What outsiders know that locals don’t

[Baggy]

When travelling, food is always a great conversation piece when meeting people for the first time. Everyone has an opinion and it keeps pushing on my own knowledge about food and its origins.

Having just got back from France, I was stunned to discover two new things. First, several well-heeled restaurant goers who have never heard of molecular gastronomy. Second, no one knew anything about the flour used in bread.

Maybe my surprise got the better of me, but it got me thinking about what is not known in England but would be common knowledge elsewhere. I came up with two examples.

In England, most people can’t tell the difference between certain cuts of meat. Many professional publications (and master butchers) incorrectly identify onglet (butcher’s steak or hanger steak) as a cut from either the skirt or blade, whereas it’s actually part of the diaphragm, which is why in France it’s counted as offal.

Another example, butchers can’t seem to deliver a Porterhouse steak which has a big piece of fillet in the cut, unlike a straight T-bone where there the cut includes only the smaller tail of the fillet. This is well-known in the US but, apparently not in England.

I’m sure there are lots more examples from different countries/regions.

[sazji]

I don't know if this counts, but when I was up in the mountains in the Black Sea a few years ago, I saw porcini (boletus) mushrooms everywhere. Huge, firm, perfect porcini. I asked the folks in the villages if they used them. They said, "No, we're afraid of those." They eat other mushrooms, most of which are considered mediocre in some areas, but nobody eats the boletes. I told them they were very highly valued in the west, especially in Italy. One man said, "Yeah, now that you mention it, a few years back some Italians came up here and filled the back of a truck with them..." He couln't believe that they probably made a couple thousand dollars from that truckload. The problem is that it's very difficult for the people up there to dry and preserve them in the mountain villages, because they live right at cloud level.

[srhcb]

In a similar vein, I think people tend to take their own local ingredients and dishes for granted, and are often surprised, or even baffled, when outsiders make a big deal out of them.

An example from my locale, Northern Minnesota, would be venison and wild rice. In upscale restaurants anywhere these would be considered fairly exotic, and priced accordingly.

On the other hand, my friend Big Lou, an Ojibway band member, grew up eating venison and wild rice. As recently as the generations of his parents and grandparents, these items had actually been the primary means of sustenance.

Lou and his children now enjoy wild game and other native products to honor tradition, but I know his grandkids would rather eat a burger and fries.

SB (Kind of like the food version of "A prophet without Honor"?)

[K8memphis]

Even though I've been in Tennessee for decades, I'm a Yankee. I've only really known Memphis barbeque. We serve it with cole slaw. I mean like a hamburger comes with pickles ketchup and mustard we automatically serve barbeque with coleslaw wherever you purchase it. I once met a lady who just moved here from Florida and she was demoralized to A) Find cole slaw on her sandwich and B)have to ask to 86 it. Clearly Florida is not a barbeque capital but still...And then again it might not a just been the cole slaw that was demoralizing about my fair city...

Doesn't everybody serve slaw on their barbeque sandwich???

[jbh]

> Doesn't everybody serve slaw on their barbeque sandwich???

I've encountered slaw on Que in only one BBQ joint in Florida, and the operators of that place hailed from North Carolina.

While I was a little surprised at first, the slaw was a great contrast to the NC-style thin peppery sauce.

Since then I've surprised many Que-joint operators by dumping my slaw on my sandwich, I suppose because more often than not the barbecued pork itself has been mediocre.

[Kent D]

Even though I've been in Tennessee for decades, I'm a Yankee. I've only really known Memphis barbeque. We serve it with cole slaw. I mean like a hamburger comes with pickles ketchup and mustard we automatically serve barbeque with coleslaw wherever you purchase it. I once met a lady who just moved here from Florida and she was demoralized to A) Find cole slaw on her sandwich and B)have to ask to 86 it. Clearly Florida is not a barbeque capital but still...And then again it might not a just been the cole slaw that was demoralizing about my fair city...

Doesn't everybody serve slaw on their barbeque sandwich???

←

I encountered slaw on pork barbecue while in Little Rock (pretty close to Memphis), and while I was momentarily put off, I managed to eat the whole sandwich, messy though it was. And now, when I serve pork barbecue sandwiches, I offer a form of slaw on the side and tell everyone "That's the way you're supposed to eat it!".

[phaelon56]

Doesn't everybody serve slaw on their barbeque sandwich???

←

Where I live (central NY state) that sandwich is called a "Pork Carolina" - the assumption around here being that it's a popular serving style somewhere in the Carolina's.

[Paul Tepper]

Chiles!!!

Ask folks from India, Pakistan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand about the origin of chiles.

[faine]

It's definitely the Carolina style, at least in my experience. My dad is from Mt. Airy, which is about an hour or so from Winston-Salem and nearish Lexington, and slaw comes on all the sandwiches I've had up there. (Or even better, barbeque sauce infused slaw.) That's how we do our barbeque at home...lots of pepper sauce and lots of slaw.

[Rehovot]

I’m sure there are lots more examples from different countries/regions.

←

Homemade guacamole has yet to catch on in the Czech Republic, which explains why avocados are routinely around thirty cents apiece in the supermarkets. I've made more guacamole in the last six months than I ever did, living in the Southwest.

[MaxH]

... got me thinking about what is not known in England but would be common knowledge elsewhere.  ... In England ... butchers can’t seem to deliver a Porterhouse steak which has a big piece of fillet in the cut, unlike a straight T-bone where there the cut includes only the smaller tail of the fillet.  This is well-known in the US but, apparently not in England.

I believe that's about liguistics, not local knowledge: Different definitions of "Porterhouse" in US and UK as I strongly remember. Larger in US (I don't mean thickness.) Maybe someone here can point to a good reference.

There'a niche genre of words (more clear-cut even than that example) where the same word is in both cultures (or even sometimes, in North American English vs. most other English) but understood differently. And used in similar sentences so people don't spot a difference. When a British writer caused a villain character circa 1960 to talk about "discussing the price of corn," US readers may have missed that UK uses the word for grain in general while the author might even have missed that what much of the planet calls "maize" in English is called "corn" in US. Later the same character more explicitly points out different traditional meanings of "billion" (10 to the 9th power in US, 10 to the 12th power in UK, whence pointed use of unambiguous "thousand million"). Though the "billion" issue has been fading now for a generation or two, I hear.

[MaxH]

I remembered the strongest case of "What outsiders know that locals don't" that I know of in the US. Thread here on "Bad Name for a Donut" triggered it.

The common French food word beignet (fritter), found in any cookbook from France (sometimes with dozens of recipes), evolved to an altered meaning in Louisiana, where it routinely is solid, nothing inside. No meat, fruit, jam, shellfish. (This is very non-French: nearest traditional French recipes to a New Orleans "beignet" aren't even much like the version made there. Julia Child even pointed that out.) It routinely causes a surprise to French-speaking foreign visitors to Louisiana. What that region labels a "beignet" is what older US recipes call a donut or dough-nut (ironically described by a famous early US cookbook as a "yankee" specialty) because the annulus or ring shape wasn't common until later.

The peculiar New Orleans regional meaning of beignet (the pastries themselves are common there) is even spreading in the US, becoming fashionable, among people unaware what it is in the larger French-speaking world. Like those words mentioned above with unconsciously different meanings in US vs. UK English.

(Ihave a stack of early original sources on this and can post more details not easily available. Other old names too for the nut-shaped original "dough-nut" survived beyond the annular shape but are not much used now.) How 'bout that for foodword trivia?