Posted on 04/22/2014 7:05:03 AM PDT by Scoutmaster
What are the United States' best regional foodstuffs? Its worst? [W]e have ranked them. Rigorously scientific (not), ardently researched (nope), and scrupulously fair (not even a little bit): this is the Great American Menu!
"Man is mortal. He frolics upon the grass of life for but a short season, and then is snatched back to the inanimate dirt of his origin. The Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, America's greatest regional foodstuff—all those toppings, so much cheese and meat, I can hear my heartbeat, this can't be right, it sounds like a chainsaw, can that be right?—will greatly hasten that day's arrival, but it will also fill at least a little part of at least one of those days with a transcendent, mind-boggling, outrageously indulgent sensory experience. This is the best thing any food can do, and certainly far beyond the capabilities of [stares daggers at New York] a sheet of soggy cardboard with a flap of waxy melted cheese stretched across it."
2. Shrimp and grits (South Carolina)
3. Mission-style burrito (California)
4. Crab cake (Maryland)
5. Peach pie/cobbler (Georgia)
6. Gumbo (Louisiana)
7. Key lime pie (Florida)
"But what about the Cuban sandwich?!?!?!?! First of all, there's some controversy about the Cuban sandwich's origins: Either it is from Cuba, in which case it is Cuba's sandwich and not Florida's, or it is from Tampa, in which case it is not a Cuban sandwich and has a dumb name, in which case it [stinks] because things from Tampa [stink] because Tampa [stinks]. In any case it is not as definitively Floridian as Key lime pie, which originated in Florida and is made with ingredients—Key limes—that are native to Florida and nowhere else."
8. Fried green tomatoes (Alabama)
10. Marionberry pie (Oregon)"The 'Marion' cultivar (Rubus L. subgenus Rubus) or Marion blackberry, marketed as marionberry, is an indigenous blackberry developed by the USDA ARS breeding program in cooperation with Oregon State University. It is a cross between the 'Chehalem' and 'Olallie' blackberries. The marionberry is currently the most common blackberry cultivar, accounting for over half of all blackberries produced in Oregon. Source."
11. Hot wieners (Rhode Island)
12. Burgoo (Kentucky)
"Kentucky's signature food, a whatever-you-got stew that never tastes the same twice, gets a million imaginary bonus points for its wonderful communal nature: People just bring whatever ingredients they can, and everybody puts what they've got into the stew, and out comes burgoo, and that is just . . . beautiful, even though in reality probably 78 percent of its ingredients were scraped off I-64 with a snow shovel."
13. Pulled pork barbecue (North Carolina)
"Pulled pork is more reliably tasty than burgoo—that is to say, there's virtually zero chance of it containing a fistful of raccoon fur—but a lot less wonderful. Science."
14. New England clam chowder (Massachusetts)>
T-15. Kansas City-style ribs (Missouri)
T-15. Memphis-style ribs (Tennessee)
"For real, they're the same [thing]. But hey, let's fight about it!"
17. West Virginia slaw dog (West Virginia)
"This is a hot dog with a chili-like meat sauce, mustard, and coleslaw on it. (Sometimes it has chopped onions on it, too.) Which, yeah, you can get variations of that pretty much anywhere, but West Virginians are serious about the coleslaw part. It's tasty."
18. Chimichanga (Arizona)
19. Frozen custard (Delaware)"Suggested advertising language for your frozen custard shop: Frozen custard! It's just like ice cream, only not particularly significantly unlike it, and only preferable if you grew up with it!"
20. Texas-style barbecue brisket (Texas)
"Beyond the smoky tastiness of all barbecue, the virtues of the Texas-style barbecue brisket are as follows: It is very large. The end."
21. Fried okra (Oklahoma)
22. New York-style pizza (New York)
"By rough estimate, there are 900 trillion pizza joints per person in New York City. Somehow, within this competitive environment, not a one of the purveyors of "New York Pizza" has yet considered the wild and crazy idea of maybe trying to do something—anything!—interesting with its pizza. Here is a comically large, thin wedge of dough with some indifferent, rubbery cheese smeared across it, and maybe a few greasy F-grade variants of the same . . . toppings you can get on your lousy DiGiorno back in . . .Topeka. Oooh, it's so New Yorky! In that it is overpriced and happy to coast along on a long-since-hollowed-out myth of Big Apple authenticity, just like everything else in this giant, bad-smelling amusement park for rich white people! New York pizza isn't even a genuine pizza genre. It's just lousy . . . pizza. Papa John's with a chip on its shoulder."
23. Hot Hawaiian breakfast (Hawaii)"This is Spam, eggs, and rice. Tastes like authentic cargo cult!"
24. Lobster roll (Maine)
25. Bull testicles (Montana)
26. Fried catfish (Arkansas)
27. Maple syrup (Vermont)
28. Scrapple (Pennsylvania)
"[But the Philly cheesesteak!] Shut it. The famous grease-and-garbage sandwich belongs to the city of Philadelphia, which A) is the worst place on Earth, and B) doesn't come close to representing the entire state of Pennsylvania. In a given day, 500 times as many Pennsylvanians are scraping possums off the motorway to add volume to their scrapple as are standing in line with the tourists [to have a Philly cheesesteak].
