Ok, I guess I’m an idiot because I thought lox usually wasn’t smoked, just cured, although sometimes it’s smoked. I could swear the very few times I’ve had something called “lox” it was not smoked or so slightly smoked that I didn’t notice it. And yea, I know gravdlax in the Scandinavian sense, but I’m wondering about “lox” in general English. This is something I have no business not knowing as I’ve been to Jewish and non Jewish delis and had the bagel and lox, but I’m confused now.
I was travelling with my parents in somewhat out there rural Louisiana after a few days in New Orleans. We stopped at a restaurant and my dad got a sampler platter or whatever it was called. The waitress came by after out food was delivered to make sure everything was ok and Dad asked what this amazing food in a bowl was. The waitress replied," …well, that’s jambalaya." He then had a lick from another bowl, declared it excellent and asked what it could be. The waitress looked around, certain she had to be on hidden camera. “Umm, that is gumbo.” Both were pretty obvious, even to Dad in retrospect, but the rest of us had a good laugh. Like, pick two foods known in NOLA.
My debris beef po boy was amazing.
I knew what lox was, from only one single source, encountered before my 30s. That was an Encyclopedia Brown book I read as a kid. I had to ask my parents what it was. Then I didn’t see the product, or even the word again for 25 years +.
Folks who live in the tiny fraction of the USA where Jewish people and cuisine are a visible minority really do not understand just how invisible Jewish folks and their cuisine are (or at least were) in the other 90% (95%?) of the USA.
As a kid growing up in Los Angeles I knew about the existence of Jewish folks in America. Imagine my surprise when it turned out several of my childhood friends were Jewish. They & their families & habits seemed indistinguishable from the white folks of whatever other ethnicities and religions up and down the street.
As to lox, I was probably 20 when I first actually saw it on a menu. I knew it was sliced salmon prepared somehow, but beyond that it was a mystery.
I grew up on the westside of Los Angeles, and all our neighbors save one family were Jewish. My high school was 60% Jewish when I attended, and all my friends were Jewish (one was half-Jewish but raised Presbyterian). And there was a local deli, Roll-n-Rye, we went to a lot. Loved their pastrami burgers. So, yeah, I’ve always know what lox is and loved it.
Ditto for the grocery stores around here. I mean, they’re tasty – especially the jalapeno/cheese ones – but bagels they ain’t.
Los Angeles has the second largest Jewish population in the US after NYC. One of my girlfriends in the Bay Area was raised in North Hollywood, a Jewish enclave, and one Sunday we were going to have an al fresco lunch in a park. We picked up the wine and bread (sourdough, naturally) then went for the cold cuts and cheese. After picking the latter she started walking off. “Where are you going?”
“For the cold cuts.”
“They’re right here,” pointing to the next case over.
“Oh. I’m used to them being in an entirely different case.”
It’s cold-smoked, not hot-smoked, so it’s moist. And it’s not smoked super intensely.
LA proper, sure. Orange County? Not so much. My point was more that they were largely invisible outside of certain dense enclaves, not that they were largely absent in toto.
Oh, yeah, I meant Los Angeles city. Even in the county as a whole they get pretty well diluted. And as for Orange county, I went to high school there and there were no visibly Jewish kids in the school of 1,500.
I mean there were undoubtedly some but they sure weren’t Hasidic.
'Zactly.
that was in the one that had food-related cases and was sort of a cookbook…i remember because they solved the case because lox is so salty so all they did was watch the water fountain for someone unusually thirsty
Yes, I’ve had some where I could barely distinguish the faint smokiness over the fishiness of the salmon.
Some lox is very salty. Other lox isn’t. I much prefer the less salty version.
I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and absolutely loved all the Jewish cuisine. I remember being in a deli where there were multiple types of lox, hearing a guy freak out, “NO!!! THE NOVA!!!”
Asked for pipe cleaners. Got offered drain cleaner.
As @doreen says, AAA clubs across the country are individually operated. I think it is on a state by state basis. I was not aware of this until fairly recently. I mean, the “A” stands for American, which to me implies some sort of centralized control for the purposes of membership, pricing, offerings, etc.
In WA, the annual fee was not cheap, but I found a way to afford it, something like ~$90 for (IIRC) myself and spouse. Moving to Indiana, the price was going to be a lot higher, maybe 50%, and I wasn’t ready to pay that. Asking why, they said the club in Indiana was much smaller and therefore had to charge more for membership. So I canceled. But somehow they continue to send me the local version of the AAA magazine, and have done so for 6 years so far.
Kinda close, just the wrong kind of pipe :).
I think ‘English as a second language’ had something to do with it.
I would have thought the AAA clubs were organized on a state-by-state basis but it’s weirder than that. Wikipedia has a list of the regional clubs, and which areas they represent. The part of Connecticut where I grew up, for instance, is represented by a AAA club out of Rhode Island, and also represents parts of New York and New Jersey.