Pennsylvania and Delaware

The first two states to join the Union, and the last two states in our cooking project!   There are a number of foods associated with Pennsylvania, but my husband is from Philadelphia, and that means just one thing:  Philly Cheesesteak.   Always good if you get decent shaved beef.   A cheesesteak is shaved beef on a sub roll with melted provolone or American cheese on top.   We went for the provolone.   Onions and peppers are frequent additions, and we added both.

When we started the project, we started in backwards order because we had no idea what to make for Delaware.   Even queries of people who had lived in Delaware came up empty.  We got better at our research  though, because it turned out that Delaware was actually very easy!   To our surprise, we discovered that one of their state symbols is peach pie.  Yum!

So steak sandwiches and peach pie concluded our project.   We had a great time doing all of the research and cooking, discovered some interesting foods, and ate a lot of really good meals! 

Georgia and New Jersey

Ok, when you think of Georgia, can you think of anything else besides peaches?!   Luckily, it is the right time of year to get good peaches here in Massachussetts.   We made a peach torte for dessert using the basic fruit torte recipe from "Elegant But Easy."   This is a great recipe;however, you must use real butter, and have a heavy hand on the sugar and cinnamon for the topping.  

I lived in New Jersey for awhile, and I always think of good red sauce Italian food for that state.   But I couldn't come up with a specific red sauce dish that was really local to NJ.   Instead, I came across a number of discussions about Italian hot dogs, which are a favorite dish there.   Descriptions of the hot dogs said that they are served in a "pizza bread roll" with fried onions, peppers, and potatoes. 

The big question was, what is a pizza bread roll?   I couldn't find any recipes on the internet, but I did find various descriptions saying that they were "sort of a fat pita".  That description, plus the name, leads me to think that they are rolls made out of pizza dough.   So that's what we made - rolls from pizza dough, filled with a hot dog, onions, peppers, and potatoes.  We cheated an made oven fried potatoes instead of deep fried, but they worked well.  I thought it would be strange to have potatoes on a sandwich, but I really liked it!

Massachusetts and Connecticut

Massachusetts is easy, because that's where we live.   We made brown bread and baked beans for our meal.   The catch on making the brown bread is that it should be steamed, not baked.   This was traditionally done in a large tin can such as a coffee can.  But who has coffee can's these days?!   The coffee we buy comes in cardboard cans.


I almost gave up and decided to bake the bread, but then I noticed that it can be done in a slow cooker.  Voila!  We put the bread batter into a casserole dish, covered it with a lid, and put it in the slow cooker surrounded with water.   Worked like a charm.

We did cheat on the baked beans since we were pressed for time and don't have a pressure cooker.   Rather than starting from scratch, I used my mom's old recipe for doctoring canned baked beans.   First you drain the beans, then cook them with onion, green pepper, bacon, ketchup, mustard and brown sugar.

Connecticut was a fun find.   There is a cake called "Election Day cake" or "Hartford Election cake" that originated in Hartford back when women did not yet vote.   It is a yeast coffee cake, not too sweet, with fruit and nuts in it.  We used golden raisins because we had dark raisins in the brown bread.  The cake is usually made in a tube pan, but we made a half recipe in a loaf pan instead.

An amusing point to this meal is that our bread had leavening normally used for cake (baking soda) and our cake had leavening normally used for bread (yeast)!

South Carolina and Maryland

I'm from Maryland, so this was an easy decision.   Crab, crab, crab!   Definitely my strongest food association with that state.   We made Maryland crab cakes as an appetizer for our meal.

We didn't want to do any of the basic Southern cooking (much of which we've already done for other states) for South Carolina.   Fortunately, we were able to find something fairly unique to that state.  I say fairly unique because it's also done in Georgia, but that seems to be it.   We prepared a low country boil for dinner.   This is one of those dishes traditionally done outside in an enormous pot for a big crowd.   We were too busy to deal with a big crowd, but we did at least make ours outside on the camp stove :-).

A low country boil is traditionally shrimp (shell on), corn, new potatoes, kielbasa, and sometimes crab, boiled in a big pot with some Old Bay seasoning.   We skipped the crab since we were making crab cakes at the same time.  Also, regretfully, we couldn't find any real Old Bay seasoning and had to go with Penzey's Chesapeake Bay seasoning instead.  Being from Maryland, I didn't think it was a good substitute - it was too clove-y and not spicy enough.  If we ever make this again, I'll definitely try hard to find real Old Bay.   Anyway, the low country boild was easy to prepare, and kind of fun.   You're supposed to eat it by dumping it onto a table covered with newspaper and then just roll the paper up at the end.  We compromised and used plates for the corn, kielbasa & potatoes :-).

