[Sca-cooks] Regional dishes... OOP

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Robin Carroll-Mann:
>The original goulash is a Hungarian beef
>stew, made with chunks of meat, seasoned with paprika, and not
>containing pasta.  "American Goulash" (sometimes shortened to
>"Goulash") is a dish of macaroni and tomatoes and ground beef.  In
>some parts of the country (such as New Hampshire, where my
>husband was raised) it is called "American Chop Suey").
>
>Gorgeous, being a chefly type, expected Hungarian goulash.

Culinary regionalism can be carried in some interesting ways. If you
read Rodman Philbrick's tear-jerker children's novel, "Freak, the
Mighty", there's a chapter called, IIRC, "American Chop Suey", and
the title character has a near-death run-in, when he chokes on a
forkful of American Chop Suey. In the movie based on the novel,
there's a scene called "Falling Down to Earth", in which the
character played by Kieran Culkin chokes on a mouthful of what are
obviously Chinese dan-dan mein noodles (slightly wiggly, fried,
angel-hair-thin egg noodles, generally fried into a crisp patty which
is the substrate/basis for real Cantonese chow mein) after a
prolonged bout of playing with his food. I thought it was
interesting, watching a dish (or would that be, its name) becoming
somewhat bastardized, and then be accidentally reconverted, perhaps
by some props person who didn't know what American Chop Suey was (I
didn't, until reading the book and I asked somebody), accidentally
providing something closer to the original.

And dan-mein noodles are almost irresistably fun to play with... ;-)

Adamantius

--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER