal and unidentified pig parts I suppose.
*This book is amazing and everyone should try to find one even if, unlike the book seems to expect, you do have a refrigerator but do not have easy access to things like "one large hog's head" or "200lbs fresh killed beef". It's a cookbook organized around specific culinary regions in America, with recipes clearly collected from old ladies just before regional cooking stopped meaning much in people's daily lives. The regions are: New England; Southern; Pennsylvania Dutch; Creole; Michigan Dutch; Mississippi Valley; Wisconsin Dutch; Minnesota Scandinavian; Southwestern; and Western. I'm guessing the repeated "Dutch" is a result both of German settlers moving pretty far west along the upper parts of the country, and also being more food-obsessed than a lot of other American subcultures. The Pennsylvania Dutch local culture certainly is, or at least it seemed that way when I lived there.
"Real" ie Sonoran-style burritos, which were and maybe still are largely dominant here in non chain places, are much smaller, and have 1 or maybe 2 ingredients, like just chile colorado and nothing else.
I confess to occasionally thinking it would be nice to have an old school American taco - crunchy shells, cheddar and all.
I admit to being scrapple-curious.
There's a place that will soon be close to you that has it. It's actually fucking delicious.
My favorite part of the list is that the "Good" section includes so many foods that the writer complains about - I kept scrolling up, to make sure I hadn't missed a new section heading for "Crappy" or whatever.
I've never had scrapple, but ISTR that my mom (who lived in western PA for ~10 formative years) had vaguely positive things to say about it.
We've already don the the porkroll (Taylor ham)/egg/cheese on a hardroll thing here, though.
When we did, did I mention that I once sent a package of Taylor ham to my HS BF in the Navy?
Come to think of it, preparing Taylor ham sandwiches for myself and him was probably the first real communal cooking I ever did. I always had the heat too high and set off the damn smoke alarm.
160: what do you want to know? I worked with the committee a bit and can probably answer your questions.
165: Breakfast burritos are awesome. We pick them up with bacon, egg, potatoes, cheese and beans from our local restaurant most Saturdays.
re: 156
In Charles Rosen's Piano Notes [a great great book], he has a bit about his piano teacher's 'lineage', and it's amazing how few steps there were from a lot of the 20th century greats to Chopin and Liszt. So Rosen, who only died 2 years ago, was taught by Moriz Rosenthal, who was taught by Liszt, and was also taught by a pupil of Chopin! So, from Rosen you've only got one or two degrees of separation to Liszt and Chopin.
Oh, and LB: you totally can't get egg cream anywhere but metro NY and places with ex-NY populations.
I think it's very sweet that you would even consider the idea that egg creams exist elsewhere.
You used to be able to get egg creams in Boston for reasons other than ex-New Yorkers but I think the places that had them have mostly closed.
173: What I'd hope for is that Northwestern can model an institution's coming to terms with its own past, and with wrongs of which the institution is at least in part the beneficiary. Seems rather topical just now.
Also, the summary suggests that the nature of Western development, in which Evans participated and was an obvious beneficiary, was itself a wrong against native peoples. If that's the stand, I think it'll be a harder sell.
177: Everyone knows Boston is just a far suburb of NYC.
Charles Rosen's Piano Notes [a great great book]
It is! My book-buying female relatives have zeroed in on what kinds of books I like, and was given that one.
We pick them up with bacon, egg, potatoes, cheese and beans
Nice. Our little 24 hour Mexican place down the road has a "super" breakfast burrito like that but with carne asada and no beans. But what Halford said. Keep that damn rice out of my burrito. It's taking up space that should be filled with delicious carne asada or a chili relleno.
JRoth, did you see my insertion about the Glascow Art School fire the other day?
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Hey, remember we were talking about whether PETA sometimes did questionable things?
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Going to have to change my handle at my next birthday but in the meantime let me defend my two home states. For CT, skip the steamed burger and try a steamed cheese on rye toast with spicy mustard and onion. For NY, bad pizza is universal, replace it with linguine with clam sauce.
