Although I love the Midwest, as I was telling kleinbl00 yesterday, the Midwest is responsible for a litany of heinous food crimes. Food crimes such as...
A deep-fried and breaded grilled-cheese sandwich known as the Cheese Frenchee.
Cubed venison cooked in a deep fryer, which we call chislic.
Ground beef and cabbage wrapped in bread, AKA the Runza.
Chili, eaten using a cinnamon roll as a utensil.
And finally, the self-explanatory hot beef sundae.
What about you? What's a regional meal that horrifies everyone you try to explain it to?
TexMex horrifies anyone that didn't grow up expecting all Mexican recipes to be changed to use Save-A-Lot clearance ingredients.
Speaking as a native New Mexican with enough Texan blood to qualify for Old 300, allow me to say with no qualification that everyone west of you understands Tex-Mex to be what happens when white people encounter flavor and recoil in horror clear to St. Louis.
That explains casseroles in my second comment. But "family recipes handed down for 150 years since we moved north to Texas" tend to taste like Taco Bell with better salsa whenever the family got stuck in a dying railroad town for a generation.white people encounter flavor and recoil in horror clear to St. Louis
Found the problem. Hispanic cultures in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico tend to view themselves as Chicano ex-pats at worst and OG conquistadores at best. Hispanic cultures in Texas recognize the "yer with us or agin us" nature of the predominant white culture. "Remember the Alamo" to Texans is "fight and die for what you think is right. To everyone else it's whites over browns.since we moved north to Texas
Yeah. I don't disagree with you on any if it. Just bugged me because "when white people encounter flavor and recoil in horror" is the broad market appeal change after cultural otherness/isolation caused a bunch of other changes.
It's easier in the rest of the Southwest because the native americans hate the Spanish, the Spanish hate the native Americans, and everyone hates the white people. In New Mexico, none of them have a clear majority. Nobody lived in Arizona until air conditioning so things are tense. In Colorado the hispanics have been there long enough that whatever bullshit they had to sort out got sorted out a hundred years ago. In Texas, though, white people consider themselves the undisputed kings which means you gotta white up any food so that people won't accuse you of going native. I got some real conflicting feelings about Texas. That said, when white people in California interpret Mexican cuisine you get the sense they're at least trying to make something other, rather than just something lesser.
Between my family and in-laws I've had the whole range of TexMex from Abuela saying "now we'll feed you some real Mexican food" to the new white person all the way to white Grandma excited to show off her Mexican casserole to the new Mexican family member. The second is super cringey. The first was still unmistakably TexMex. The main appeal is "this is the way Grandma makes it." By now there's better restaurants and Mexican grocery stores if you want to find them. But why do that when you've memorized the secret family ratio of Velvita and Rotel to make perfect queso. There's also a "Spanish from Santa Fe" branch of the tree -- that mess doesn't translate to Texas' race situation at all but he tried anyway.
My wife's family are from Minnesota/Wisconsin. I can't say that all of Minnesota/Wisconsin fears flavor, but I can say that there are vast strains of Minnesota/Wisconsin that fear flavor. I can also say that in any Mexican restaurant you care to name, you sit down and you are given chips and salsa. In the good ones you are given chips, pico de gallo and salsa. In the really good ones you are given hot, just-made chips, pico de gallo and salsa. In the serious New Mexican restaurants you are given hot, just-made chips, pico de gallo and two different kinds of salsa. Every Mexican restaurant I've been to in Texas starts you off with "queso." "Queso" is takfir. When you wish to offend your enemies back to their ancient dead, serve them "queso." "Queso", more than any other aspect of Tex-Mex cuisine, is the embodiment of effrontery. I believe that Tex-Mex fans and Mexican fans could probably find common ground if it weren't for the fact that Tex-Mex holds at its heart something so essentially sacrilegious that it ends the conversation immediately and succinctly. If you choose to eat "queso" when there are so many better things to do with food, you are an infidel, an unbeliever, and may god have mercy on your soul.But why do that when you've memorized the secret family ratio of Velvita and Rotel to make perfect queso.
"Mexican casserole" is a surprisingly popular "white people TexMex" dish. It is made by taking ingredients for a TexMex enchilada dinner (enchiladas with rice and beans) and then just throwing it all in a casserole dish. The mildest available enchilada sauce is used, probably only a couple tablespoons for a 13x9 pan. If you're unlucky, your host used flour tortillas instead of corn and they all got gluey in the oven. The strangest I've had thankfully hasn't caught on: a tamale casserole meal donated by a white lady to a largely Hispanic student group. It was made by buying enough tamales to fill the foil pans, unwrapping them all, and layering them in with sprinkles of unseasoned cooked ground beef and handfuls of shredded cheese, and heating until the cheese melted. We were pretty confused and just picked out the tamales.
Oof, the old boiled dinner. Blows my mind that this is such a "classic" when it tastes so much better if you just roast the same ingredients. Also Necco wafers. Who thought sidewalk chalk would make good candy??
Well, I love some good corned beef and cabbage, but I always roasted the stuff. Boiled plus a bunch of other D-list vegetables doesn’t sound like a winner to me. Though after having turned my nose up at boiled chicken for the longest time, there’s actually something going on there. I suppose I’d try the corned beef that way.
