July 19, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Eric Raymond asks an interesting
Eric Raymond asks an interesting question: why don't the best of regional foods percolate across the country?
In some cases, I think that what one region considers superb may be too much of an acquired taste. For example, having gone to school in Philadelphia, I am aware that the provolone cheesesteak with fried onions, mushrooms, and salt and pepper is one of the finest foods known to man, especially if it is accompanied by an order of cross-cut spicy fries with cheese whiz, and a bite of your companion's Italian Hoagie with mayonnaise and oil and vinegar. Yet some of you are already blanching at the thought, and not just heart surgeons, who are in fact probably enthusiastically figuring me into their plans for early retirement. It has been suggested to me more than once by people who were not fortunate enough spend their college years in the City of Brotherly Love that there may be an age beyond which a taste for such cuisine cannot be successfully acquired, and that this age is the same one which marks the end of a taste for drinking one's own weight in tequila.
And though my mother hails from the midwest, and I was raised on such delights as Jello Molds and Ham Salad, I am pretty confident that a taste for salads composed of three disparate ingredients and enough Miracle Whip to drown one of those small towns that's always getting flooded and rebuilt is not going to catch on outside the Land of the Ladies Aid Potluck. And no one is ever going to like Ambrosia.
Then there are the differences in natural resources. For example, you cannot get a good bagel outside of New York. People who think that they have access to good bagels merely because they happen to have a couple of Jewish professors at the local college who support a bagelry that is one step above the dietary atrocities committed at Einstein Bros. and its ilk, are wrong. If they will come to New York, I will direct them to H&H bagels, with a stern warning that after they eat there, they will never be able to consume one of those round pieces of stale bread that passes for a bagel outside of New York. However, even in places with a large Jewish population that would support some good bagelries, such as LA, the bagels are not as good as New York's. This is not local prejudice; it's the mineral content in the water. For some reason, it's ideal for making bagels.
You can't get San Francisco sourdough bread outside of San Francisco because nowhere else has the humidity, temperature, and barometric conditions to produce ideal San Francisco sourdough bread. You can't have good clam chowder outside New England because clams don't age well, and the kind they get elsewhere aren't right for New England Clam Chowder.
Some things are simply differences in taste. People who were born in New York, and are thus actually allowed to call themselves New Yorkers, know that good pizza has a thick, floppy bottom crust with a nice big hunk of soft crust to grab onto at the wide end. It does not have a thin, crispy crust that tastes like matzoh. It is not eight inches thick and drowned in tomato sauce sweet enough to rot your teeth, either. And it does not have barbequed chicken or arugula on it, thank you very much Mr. Puck. Yet unaccountably, people in other cities continue to do these bizarre things to their pizza, and actually seem to prefer it to the Real Thing. And I have only scratched the surface of the regional variations -- not to mention such unholy national creations such as Dominos, the Pit of Ersatz.
But then there are things you would think would translate. Philly Soft Pretzels. Texas Barbeque. Carolina Barbeque (yes, I swing both ways.). The outstanding pie you can get in every Iowa diner, and nowhere else. Why don't they percolate? I don't know. But I think someone should find out. I wouldn't mind a slice of pie right about now.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 19, 2002 7:39 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>