Add Puerto Rico with the advisory to definitely not try gandinga.
Smearcase, I've been listening to Webern conducting the Berg Violin Concerto, obviously a very old recording, on my ipod this morning.
BBC Symphony Orchestra? I transcribed Webern's letters to Schoenberg for a friend, and Webern talks about that a lot. How much it meant to him, etc etc.
166: I've had pierogies on hotdogs and maybe on hamburgers. Maybe also in a salad, but I could be confusing it with the many fries salads I've definitely had. I think putting pirogues on things is mostly tongue-in-cheek, or perhaps "haha we're enjoying this ironically but also secretly honestly." While delicious, it's not as practical as other potato-based toppings because they're more discrete and can easily fall off.
167: Interesting! I know scrapple's also a style of food in coastal Virginia/Maryland (in particular the Eastern Shore), but I didn't get the impression that it could be found further south or in the Scots-Irish areas of the South. Or maybe there it descends from an English pudding recipe instead? Dunno.
re: 180
I don't play the piano, but it's one of the best books I've read about the process of learning to be a musician, playing an instrument, and the experience of music.
I think it's very sweet that you would even consider the idea that egg creams exist elsewhere.
The pharmacy we used to use when I was a kid had an old-school soda fountain in it and you could get egg creams there. Rural mid-Missouri. Pretty sure it was a soda fountain thing, not a New York thing.
BBC Symphony Orchestra?
I didn't enter that into info, so I don't know. Must have been in a hurry. Louis Krasner is the soloist.
182: That was actually all over my FB feed, and I frankly haven't followed up, because I can't bear to think about it. I really, really admire Mackintosh.
188: Genuinely shocked. I've generally not encountered people who've even heard of them elsewhere. I should ask my sister, who has always pined for them, but afaik not found them in Miami, western MA, Chicago, DC, or CO.
Speaking of soda fountains, what do people know about lime rickets? My Chicagoan father has fond memories of them, but hasn't had a ton of success finding them as an adult (not that he's hunted).
Limes prevent scurvy, not rickets.
I know a few things about gin rickeys, is that similar?
Yeah, a lime rickey is just lime juice, simple syrup, and soda. Maybe some bitters. Any decent bartender should be able to make one.
186.1: I don't know if it's ironic as such, but people didn't used to do it. I don't believe I ever saw pierogie pizza* or a pierogie atop any other food until the mid-'00s, presumably as a combo of local foodieism and a sort local pride from people who may or may not be from here. Crossed, obviously, with the fries thing.
I'm pretty sure the first place I encountered pierogies outside their natural habitat (church basements**) was at an upscale restaurant in maybe '07 where the chef, a local kid made good (who has since gone on to considerable repute) was making fancy pierogies. I don't think he was the first, and I'm certain that pierogie pizza predated that, but the celebration of the pierogie as a local icon (as opposed to an ethnic throwback) is recent enough that I still recall that dish as noteworthy.
*usually not dumplings on a pizza, but pierogie ingredients (mashed potato and cheddar, usually) on an unsauced pie
** exaggeration; they had them at PNC Park when it opened, but I actually think that stand is gone now
191 - There's a soda fountain (with a number of old-fashioned oddities, phosphates and the like) here in Cleveburgh, JRoth. I'd be surprised if there's not something similar in Steelerville, given the two cities' relative position on the hipster curve.
Actually, I just went back and reread, and my memory was off. The meal was late '05, and, while the point was, indeed, that the chef was taking his pierogies seriously, we did note that ironic* pierogies had already appeared on local menus.
*"But often, these dishes seem to be the creations of chefs smiling out of one side of their mouths, smirking out of the other, as they condescend to incorporate provincial tradition into their rarified repertoires."
196: we have an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, reopened some years back after being shuttered for decades, but the soda fountain aspect was/is secondary. That said, now I can't recall if it had egg creams (it's now under new ownership, and I've no idea what they're offering); I doubt it, because I feel certain I would have mentioned it to my sister (who has been there a couple times), but maybe not. That is where my dad ordered a lime rickey that failed to satisfy him.