Surströmming! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming) But for a thing that isn't seen as horrifying by me as well, Kebabpizza(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pizza_varieties_by_country#Sweden).
Holy fuck that wiki page on surströmming is a goldmine.In 1981, a German landlord evicted a tenant without notice after the tenant spread surströmming brine in the apartment building's stairwell. When the landlord was taken to court, the court ruled that the termination was justified when the landlord's party demonstrated their case by opening a can inside the courtroom. The court concluded that it "had convinced itself that the disgusting smell of the fish brine far exceeded the degree that fellow-tenants in the building could be expected to tolerate".
This sounds disgusting! Have you ever tried it? I'm just filled with morbid curiosity right now - Part of me wants to order a can just to see if it's as bad as the internet makes it sound Kebabpizza actually sounds delicious, even if I'm laughing at the name a little bit :)A fermentation process of at least six months gives the fish its characteristic strong smell and somewhat acidic taste. According to a Japanese study, a newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world, even stronger than similarly fermented fish dishes such as the Korean hongeohoe or Japanese kusaya.
I have never eaten it, I can't get over the smell. My family still get together to eat it once a year though, they claim it actually tastes fine. And Kebabpizza is delicious .
The hot brown: Sounds like a euphemism for a filthy act; eating it feels like you're complicit in a filthy act. Digesting it closes the loop.
Oh, I for sure get down on one of these every once in a while. I just hate myself for it.
We Dutch don't really do cuisine - some of the most typically Dutch dishes involve nothing more than mashing together onions, potatoes, and either carrots or kale and calling it a day. The rest we stole from mostly Indonesia, China or Morocco, like the rijsttafel which is something we stole and is now no longer done in Indonesia so it's ours. Most of the original Dutch things are delicious cookies, cakes, sweets and breads. We do have some deep fried abominations such as the nasischijf / bamischijf, which is a deepfried disk of fried rice/noodles. Our new year's eve snack of choice is the oliebol, a deepfried ball of dough usually dotted with raisins. We eat raw herring (matter of fact I just had some today), mussels and smoked eel.
Dutch mayonnaise is generally sweeter than American mayo, IIRC. Especially Zaanse Mayonnaise. Now that I think of it - there’s something worse. I love patatje oorlog, which most definitely is an acquired taste.
So... a Cheese Frenchee looks like a close cousin of the Monte Cristo, an east-coast misinterpretation of the croque monseur. Throughout the '80s and '90s it was impossible to get a Monte Cristo that wasn't deep-fried but nowadays it's basically a batter-dipped grilled-ham-and-cheese sandwich made with french toast that's been grilled and they're fucking delicious. Chislic is Shashlik without the yogurt sauce. Trust me. Tzatziki elevates the shit out of that. I subsisted off of "Runzas" when I was a kid (I stopped eating with my family about age 12). I, too, was ashamed of this. Then I got a subscription to Gourmet Magazine and discovered that when you substitute the velveeta for gruyere it becomes something pompous and french the name of which I forget. Chili and cinnamon rolls is pretty fucked up, tho. That's okay. I spend 5 months a year in the place that perpetrated chicken and waffles on an unsuspecting populace. The pacific northwest, by contrast, really only has jojos, which apparently we can also blame on the midwest.
I think "skins" - as in, potato skins - are a PNW invention. (Specifically, the Rio Cafe.) Scrape the contents out of a potato and make boring white mashed potatoes with them. Take the skin of the potato and lightly oil it, put it on a baking sheet, sprinkle shredded cheese and salt and pepper on it, bake it at 425 until its crispy, put them in a basket, and serve with what nowadays would be called "aioli", and pico de gallo. YOM YOM YOM.
It's possible, sure. But TGI Friday's didn't come up with skins until their Dallas location did it in 1975, and I found a Rio Cafe menu from 1969 that had em. What's more interesting to me, is to HOPE that they weren't just invented around the same time by multiple people (the most likely case), but to think of how information traveled at that time, and how people could have found out and copied a recipe from another restaurant. The Rio Cafe was NOT in a good part of town. 1st Ave in Seattle was nasty at that time... the most porno theaters anywhere in the world, apparently. And some guy from Dallas visits Seattle... and happens to eat at the Rio? Or someone who had eaten at the Rio was a friend of a guy in Dallas and talked about their 'skins' they'd had at the Rio? I'm nostalgic for when information was scarce.
I tried to be open-minded and try as much local cuisine as possible when I was in France last semester... foie gras did not make the list because I can't get over that process. I miss 90% of the rest of French cuisine though!
My god it tastes so good, though. I like to think I've only ever had goose liver foie gras because geese deserve that shit.
Seems...unethical, yeah. Damn. I want to try it, but I'm not especially proud of that. Seems to be banned in California, Australia, India, and large parts of Europe. On one hand, I'm a little horrified by how much it hurts the animals. On the other hand, I don't know if I can honestly say this is worse than a Tyson Foods factory farm? I dunno. Whether I can make a logical case for it or not, I'm skeeved out by gavage
Livermush is even worse than it sounds. Low country boil: You have small quantities of a large number of things that are going to spoil soon. Boil them together, then drown in hot sauce until the results are palatable. Boiled peanuts, on the other hand, are the perfect snack food.