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

[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.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

There are candy shops around here that specialize in regional and rare candies, so I have tried a Goldenberg's Peanut Chew once. I found it ... decent. It wasn't my favorite. I mean, it was good, don't get me wrong, but I could tell that I would have liked it a lot more if I'd grown up with it.