194: Huh. Funny to think of a soda fountain favorite as a bar item, but there you go.
I wonder if a gin rickey just adds gin or replaces the lime with it. I suppose it would take less time to Google than to type this out. Oh well.
Oh, and 194 makes me suspect that they used lime syrup as a substitute for the lime juice/simple syrup, and that it wasn't that great.
A gin rickey is gin, lime, and soda.
How is that different from a gin and soda that comes with a lime garnish?
Maybe. If I liked gin, I might order one to see. If I liked lime.
178: I think the important thing is that universities are beginning to grapple with the role that ill-gotten gains played in their founding and development. The Ivies, UVA, and a few other insitutions have started to do this around the issue of slavery. The theft of Native American land is, perhaps, the next leg in the journey. As for the specifics of the report, it's important to remember that it was written by a committee. Some members of that committee were and still are more militant than others, and so the document isn't, in my view, especially consistent in its presentation of the moral valence of Western history and especially continental expansion.
What I'd hope for is that Northwestern can model an institution's coming to terms with its own past, and with wrongs of which the institution is at least in part the beneficiary. Seems rather topical just now.
By the way, I don't think there's any chance that NU will serve as a model in this regard. Harvard and UVA and Brown are all way ahead of Northwestern -- again, grappling with the issue of slavery. NU is playing catch-up.
206:
Thanks, I'll be taking the temperature of my friends at NU the next few days for reception. I may have more comments later.
I have from somewhere the notion that you share my wife's "Pity of It All" sub-ethnicity, so that it amuses me to call you "VW."
Nope. My peeps, including my mom, were all from Warsaw. Which, if you listened to my dearly departed grandmother, was an awfully nice place to live between the wars.
but pierogie ingredients (mashed potato and cheddar, usually)
?@! I guess this means that according to the stepped off a plane familiarity definition, pierogies can be considered an American food distinct from pierogi. For the record, the standard pierogi fillings are: ground meat; white farmer's cheese with fried onions, white farmer's cheese with fried onions thickened with potato; sauerkraut and mushroom; blueberries; sweetened white farmer's cheese. These days other things might appear on Polish menus - say spinach or beets or strawberries, but not cheddar or any other non white cheese. They are served with either hot fat (butter or preferably lard with cracklings) or sour cream.
Sincerely,
Food Police Dept. of Traditional Peasant Fare.
210: Not potato; only cheese thickened with potato? Potato is what I always thought of as the basic pierogi filling, and that was from restaurants in the East Village Polish enough that the waitresses had accents.
209: It's the living-memory immigration where the connection is then. I believe it about Warsaw.
I guess I knew about slavery and the Ivies, but the possibility of extending to Native peoples and Western development is still interesting.
I come from the most Polish region of the US, where churches have pierogie sales, restaurants have pierogies as appetizers, grocery stores have large freezers of both mass-produced and locally made pierogies. And pierogies always have potatoes and virtually never have meat.
Potato and cheese, most common.
Potato and onion
Potato and sauerkraut
Great catch by JRoth in identifying the recent chef-driven trend of incorporating pierogies into random foods. Definitely not a tradition.
211 Not in Polish - only fresh cheeses are 'white cheese'.
212 I've never encountered plain potato pierogi in Poland.
I guess I might be remembering potato with cheese as plain potato, but the proportions were definitely POTATO with (cheese) rather than CHEESE with (potato).
210:
This is a good summary of what's available at the great restaurant on Elston, nearly to Milwaukee Ave. A place whose off-the-plane-edness and accents are impeccable and the food is terrific.
I've seen plain potato pierogi in the US, but in Poland I've only seen them in combination with cheese. Cheapo crappy ones can be a bit light on the cheese. In Poland all the sauerkraut pierogi I've seen have been combined with mushroom, ideally porcini, but most of the time with plain mushrooms. Meat is pretty damn common as a filling.
