Outrageous local specialties
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Lithuanian combo platter. Served in Vilnius and Chicago. @Steve-Miller , you can probably find it in Cleveland, too. Lots of Lithuanians there.
Meat filled potato zeppelin (cepelinas), fresh and smoked Lithuanian sausage (Lietuviškos dešros, rūkyta ir švieži), and potato kugel with bacon (kugelis). All served over braised sauerkraut with bacon (troškinti rauginti kopūstai) with a side of sour cream (greitine) and also one of bacon (spirgučiai). The side of bacon is included just ...because bacon.
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Pequod's pizza in Chicago. I think an accidental discovery at first. Deep dish, but cheese spilled on the outside of the crust - when baked it makes an amazing outside crust.
Like Steve discovered, it is a brick of food!
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“Deep fried Twinkies” — served at a British pub.
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@Steve-Miller said in Outrageous local specialties:
What’s hot in your area?
We don’t actually know yet! After living here for a year now. Maybe this should be our summer project, to try local specialities and actually eat at some restaurants!
BTW this thread is making me miss really good brats like the ones I used to get in grad school!
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Philly has cheesesteaks, of course. And Wawa is a cult basically -- it's a convenience store/gas station that also serves food that you can order/customize via a kiosk -- it is good and it's spread from Philly to VA, FL, and soon the midwest (they're building stores in Ohio now).
But perhaps the grossest thing is scrapple:
It's basically what its name implies - all the slaughterhouse leftovers ground up and made into a kind of bologna textured loaf that gets sliced and fried like a sausage patty. I have never eaten it on priciple and I never will, but people say it is absolutely delicious. (Sadly there doesn't seem to be an actual animated vomiting emoji here (unless WTG has it tucked away somewhere) but I did find this!
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“Gross” things are often (considered) quite delicious — you just have to get past the gross. Like haggis..
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I think it would be interesting to expand this thread to non-food weird regional things as well! I grew up in NE PA where cemetery logs are a big thing - they're basicaly floral arrangements or planted annuals that use a hollowed out log as a planter. They're sold to be placed on a gravesite -- there are Christmas themed ones for the winter and annuals filled ones that last all summer. You stick flags in them for the 4th of July, etc. It's a whole thing and its POPULAR....pretty much every grave in the cemetery will sport a fresh summer log by Memorial Day and a winter log around thanksgiving LOL.
I assumed this was a thing that everybody did but I was recently talking to a group of friends about how I worked at a plant nursery for a summer in college and my main duty was planting geraniums and dusty miller into cemetery logs and they looked at me like I had two heads. So apparently cemetery logs are a very specialized regional thing that no one outside the area has ever heard of, LOL! (And even now, googling for images to put in this post, every picture I could find of one came from the website of a floral shop or nursery within 50 miles of where I grew up so apparently the area is REALLY small!)
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Chicago deep dish pizza is AMAZING. We have a place in Detroit that does it well and they offer half-baked pies so sometimes we get one to bring home and cook here. They are awesome! We can get four meals out of a large.
As for local…. Yellow perch and chips is probably what we are best known for. White perch is not the same at all (though it increasingly also offered on menus since yellow perch is getting rarer and therefore more expensive). We also have Windsor style pizza, which is usually topped with pepperoni (shredded rather than sliced rounds), canned mushrooms, and green peppers. The cheese has to be Galati brand, which is a high fat mozzarella produced in Windsor. The crust is medium thickness and usually flour mixed with corn meal. The sauce is slightly sweet and heavy on oregano. I had no idea that Windsor pizza was a thing until I moved to Toronto and the pizza was weird.
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Never heard of a funeral log, interesting.
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I nominate New Orleans po boys. My favorite is the fried oyster po boy. Fully dressed, it comes with lettuce, tomato, and remoulade sauce. and it is to die for. They make similar versions with fried shrimp or fried catfish.
My sister's favorite goes in a different direction--roast beef po boys doused with what fancy folk would call au jus. The really good au jus has "trash" in it, the caramelized stuff that gets scraped off the bottom of the pan.
When I was a kid, I loved barbecue ham po boys. I don't remember if they ordinarily come fully dressed, but I got mine with just slices of ham and barbecue sauce. Salty but amazing.
You could eat outrageous local specialties in New Orleans for a month with all the different gumbos, jambalayas, etoufees, and such.
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@Mary-Anna I had a soft shell crab po boy at a Cajun restaurant here in Chicago. I don't know if it was authentic New Orleans fare but it was delicious!
