Cheesesteaks, Pierogis and Crawfish

I grew up in Philly — not the suburbs, not Doylestown. I went to the Philadelphia Area School District, complete with prisonesque barred windows. I walked home from school and bought rock hard, sheet-style soft pretzels on the street corner. It's the main food I associate with the city, because at 10 years old we packed up and moved to northeast Pennsylvania. For my parents, the last straw came in the form of a gang-related stabbing down the block.

Fifteen years later, I had the chance to grab an authentic Philly cheesesteak, gang violence be damned. Faced with the choice of the flashy orange banners that screamed "Geno's!! GENO'S!" or the simple closet-sized establishment called Pat's King of Steaks, I went with Pat's.

I had to chuckle. I've heard so many complimentary things about these steaks my whole life, so the anticipation of taking a bite from a 'wit-out' (steak and cheez whiz, no onions) ended up being more satisfying than the sandwich itself. Especially for nine bucks. Still, I came for the whole experience: the location, the noisy ambience, the gruff, harsh-talkin' locals — it all gives the food a context within the entire culture.

And that's why people travel anywhere. Philly cheesesteaks are available in the frozen aisle of any grocery store, but they don't come with the experience of misunderstanding how to order a cheesesteak and holding up the ever-growing line, even though there are instructions are plastered on a huge sign that any moron could see. (Sorry, folks behind me. I'm from out of town.)

For the ten years following our departure from Philly's Mayfair district, I got to experience dem bleenies, boilo and pierogis in Pennsylvania's Coal Region. Yo bot! You can buy Mrs. T's pierogis in any grocery store, and you'll probably find them alongside cheesesteaks. But there's no experience quite like going to any coal region festival, standing around with truckloads (Chevy pickups, mostly) of overweight rednecks pretending to be cowboys and slurping down pierogis soaked in butter and onions. At least there's plenty of Yuengling, the local brew and America's oldest continually operating brewery. (See this.)

In my years of travel that followed, I came to understand that the context surrounding a region's flagship food is as important as the calories themselves.

Once, when passing through San Diego, my road trip buddies and myself ate from a legit Mexican restaurant near the Mexican border. I ordered randomly from the all-Spanish menu, cursing myself for letting those years of high school and college language studies go to waste. Still, I enjoyed something great slathered in green and red sauces, with complete with INS helicopters circling overhead and a parking lot full of Hispanic people who instantly cleared out when it appeared the cops will be called after a minor car accident.

In New Orleans, we drank Abita beer, Louisiana's Yuengling equivalent, danced to the face-melting tunes of Trombone Shorty, drowned in gumbo and stuffed ourselves with jambalaya and fried alligator, watched impromptu swing dancers spin round and round to clarinet ragtime and wandered mouths-agape in the debauchery of Bourbon Street. There's nothing like it. You can make jambalaya at home, it's pretty simple. But you just can't get the experience of it all by sitting at home watching the Travel Channel.

Nor will you be approached by fish and game law enforcement who ask you to stop fishing in the bayous of southern Louisiana since you don't have a license. Tip: bring a Serbian along with you, there's no better way to prove you're from out of town and don't know any better.

At any rate, once our fishing trip was cut short, we stopped at a local bait shop for some crawfish. We learned how to break the boiled shrimpy-looking delectables apart to get at the good stuff inside.

An employee at the shop gave us a demonstration: "All that's flavor up in there," he said. And when we expressed reservations at "sucking the head" out of the shell, he assured us, "There ain't no embarrassment when yo' come down heah."

And he's right. Who knows when we'd be back here again. When in Houma's bayou, jump in head-first. So we bought 15 pounds of live crawfish, took them to the apartment of a friend we knew staying locally, and proceeded to destroy her impeccable stovetop with the dirty splatter of scores of dying crustaceans.

In the end, our crawfish-and-creole-seasoning-from-a-box concoction didn't stand up to the pre-boiled and seasoned crawfish we tried at the bait shop. But no alarms and no surprises there.

And we got a moral out of it. Don't hesitate to suck the head out of a crawfish. Ater all, that's where the flavor is. (It turns out he was right about that, too.)