Church Brew Works has put novelty meat in pierogies--I recall them having rattlesnake pierogi. (Hrm, not sure why I feel the need to use a different pluralization there.) Beyond that, it's always been potatoes, often with cheese (in the mixed together, thickened way LB describes), possibly with some other seasoning.
The wider variety of fillings you describe would probably be referred to as ravioli or dumplings here, but I've never seen e.g. blueberry in anything pierogi-like. But it sounds delicious!
Thanks for the references, JRoth. It did seem like a local foodie/hipster thing. And honestly, they are in general delicious, so I can't complain.
Pierogies with filling not primarily potato would probably be called "ravioli".
Typical church pierogie sales in Northeast PA and Pittsburgh. The latter describes having non-potato-based ones. But also says:
Other ethnic peoples have their version of the pierogie, too. The Chinese have the "won-ton," and the Italians have "raviolis." Pierogies, however, are a distinctly Slavic food and unlike the ravioli, usually meatless.
Maybe the meatlessness dates back to the deprivation a hundred years ago, during which the progenitors of today's Polish-Americans and Ukrainian-Americans immigrated.
I've only had pierogi in [semi-legendary London Polish restaurant] Daquise. Those had meat in them.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/17/polish-delis-restaurants-british
[I've not been for years, so it was pre 'Gessler']
Justice won't be achieved until Stanford changes its name to stop honoring its extreme dbag founder.
217 - that would be Smak-Tak! (The exclamation point is not optional). http://www.yelp.com/biz/smak-tak-restaurant-chicago Super amazing pierogi and borscht.
Stanford changes its name
Isn't it named after his youthfully deceased son? Or is it your position that Sheldon E. Silver is responsible for all wrongdoing in the world?
The son can keep his ridonkulous mausoleum, but the founding asshole's vanity should not be able to live on through the name.
For Christmas Eve, my grandparents would usually serve cheese and potato (pierogi ruskie), blueberry, sauerkraut, and mushroom pierogis (among all the other dishes). I've seen pierogi with meat on the menu of most Polish restaurants, but I've never ordered it, and my grandmother has never made it for me that I can remember.
I should ask my sister, who has always pined for them, but afaik not found them in Miami, western MA, Chicago, DC, or CO.
Well the thing about egg creams is they are exceedingly simple to make, so one need not pine for them. Now I really want one but I am on a sugary-things fast so it'll have to wait.
228 was me. What you can't find many places anymore that is slightly more of a pain to make is ice cream sodas.
So you do hold Sheldon E. Silver responsible.
I guess it's possible I've never had a Sonoran burrito. Though I had one recently in San Jose that may have fit the definition. It was distinctly different (fewer ingredients) than other burritos I've had.
Also, all three Stanfords are in the mausoleum on the SJSU campus.
212/215 I wonder if the deal is that pel'meni come with more or less plain potato (it seems to me there's onion in there) and places in NYC, anyone ones like Veselka that mostly do not cater to native eaters, maybe don't make a menuic distinction between pirogies and pel'meni which after all are quite similar.
You know, typing a pseud in the window is not the very hardest thing in the world. 233 is me again.
What you can't find many places anymore that is slightly more of a pain to make is ice cream sodas.
Say what? I've seen root beer floats, at least, all over the place. (And this place has all of egg creams, phosphates, and root beer floats.)
235
NO.
Ice cream soda ≠ float.
Veselka's was technically Ukrainian, even though the waitstaff was mostly Polish, particularly back in the grungy pre-makeover days. Same goes for the late lamented Kurowycky's (awesome Polish butcher and deli, much better than the ones that remain in Greenpoint). In both cases the food seemed to be more Polish than Ukrainian, but I can't always tell. Can't remember either place featuring salo though.
236: What's the distinction? Wikipedia says they're the same basic thing.
The exclamation point is not optionalThe exclamation point is not optional
Yes, I wasn't sure I should name it though. Do I know you? Have you been commenting long, so that I'd know you from about seven years ago?
