Destination Food In Your Backyard

I was going to continue with the food posts today, covering a delightful Buffalo treasure known as the hot wing, but I searched in vain for a decent picture of the Anchor Bar, home of the "Buffalo Wing".  I've mostly gone at night, and the best I had were some very fuzzy images of their sign.  It's a wonderful place, one of many reasons to go to western New York, and I really recommend their cheese garlic bread to be enjoyed alongside their wings.   Then I realized that, in addition to not having any good pictures of anything, I was pretty much devoting a week to fast food.  While such worship is part of the American religion, this felt wrong.  People from around the world have taken a peek at this blog, and if I really want to talk about North American food, I figured I should probably talk more about Native American food, as well as more traditional fare of us newcomers from abroad.  The problem is, outside of pre-Columbian Mexican cuisine, Ojibwe and Algonquin fare, and a half bad look at how we improved on the eternal boil that is British food, I lack the proper experience to share more on such matters.

Worse, I have not done a lot of destination dining as far as such things go, or at least I've never organized my thoughts much on the places I have been.  Instead of heading head first into a food week, then, I'm going to take us to such places as a lowcountry boil when I get to them, that is to say getting to the stomach once I have visited the landscape and the history.  In the meantime, I'm going to issue a challenge to my readers: find out what sort of regional cuisine you have, and start with the First Born.  They've been here a lot longer than us colonial types, and as a result have used the ingredients on hand a lot more.  I'll start!

Here in southeastern Michigan, in addition to having access to passably decent maple syrup, and trading access to some of the best stuff in our own northern lower peninsula, we've also long since had a variety of fruits, from plums, paw paws, blueberries, and persimmons to later introductions of apples and berries; the climate here is excellent for temperate fruit trees, as we get much in the way of winter chill without excessive cold.  This part of Michigan was historically part of the Sauk and Fox nations, which after the Black Hawk War.  They were later joined by the Wendat (Huron) people, who were most likely also here and in neighboring southern Ontario centuries before their arrival in exile after their near destruction in 1649 (long story).  All of these people were excellent farmers, growing squash, beans, and corn (the three sisters), like many people in North America.   They were also expert fishers, Michigan being absolutely permeated by waterways.  Tomorrow being Friday, I'll talk about a particularly wonderful catch then, one less common so far south as Lake Erie and Lake Saint Clair.

I've barely scratched the surface on local food, not even touching the contributions of many later peoples such as the Polish, and yet we've already found quite the buffet set up for us, a vegetarian and fishy one at that.  Fear not, meat eaters, there were also plenty of ungulates around to be hunted, and the deer have yet to catch on that this is not really a wilderness anymore.  That said, find out what's in your backyard; even if it is a cuisine that has evolved from far away places and through millennia of development, the truth remains that fresh and local is making a comeback, probably because it tastes just a bit more real.  There's a reason to be mindful of history and geography, after all, as a sense of continuity is helpful for figuring out perspective.