29. Corndog (Iowa)
30. Cedar-plank salmon (Washington)
31. Cowboy cookies (Colorado)
"The cowboy cookie is a chocolate-chip cookie to which someone wisely added rolled oats and shredded coconut, and to which someone else very stupidly added chopped pecans . . .. Neither pecans nor coconuts nor oats come from Colorado. Nor does chocolate. Nor do cowboys, really. You know what does come from Colorado? Confused looks and shrugged shoulders when you ask people what their state's signature foodstuff is. This is because, at any given time, 102 percent of the people in Colorado are vacationing Californians in bubble-vests and hiking boots."
32. Mud pie (Mississippi)
"This is essentially a pile of brownie dough floating in a gallon of chocolate syrup. It is delicious. Let's take this moment to remember that Mississippi leads the nation in adult diabetes."
33. Bratwurst (Wisconsin)
34. Virginia ham (Virginia)
36. Half-smoke (District of Columbia)
"For those not familiar with the culture of our nation's capital, the half-smoke is a hot dog. Yes, it is. Sometimes it can be half beef and half pork; sometimes it can be smoked. Most often it is a steamed beef frank with some very lousy chili slopped over it."
37. Chicken-fried steak (Wyoming)
38. Finger steaks (Idaho)
39. Hamburger casserole (Kansas)
40. Hotdish (Minnesota)
41. Michigan pasty (Michigan)
42. Chislic (South Dakota)
"Picture a kebab. Can you picture a kebab? Meat, veggies, skewer, maybe some cucumber dressing and tasty pita bread or naan on the side? Fresh and flavorful and varied and exciting? Got it? OK. Now, eradicate that appetizing image from your mind, and replace it with a bunch of small cubes of greasy, chewy beef on toothpicks, sitting on a sad plate next to some plastic-wrapped packets of saltines. Congratulations. You have now pictured chislic."
43. Green Jell-O with *&%#!@*# carrots in it (Utah)
44. Lutefisk (North Dakota)
45. Salt water taffy (New Jersey)
46. Handheld meat pies (Nebraska)
"These are homemade Hot Pockets. They are homemade Hot Pockets, and they are what pass for regional culture in Nebraska."
47. Akutaq (Alaska)
"Alaska's putrid mixture of whipped fat (usually vegetable shortening; traditionally blubber) and berries."
48. Boiled dinner (New Hampshire)
49. Not having any authentic local culture to speak of (Nevada)
50. A *&%#!@*# steamed *&%#!@*# cheeseburger (Connecticut)
The source for this Tuesday List is Deadspin: The Great American Menu: Foods Of The States, Ranked And Mapped. Deadspin and its related sites frequently contain interesting articles, but some language of writers and commenters, and the topics of some articles on related sites, are often NSFW or simply not recommended for a significant percentage of FReepers. However, Deadspin is one of many excellent sources of lists and a unique source of out-of-the-ordinary sports news.
Where Deadspin comments have been used, many have been edited.
Which is portugese bread, but beats spam
My wife was born and raised in Red Hampshire, and she has never heard of poutine...so I looked it up. Damn...that looks like Osama bin Laden’s innards after that rock fell on him back circa 2001-2002.
I shall pray for you.
You're a better man than I am.
The story gets South Dakota’s signature dish totally wrong. Chislic is traditionally made from lamb or better still mutton...and old ewe preferred. Old timers used to use at least some sheep tallow in the deep fat frying oil, but most now use peanut oil. Chewy...yes, but tasty and best washed down with cold beer. Recently some have cooked their chislic on a BBQ grill or even use beef or venison...poor substitutes for the real thing. Note chislic is largely an eastern South Dakota thing. Once you cross the Missouri river, local ranchers would not be too happy to see beef cooked that way.
I just can’t beleive that Lobster Roll only barely beat Bull’s Testicles.
I saw that, hilarious! Reminds me of the Red Sox bullpen during the early 1980s.
Although I do like dungeness crab, it doesn't have nearly the flavor of a good blue crab. And I'm not talking blue crab from Florida or somewhere in Asia. I'll take Chesapeake (or even better, Choptank River) blue over any other food any day. But again, you gotta go to the right place......or do it yourself.
Bear in mind, it will be compared to my granddad's Texas chili and some New Mexico green chile from a hole-in-the-wall place I can't tell you how to find. If you put me in a rental van at the Albuquerque airport and let me drive toward Cimarron, I can find it for you on the way every time.
West Virginia’s food should be Pepperoni Rolls not Hot Dogs.
I should have read the comments before posting. My first thought was pepperoni rolls too.
Christmas! That is some of both for you non-New Mexicans.
I really thought the Green Chile Cheeseburger would be the signature food of New Mexico. That, or an Allsups burrito (burp).
I had Eritrean food at a restaurant in San Jose once. Wow. One of the best meals I’ve ever had.
Have you tried Cambodian?
For the record, that was in the second game of a double-header on Thursday, April 17, 2014. Eight walks in one inning was the most ever for a Twins team.
Taylor Ham, egg and cheese on a hard roll with salt, pepper and ketchup is the NJ state breakfast. Awesome!
Mississippi mud is a pie I think
Been there several times and the Los Banos restaurant is even better. Bakersfield is eally expensive now.
You haven’t had any either??? LOL
I have an old Bell’s Best cookbook from the mid 80s. It is falling apart. It has recipes of pound cakes and all kinds of things that my mother and all the church ladies and neighbors made all my growing up years. There are three Mississippi Mud cake recipes in it. No pies. No brownies. I have never made any of them nor did my mother. I was always a fan of Coca Cola cake though. Whew. That stuff will kill ya. :-)
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