A spin-off, as requested, from the Over Rated Items from your Regional Cuisine thread.
So what’s your local delicacy that you can’t convince the tourists to try?
I would like to nominate Zuurvlees, a Maastrichtspeciality, traditionally made with horse meat, but now everyone uses beef, It’s a sweat and sour beef dish, that goes great on top of Frieten, In Holland and Brabant they have a similar dish called Stoofvlees****but that tastes like dog food
*(sour meat)
**(city in the south of Holland)
***(French fries, but thicker)
****(simmerd meat)
Pittsburgh’s underrated items are the steak salad, heaped with veggies, a quartered hard cooked egg, sliced steak and french fries. I dress mine with oil and vinegar - just the right complement to the potatoes.
My wife is still creeped out by fries on salad and thinks it is unnatural.
Add to this the Devonshire sandwich - recipe here. This you can get people to try, but it isn’t much known outside of the 'Burgh.
As always, sauerkraut balls.
Oh, and buckeyes.
Connecticut style lobster rolls.
Not that greasy seafood salad in a hot dog bun, but the lobster meat, warm, drizzled with butter in a toasted New England style bun.
No mayo, celery, anything but lobster and butter.
No one realizes how much better our lobster rolls are.
Mr. Moto already hit it for my area.
Cabrito. (baby goat) It has to be milk-fed only, so no more than a month or so old. Once the kid starts to eat other foods, it turns a little gamey. That just sounds weird.
Scumpup, I’ve been hittin’ it for years!
English food. I’ve found so many fantastic things that I enjoy. Lemon curd on crumpets, real black tea, treacle tarts, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes (crispy on the outside and fluffy inside), sticky toffee pudding, black pudding (never thought I would say that!), ale that is not ice cold, thin British pancakes, uniquely flavored pasties (chicken curry, christmas dinner, and many others) and so on and so on.
I really have no idea why people think British cooking is bland or yuck…I can only assume that they haven’t actually tried any, or just weren’t adventurous when they were here.
Oh, yes, my goodness. Now I’m hungry for lobster rolls. shakes fist darn you!
In the last threat, I expressed my ambivalenance with respect to the Kentucky Hot Brown.
In this thread, I will state that I have come to believe that Bourbon is not only the greatest avatar that whiskey might take, it is the single greatest drink–alcoholic or otherwise–known to mankind.
Beer cheese is pretty good, too.
You have pasties which are “christmas dinner” flavored? Why do I have visions of Willy Wonka and giant blueberries all of the sudden?
Christmas dinner pasties are filled with chunks of turkey, chopped sprouts, potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing and onions, all wrapped in delicious pastry. Oh so good, and you can walk around with one stuffed in a fist while it’s hot and steaming, nomming away, while Christmas shopping!
whimper
I think I just died of envy!
Not underrated in the sense that people won’t try them, but underrated in the sense that a lot of people don’t even know about them, since we’re overshadowed by the popularity of deep dish, hot dogs, polish sausages, and Italian beef. Another great Chicago creation is the jibarito sandwich. Think of a cheesesteak, except instead of a bun, you substitute two fried flattened plantain halves, and top it with tomatoes, lettuce, onion, and garlicky mayonnaise. It will eventually kill you, but oh so good. And here’s a more flattering picture of the sandwich.
One more is the standard Chicago barbecue fare of tips/links combo. Quite a few people don’t like rib tips, because of all the bone, but I think they’re better than spares (my choice of cut when I want full ribs) and baby backs (which I generally don’t like that much.) For those who don’t know, tips are the part that gets trimmed away when making a St. Louis cut of spare ribs. In other words, it’s the tip (last two inches or so) of a full spare rib. Hot links, in Chicago parlance, are a pork sausage which basically tastes like a spicy breakfast sausage, and is smoked along with the rest of the barbecued meats. It can be coarsely or finely ground (I prefer coarse ground), and it generally served cut into inch long pieces. They most resemble Mississippi hot links, not Texas style hot links.
Ho. Ly. Crap.
WANT!!!
The only thing I can think of off the top is cheddar on apple pie, and being a flatlander, I haven’t tried it yet either!!
“Local” as in where I live now? Probably Rocky Mountain oysters. Tourists just will – not – try these, but a couple of local restaurants do them quite well. For those who don’t know, Rocky Mountain oysters are cattle testicles, typically taken from bull calves when they’re turned into little steers.
“Local” as in my heritage? Definitely haggis. Wonderful stuff. When I was in Scotland this summer, I had bag haggis, pan haggis, haggis with neeps in a tattie, haggis-stuffed chicken breast, haggis pie… Yum.