You mother’s grandmother was not at the table.
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That’s what my mom used to make. She topped if with green pepper slices and ground beef. She later switched to sliced hot dogs since it was quicker than cooking beef.
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I went to a pizza place in Mexico once where the “sausage and mushroom” pizza we ordered had Vienna sausages and mushrooms out of a can that tasted like they’d been put on after cooking. I have no idea how representative that place was of the pizza quality throughout the Yucatán but it was one of the only times in my life I couldn’t bring myself to finish a slice.
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It’s funny how this happens and how it’s sped up in recent years. I remember having sushi for the first time in like 1999. Now it’s about as common as Chinese takeout or pizza. These days it’s like every time I find out about an uncommon international food it starts appearing everywhere. There’s Poke takeout shops everywhere. Arepas and Pho are all over the place. I just saw an ad from McCormick for making cacio e pepe and there’s cacio e pepe jarred sauce at Trader Joe’s when just a few years ago I feel like I saw Anthony Bordain talking about having this amazing dish at a secret restaurant whose address he refused to divulge in Rome for fear tourists would ruin it.
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Exactly. Just like Boston is not in New England because it has Irish people.
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Someone will have to explain to me the difference between the Midwestern United States and Midwest. Is it just the most populous city that gets left out?
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Not just. New Bedford, MA is not in New England because a lot of Portuguese live there.
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The point is it is culturally different from most places in the Midwest due to its size and cosmopolitan nature and resembles culturally more closely East Coast cities rather than the smaller towns and cities found in the Midwest. For those on the East Coast you might compare the vast cultural difference between NYC and upstate NY.
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Exactly. Which is why New York City is not in New York State.
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My Sicilian grandfather was the sauce boss of the family. And he was not a tolerant guy.
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Yes. Meet someone from upstate NY and they’ll make it clear to you that they aren’t from NYC and are angry that outsiders think NYC is representative of the state as a whole (and there’s the opposite where NYC people think their city is the whole world as in the famous New Yorker cover, but I think that’s more of a cliche than the inverse).
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Some neighborhoods in Chicago are not in Chicago because they’re different.
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There was a time when even Italians felt that way about pizza.
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Gyro & shawarma are easy to find in any large town in most of Ontario. My ~70k pop central Ontario town has at least a dozen options as well as “Pita Pit”. Falafel, too.
What’s rare is the Donair. Think gyro with cheddar cheese (optional), onions, tomatoes (optional) and the most incredibly addictive sweet sauce instead of garlic-centric. Basically condensed milk + sugar + vinegar (maybe). Perfect sauce for the spicy vertical spit-roasted beef (instead of the lamb, beef or chicken of a gyro).
Sadly mostly limited to the East Coast. And Alberta for some odd reason. A chain called Greco Donair tried a push into Ontario ~20 years ago, maybe a dozen stores, all gone within 5 years. Ontario-folk just didn’t get donairs. I tried, too. Weekly lunch trip for the year our local outpost survived.
When I was in the army, a Greco Donair was on the way home from the local beer parlour. Perfect for a late night alcohol absorber. I order the usual 2 regular with onions, cheese, extra sauce. To go. In a foil wrap, in a paper bag, one in each coat pocket.Left, right, left, right, stumble the 10 minutes back to barracks, pass out face first on bed. Coat still on. Wake up next morning. Hungry but don’t wanna shower & etc. to be presentable for mess hall. But hey! What’s this? Slightly warm donairs!
I only ate one of them. Then. The other went in the fridge for late night snack.
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Once upon a time everything west of the Eastern Divide was just “The West”
After “The West” was redefined to mean west of the Mississippi they needed a term for the area around the Great Lakes
but since then they’ve changed everything again
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This is usually less true than people think too. Like tomatoes and related dishes/sauces are considered quintessentially Italian (and/or Sicilian). However tomatoes are a New World fruit, only brought to Italy pretty recently. Sure, that’s still older than most American food, but no culture is as ancient and consistent as people like to think.
This applies in other areas as well- like people constantly refer to acupuncture as an ancient Chinese practice. It isn’t. It was invented basically from whole cloth by Mao as part of the Barefoot Doctor program to bring fake medicine to rural areas. They couldn’t afford real medicine in the countryside, so they literally made some up as a “bread and circuses” kind of policy. It’s very loosely based on an older Chinese bloodletting practice involving gruesome needles, but it is not at all an ancient Chinese tradition.
European countries are also not neat little islands of well defined culture like Americans like to think of them. All sorts of messy cross-pollination happens all the time. Every country pretty much has a version of every food. Everyone has some version of “stuff on flatbread”, for example. Or go to any border town and you’ll find most people speak the language and eat the food of the people on the other side of the line. Borders on maps are super arbitrary when it comes to culture. Culture is a gradient that blends and cross-fades from one place to another. The lines we draw around those gradients don’t mean a whole lot, culturallly.
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True. You can always tell an American trying to pass.
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McKenzie, eh?
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