238 a float is vanilla ice cream and root beer or coke. An ice cream soda is vanilla or possibly chocolate ice cream, club soda, milk, and vanilla or chocolate syrup. They are so very much not the same thing and I FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT IT.
Elsewhere I am told they have actual ice cream sodas at Fenton's Creamery or, as I like to think of it, Fentons Tod Creamery.
Dunno. I did go to Smak-Tak! once about 5 1/2 years ago with a small group that included my wife, a female British Indian physicist, and a guy who I believe we all knew slightly through the Straight Dope message board; are you that guy? (I've been commenting here but very off-and-on for most of a decade).
No, I wasn't that guy. Do you live in the Chicago area? I live near Devon & Western.
The very best ice cream sodas in the world are at Armitage and Western.
233 gets it right. There are definitely Russian places selling pelmeni which have a meat filling and are basically ravioli. They tend to have thinner layer of dough than pierogis, too.
Possibly to simplify things for the American audience, restaurants in general, whether Polish or Russian or whatnot, call the potato ones "pierogis" and the meat ones "pelmeni".
243 - yeah, I'm in Albany Park, near Kimball & Lawrence.
To complicate matters slightly, Russian cuisine has pirog and pirozhki, which are not like pirogies.
240 is entirely correct, but strawberry ice cream sodas also exist.
Bite sized steaks (Idaho) can be much better than implied in the OP. I'm not that confident here in Kamiah, though, and Google seems to think I should eat Mexican.
240: But how do you feel about scotch and milk?
Look, this isn't complicated: there are five kinds of pierogies. Potato, Cheese, Sauerkraut, Onion, and Jalapeño. Sheesh.
More seriously, I think it was alluded to above that Poland is not the only country in the Old World that makes pierogies.
Of course, in Poland the racers are known as Potato Pawel, Cheese Czeslaw, Sauerkraut Szymon, Ondrej Onion, and Jalapeño Jadwiga.
245 roughly aligns with my experience.
For one brief, shining moment, there was a dumplings of the world place Downtown (can't recall the name). I think it was run by Eastern Europeans, but it had pierogies, pelmeni, gyoza, ravioli, pot stickers.... IIRC almost everything was made in house or by a local vendor; maybe there was one exception. Anyway, delicious and my favorite restaurant concept ever, but it didn't last.
253.2: We have a meatball ("pressed meat") place. You choose how many meats, what sauce, what presentation, and they bring it out to you. No tipping. It was delicious, but is this a thing?
(Also, how obvious is it that I'm avoiding going to bed by responding to essentially any comment here?)
I was always told that pelmeni are Siberian and are traditionally filled with meat, or maybe that the Siberian variety are always filled with meat and other varieties might exist but are not traditionally Siberian. I was also always told that varenniki are Ukrainian. They can be filled with all sorts of goodness, savory or sweet. I guess it's the variety that distinguishes them from Polish pierogies.
The spelling bee just trolled Unfogged. I really hope you were all watching!
254: Yeah, meatball places are totally a thing now. Sadly ours, which is associated with a truly excellent restaurant that makes brilliant meatballs as part of a full menu, is pretty much awful. I hadn't even considered that as a possibility going in; it was going to be, is this the best restaurant, or the best restaurant ever? But it turned out to be, How can a professional kitchen fuck up meatballs that completely, and also not get any of the sauces right?
Someone calls them perohi (or something like that), kind of like how kielbasa has at least 3 spelling options.
True story: ~15 years ago, they wanted to do a big, city-wide competition for best kielbasa, with the main event at the street festival of a largely Eastern European-descended neighborhood. But debate about how to spell kielbasa in the title of the contest was so acrimonious that they gave up. They ended up doing (maybe in a subsequent year?) a pierogi competition, but what's really awful is that, after a few years of that, Mrs. T's came in and gave a lot of money to turn it into a recipe contest for dishes using Mrs. T's. In what was probably an unrelated development, the street festival came to an end soon thereafter.
True story: ~15 years ago, they wanted to do a big, city-wide competition for best kielbasa
No way, bullshit. You made up that story about kielbasa.
Mrs. T makes a perfectly acceptable pierogi as far as I can tell.
Somebody explain the spelling bee thing. Please.
266: okay, so it starts with this kielbasa contest, a ways back, right?
And it ends with a home-schooled kid of South Asian ancestry. But in the middle, it trolls unfogged, apparently.
You can tell this was the top level of the Spelling Bee, since it long ago abandoned English and switched to words from foreign languages that no English speaker would recognize.
How long before it starts incorporating other alphabets?
Oh how slightly embarrassing, as I have doubtless had the pelmeni/vareniki conversation with Bave* but it's one of those things that won't stick in my brain no matter how many times I'm told, like what Lean In is about.
For those of you who might find yourselves hungry in Kamiah, Google is right about the Mexican place.
(I'll have lunch at the casino tomorrow -- I'm sure you can hardly wait.)
Ok I am enjoying the second movement of the Berg on youtube now. For some reason Wozzeck has always struck me as accessible 12-tone and other Berg largely does not. Having a really old recording helps though, especially having read the incredible detail that this is from about two weeks after the world premiere. Such luck to have things like this preserved, and on acetates no less, so it doesn't suffer the kind of utilitarian push/pull conducting that happens when you're trying to fit a work onto sides of 78s. Thanks for pointing this out to me.
A youtube comment "That's my grampa playing the violin! Cool. I miss you Grampa. :(" Emoticon notwithstanding, this moves me.
There's a pelmeni place in Anchorage that offers both meat and potato versions (and basically nothing else), both called "pelmeni." The place is relatively new and seems to be struggling a bit, but there's another one in Juneau that has been there for longer and has been fantastically successful, I think mostly by catering to drunk legislators.
276:
That one's not so foreign. On the rss it looked like Tamil, which would have been something.
158 (That said, 140 is right--even limiting things to Louisville, burgoo is practically everywhere. I'm not sure how you missed it.)
No one in my family cooks it, and my family only eats at the sort of chain restaurant that wouldn't have any particularly local menu options. In high school when I started going to other restaurants with friends, they were also mostly either chains or different kinds of foreign food. I am kind of curious to hear examples of restaurants that serve it.
Burgoo! It's everywhere! Check your sock drawer. There's probably burgoo there RIGHT NOW. Or, at least, potential burgoo.
Until this thread, I had barely heard of scrapple and never heard of burgoo. Since I've only skimmed the thread, I'm still not sure what those are or if they exist or if any of you exist or if the world
The first place I ever had pierogies was in Chicago and they had meat in them, so that's what I've always expected of pierogies.
I had also never heard of burgoo until this thread.
Someone calls them perohi (or something like that)
Probably Ukrainians. At some point relatively recently people started paying more attention to Ukrainian transliteration (hence referring to Kyiv, rather than Kiev), and it uses "h" where Russian uses "g". At first it was a little jarring to see people referred to as "Ihor" and "Oleh", but I got used to it pretty quickly.
280, 282: Well, I can tell who hasn't read The Food of a Younger Land!
Famed culinary specialty of whatever region is considered the Kentucky of Ukraine.
when you're trying to fit a work onto sides of 78s.
I got a record of a performances of Ives' second piano sonata. I probably would not have gotten it, though, had I known that side A had movements one and three, and side B had movements two and four.
I'm pretty delighted that one of the winning spelling bee words was "stichomythia."
I am kind of curious to hear examples of restaurants that serve it.
There was a bar in I think Germantown? that was particularly known for it, but I'm blanking on the name. My sense was that many/most bbq places had it, including that inexplicably popular bbq place in the Highlands. On a recent visit I saw it on the menu of this place. I'm sure there are/were others. The DC "Kentucky burgoo stew" I mentioned above was here.
What essear is saying is essear does not believe it would be practical were burgoo to attempt to colonize other restaurants and challenges others to explain why it's even worth considering.
290: that place looks pretty good. I should try to convince my parents to eat there next time I'm in town, but they'd probably spend a whole day grumbling about parking downtown and how expensive the food is.