For dessert, we had a magnificent find!  A Huguenot torte is an interesting cross between a pecan pie with apples, and meringue.  The top comes out like a thin layer of meringue, and the inside is an apple-pecan pie like mixture.  It's a really interesting recipe, and I'm surprised that it isn't more popular.  It's easy to make and really good.   I definitely recommend giving it a try!  We used the recipe at http://dining.discoversouthcarolina.com/recipes/recipe-details.aspx?recipe=7

Virginia and New Hampshire

Virginia is known for good food, but much of it is generically Southern and not specific to Virginia.  We already made ham biscuits for Tennessee so a Virginia ham wasn't our first choice.   We ended up making Brunswick Stew, which Virginians claim was invented in Brunswick County, VA.   Georgians claim it comes from Brunswick, GA, but at least for our state cooking project, we're going with the VA story :-).

There are many, many variations of Brunswick Stew.   Traditionalists claim that it was originally made with squirrel meat.   We like our squirrels though (and would probably get in trouble for killing them), so we went with the modern day common approach for Virginia, which means we made it with chicken.  Other than meat, the stew generally has lima beans, corn, tomatoes, and frequently okra.   Our recipe also added ham.   We did leave out the okra since only one of us is a fan.   It's not really stew weather here in July, but we enjoyed it.  The youngest of us also liked it cold for lunch - kind of a vegetable chicken salad.

New Hampshire is just not known for its food.   I asked multiple people who live there for suggestions and they all came up empty.   Fortunately, New Hampshire has designated pumpkin as its state fruit.   That, plus the fact that it was a woman from New Hampshire that lobbied to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, led us to make pumpkin pie.   Also a bit odd for July, but really good served cold!

North Carolina and New York

This was a fun combination!  Both states have state fruits - blueberries and strawberries for North Carolina, and apples for New York.   Fruit salad from those three fruits is the perfect red, white and blue combination!  New York is bigger than Manhattan, believe it or not.   We found a sandwich particular to Binghamton, NY called a 'spiedie'.   It's basically a kebab served in a slice of Italian bread.   They were traditionally lamb, but are now made with most types of meat.   We made both lamb and chicken, and I thought that the lamb was particularly good.

To go with the spiedies, we made sweet potato oven fries for North Carolina, and (baked) potato chips for NY.  Potato chips were invented in Saratoga Springs, NY and were originally named Saratoga Chips.  

For dessert we made black and whites, which are cookies created in NY.  One story says that they were invented by bakeries trying to use up their cake batter.  The cookies really are a cake batter baked as cookies.  For each cookie, half is frosted white, and the other half with chocolate.  Truth be told, most of the store bought ones are dreadful.  However, a batch freshly made at home can be really good.  We made a half recipe from here http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/09/black-and-white-cookies/

Vermont and Rhode Island

We did not actually do a full meal for these two, but parts of two meals.   We made pizza strips, a Rhode Island specialty, as an appetizer for dinner.  And we baked apple pie, the Vermont state pie, for dessert.   Pizza strips are pizza dough, with a spicy tomato sauce and no cheese.   They are served room temperature or cold.   The sauce isn't cooked - it is just crushed tomatoes with some seasoning.  We liked them a lot, and thought they were pretty easy to make since we bought pre-made dough.   I made a second batch by making dough in my bread machine and that was extremely easy too.  For the sauce, we used the first recipe in this blog http://cookingchaotic.blogspot.com/2011/04/recipe-2-ri-pizza-strips.html

The declaration of the apple pie being a state symbol for Vermont is hilarious.   It includes the wording "When serving apple pie in Vermont, a "good faith" effort shall be made to meet one or more of the following conditions: (a) with a glass of cold milk, (b) with a slice of cheddar cheese weighing a minimum of 1/2 ounce, (c) with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream."  We served ours with a choice of all three :-).

We felt the need to cook more for these states primarily because we hadn't used any maple syrup for Vermont!  Happily, johnnycakes are very common in Rhode Island.  They are basically fried cornmeal mush.  Kind of a cross between a pancake and polenta.   They were great served with maple syrup for breakfast.