Wisconsin was a second home to us so I'll put in a vote for a Door County fish boil as an outrageous local dish. Chunks of whitefish, potatoes, and onions boiled in a huge kettle. The boilmaster dumps kerosene on the fire in a ritual known as a "boilover". Served with cole slaw as a side and cherry pie (of course!) for dessert.
History:
Link to videoJust the boilover:
Link to video -
Janet and I went out for lunch today, then went to the farm market for corn, peaches, tomatoes, etc, then to a nearby butcher. They had Cincinnati chili spiced sausages with cheddar. I could not resist. They were delicious!!!
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I was going to mention the Oyster Po Boy, they are special in New Orleans. Mary Anna beat me to it.
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Rainbow Cone, product of the South Side of Chicago.
Orange Sherbet.
Pistachio.
Palmer House.
Strawberry.
Chocolate.
That’s what it looks like, top to bottom. Five layers of ice cream, which could fairly be called slabs. They are not scoops. In a city once known as Hog Butcher to the World, this seems right. It also seems right that Chicago’s most famous ice cream should be built one level at a time like the skyscrapers the city invented. The slender cone below never seems quite up to the task of supporting it all, but it perseveres.
The Palmer House flavor always intrigued me: Venetian vanilla with cherries and walnuts. For a long time, I assumed it was invented, like the chocolate fudge brownie, by the legendary Chicago hotel of the same name. According to Joseph’s granddaughter Lynn, who has run Rainbow Cone since the 1980s, a New York dairy had a vanilla-and-cherries flavor called Palmer. Joseph added walnuts to the ice cream and “House” in honor of the hotel; he and his wife were equally savvy about marketing and making ice cream./
https://www.ourmaninchicago.net/2016/03/rainbow-cone-is-chicagos-original-family-dynasty/
When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
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@Lisa said in Outrageous local specialties:
Philly has cheesesteaks, of course. And Wawa is a cult basically -- it's a convenience store/gas station that also serves food that you can order/customize via a kiosk -- it is good and it's spread from Philly to VA, FL, and soon the midwest (they're building stores in Ohio now).
But perhaps the grossest thing is scrapple:
It's basically what its name implies - all the slaughterhouse leftovers ground up and made into a kind of bologna textured loaf that gets sliced and fried like a sausage patty. I have never eaten it on priciple and I never will, but people say it is absolutely delicious. (Sadly there doesn't seem to be an actual animated vomiting emoji here (unless WTG has it tucked away somewhere) but I did find this!
)I like scrapple, but the meat packer in my area that made an excellent product is no longer in business. I often order scrapple with my breakfast if I'm dining in the eastern PA/NJ area. It's not readily available in western PA. I usually put a little horseradish on as a condiment if it's available.
I Googled goetta and it seems somewhat similar in being made from meat scraps but with an oat grain base rather than the cornmeal that is the primary binder of scapple.
Big Al
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@wtg Does the whitefish hang together through the boiling, or does it end up as more of a stew where the original ingredients blend together?
Sounds delicious, and the communal party of the boiling sounds like a crawfish boil. (Louisiana again.) The crawfish are cooked with sausage, onions, corn on the cob, potatoes, and Old Bay seasoning. (And probably other things I'm not sure about, like beer, cayenne pepper, etc. I don't recall any green solids like bell peppers or celery, though.)
All those things do hang together while cooking, so the traditional way to serve them is to set up tables outside, cover them with newspaper, and then dump the contents of the kettles on the newspaper. People stand or sit around the tables, pick the crawfish out of the shells, and eat the vegetables as side dishes.
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The fish is well-cooked but is still in chunks.
There's usually melted butter served on the side. This despite the fact that whitefish is quite fatty all by itself!
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@wtg said in Outrageous local specialties:
Rainbow Cone, product of the South Side of Chicago.
...
Palmer House.
The Palmer House flavor always intrigued me: Venetian vanilla with cherries and walnuts. For a long time, I assumed it was invented, like the chocolate fudge brownie, by the legendary Chicago hotel of the same name. According to Joseph’s granddaughter Lynn, who has run Rainbow Cone since the 1980s, a New York dairy had a vanilla-and-cherries flavor called Palmer. Joseph added walnuts to the ice crhe eam and “House” in honor of the hotel; he and his wife were equally savvy about marketing and making ice cream.//www.ourmaninchicago.net/2016/03/rainbow-cone-is-chicagos-original-family-dynasty/
Vanilla ice cream with (maraschino) cherries was called "White House" where I grew up. I wonder if the Palmer House name is a mash-up of White House and Palmer somehow?
Big Al
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this place didn’t survive Covid, but prior to 2020 if you were drunk, broke from gambling, out at 3 o’clock in the morning and suffering from a grease deficiency this is what you did.
(it was called the awful awful burger)
