For those of you who grew up in places that have distinctive regional cuisines...

[xiphias]

Some foods are place-bound. There's no reason that a Cincinnati Chili couldn't be made outside of Cincinnati, or that there could be a Garbage Plate somewhere other than Rochester, NY. But they're not. And some are a bit less place-bound, but still place-bound -- try getting Moxie outside of New England. Is there a region somewhere down South where they drink it, too? But not most places.

So, for those of you who grew up with such a cuisine, how old were you when you realized that other places just don't have it?

For me, I was just thinking about Whoopie Pies. And the age that I realized that they're not ubiquitous outside of New England was 40 2/3.

Yeah. Okay, I'm slow sometimes.

Oddly, I think I've got almost all the ingredients I'd need to make them in my kitchen right now. The only thing I'm missing is ... eggs. I've never made them before; it didn't occur to me until half an hour ago when Lis asked me that they were a thing that you actually COULD make. But they don't look all that difficult. It's just basically chocolate cake and buttercream frosting, really.

Well, one of the variations we found includes a buttercream/marshmallow combination frosting. Dunno how that would be.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It took a while to realize that you can't get bagels or pastrami outside of New York...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I have almost never seen a lardy-cake since I left Oxford; it took me embarrassingly long to understand that it was barely known outside a few southern counties. On the other hand, I picked up fairly quickly that it was entirely unknown in the US. I keep promising myself to rectify that deficiency...

(In other news, Cincinnati chili, you say? This was new to me. I have now read Wiki on the subject, and recipes beside. Hmm. My poor friends: I fear they are doomed to my experimentation...)

[gansje.livejournal.com]

I knew about cheesesteaks in their purest form not existing much beyond Philadelphia, South New Jersey and Wilmington, DE, but I was blown away when I went off to my first year of college in NYC in 1987 and no one knew what a Goldenberg's Peanut Chew was. Even through I knew cheesesteaks were a region-bound cuisine, I never quite... got what that really meant until the Peanut Chew incident. D'oh.

I gave a prized package of them to my roommate, who was from Rhode Island, and she called them, to my utter amazement, "disgusting, dehydrated Snickers bars." We're still close friends, somehow.

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Well, this is the moment I learned about Whoopie pies, so 37. ;) To be fair, I also don't eat them, so.

I believe I was in my late 20s when I realized Fluff was a New England thing.

[sproutntad.livejournal.com]

Now I really want a Fluffer-Nutter......

[bercilakslady.livejournal.com]

You can only get bagels in NYC. Montreal bagels are delicious, but different beasts entirely.

You can only get my preferred form of pizza in NYC, though I'll admit there are places that have other things they call pizza.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I learned at the age of five that Vernor's ginger-ale and Cornish pasties were not to be found in Tucson, after my family moved there from Detroit. On the flip side, I discovered marvelous *real* Mexican food long before Taco Bell became a national chain.

[fauxklore]

A friend who grew up in Maine makes pumpkin whoopee pies. I may be attempting them this weekend, but I am thinking of a cream cheese filling, with some ginger liqueur in it.

The things I think of as very regional are mostly completely unavailable anywhere these days. I only know of one place to get pletzel. And nesselrode pie is completely extinct.

[ailbhe]

White Pudding. As distinct from Black Pudding. It's not a part of the English Fried Breakfast at all.

Their loss.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

When I was living in Ottawa in the mid-80s, a roommate introduced me to Liberté yogurt, a high-fat-content spoonful of decadence from Québec, just available near the Québec border. I enjoyed it there again when I lived in Ottawa in the mid-90s, and was thrilled to find that it had migrated a few more hours into Anglophone Ontario when I moved to Kingston. I moved out west in 2008, apprehensive about how it would be different from what I was used to, and Liberté yogurt had made it here before me. (Of course, now they have lots of other products like Greek yogurt, qvark, and kefir, and not so many flavours of the super-rich stuff).

Similarly, I'd never heard of poutine before encountering it on a ski trip outside Québec City in 1984, it was a novelty when I could get it from a chip wagon in Ottawa in 1987, and it didn't become a familiar food across Canada until later that century.

Hmm, what else? The Tim Horton's doughnut chain started in my hometown. I didn't notice when it became ubiquitous (and it's still not very common in Vancouver.)

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Dark chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting is the first thing you get in the Afterlife if you've been really good. Go for it.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

AC Moore and Michaels both carry a Wilton whoopie pan, it's usually on sale for $5, and it will help you immensely with making sure that you get the halves the same size.

[banshee99.livejournal.com]

My mom, originally from Massachusetts, makes whoopie pies often.

AND THEY ARE AMAZING.

[paper-crystals.livejournal.com]

Snickerdoodles, which is kind of funny because my mother never made them, ever. Other mothers always made them and I am not even sure if they are specific to the New England region.

Also, one thing which I have been surprised isn't made more outside of New England is corn chowder. Probably because corn chowder tends to be a things which New England Jews make because they don't eat clam chowder (at least my family did). And most other regions don't have the same concentration of seafood culture, cold and Jews.

[cos]

We lived in Uganda my first year and a half, and some of my few memories from there are taste memories of things I ate. Next 5 years were in Israel. Then we moved to the US. So I've never had this experience of realizing retroactively that some food I've been used to and thought commonplace, was actually specific to my region; by the time I was old enough to have noticed anything of the sort, I'd had three radical cuisine changes. I grew up knowing how dramatically food varies.

The closest parallel that comes to mind for me was my surprise, after we moved to the US (when I was about 7), that there could be meals without bread. For non-babies, that is; I'm sure I had meals without bread as a baby in Uganda but I probably thought that was just babies. Everyone else had bread with every meal.