π r Coconut

When it comes to cream pies, coconut edged out banana and chocolate in the Roadfood.com poll: The Best Cream Pie is ... .  Here’s the thing about coconut pie, though: too many restaurants play fast and loose with the boundaries between coconut CREAM pie and coconut CUSTARD pie, and while we love them both, there IS a huge difference between the two.  You cannot call one the other.  And don’t get us started on cream pies versus meringue pies…  Suffice it to say that a cream pie has a creamy, pudding-like filling topped, ideally, with whipped cream (or at least some sort of whipped topping).  Top it with beaten egg whites, though, and you no longer have cream pie, you’ve got meringue pie, which is where the lemon version really shines.  Vanilla cream pie?  We’ve never heard of it either, but we figured if there’s chocolate there must also be vanilla.  Apparently not.

Yellow Mustard on Dogs

Roadfooders were asked, “Mustard On a Dog: What Kind?”  Yellow beat brown by a little less than two-to-one.  We’re not sure but we think this may be a regional thing.  Brown mustard is big in the New York area, probably because it marries so well with the flavors of a garlicky, Kosher-style all-beef hot dog.  Franks made with pork, or pork and beef, perhaps take better to the sweet-and-sour effect of yellow mustard.  On the other hand, yellow is the color found on a Chicago all-beef dog, so maybe we’re totally off-base.

Our personal tastes cry out for brown mustard, no matter what kind of dog we’re eating.  But when we’re eating a top-quality, natural-casing, garlicky all-beef dog, we often go mustardless, the better to savor the taste of the hot dog.  Katz’s and Nathan’s (if it’s natural casing, and long-cooked) come to mind.

Thank the Swiss

Milk chocolate was invented in Switzerland in the 19th century, but it found its true home in 20th-century America, where people prefer it to dark chocolate by about two-to-one.  The margin narrows among Roadfooders, but milk chocolate still edges out dark chocolate, according to the recent poll: Your Chocolate Of Choice For Eating Straight?  When we’re eating ultra-high-quality bon-bon chocolates like the ones pictured above, we swear by dark chocolate.  Otherwise, we confess to a love of milk chocolate, but not just any old brand.  We can’t resist the milk chocolate connoisseurs love to bash, often complaining of grittiness and sour or burnt flavors: that would be Hershey’s, either bars or Kisses.  It has a rich and toasty flavor that we never tire of.  Sour, burnt, grit?  We have no idea what they’re talking about.  Love is blind.

Drink It, Black

We asked Roadfooders: “How Do You Take Your Coffee?”  Black was the top vote-getter, but you can look at the results another way: 48% of you like it whitened, 32% like it sweetened, and 30% like it black.  People tend to have pretty strong views on coffee these days, beyond the questions of cream and sugar.  The mere mention of Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts can trigger passionate responses.  Where do you drink your coffee?  At home?  Diners?  Donut shops?  Or do you prefer coffee house coffee?  Do you swear by the Dunkin/McD/Starbucks chains, or swear at them?

Roadfood At the Movies

We saw the movie Up last night and noticed the appearance of Fenton’s Creamery of Oakland (Roadfood.com review) in the film.  This got us thinking: how many other Roadfood restaurants have shown up in films?  We quickly thought of three others.  Perhaps the most famous example is Katz’s (Roadfood.com review) and the film When Harry Met Sally (“I’ll have what she’s having.”).  The Carnegie Deli (Roadfood.com review) of New York was featured in the Woody Allen flick Broadway Danny Rose, and if we recall correctly, the late Leo Steiner, who owned the Carnegie at the time, was also in the movie.  And we recall reading somewhere that Phillips Grocery (Roadfood.com review) of Holly Springs, MS was in a Robert Altman film.  We didn’t see it – was it Cookie’s Fortune?

There must be plenty of additional examples but none come to mind.  Something in Philadelphia at a cheese steak joint?  A Texas barbecue spot?  Got to be something in L.A., right?  Can anybody think of other Roadfood movie appearances?

The Cook Beats The Meat

Roadfood.com asked the question, What's the Most Important Feature In Great BBQ?  Roadfood.com readers made it a two-way race, and The Cook edged out The Meat by eight votes out of the 955 cast.  There are a few ways to interpret the question, any and all of them valid (there’s only so much space for the poll – no explanations possible!).  Here’s how we see it: if you came up with a great barbecue sauce, how much would that define the great barbecue?  Could you take just about any meat and any pitmaster and turn the results into great barbecue through the use of the right sauce?  For us, at least, the answer to that particular question is no.

We’d say the same thing about the setting and the rub.  The other three are trickier.  Can you even have barbecue without wood?  Plenty of restaurants serve something called barbecue that never saw wood smoke.  Some of it can be pretty decent, too, but great?  Never, not in our opinion.  Which is why we voted for wood.  Of course, you can’t really have barbecue without the meat, but we don’t see the question as a choice between meat or no meat.  Rather, it’s a question of which particular cut of cow or pig or lamb or whatever is used.  And, for sure, that choice is important, but we think a great pitmaster could turn just about anything handed to him into top-quality barbecue.  Which is why we’d pick The Cook as our second choice, and maybe we’d even change it to our first choice.

There’s our two cents.  Anyone else care to weigh in?

“That Which We Call Pig Parts By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet”

This post’s headline paraphrases Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which she declares that even if Romeo dropped his name, he’d smell as sweet as a rose. Some folklorists maintain that the Bard also was referencing The Rose Theater, which was a rival to his Globe Theater, and supposedly was known for its malodorous facilities. All of which is a circuitous route to the meat depicted in the above photograph of breakfast the other day at the Sandy Hook Diner in Newtown, Connecticut. It is billed on the menu as scrapple; but it smelled (and tasted) just like good old North Carolina livermush, which is a lot like eastern Pennsylvania puddin’.

Please Mr. Postman

What do you think?  Has ordering food by mail gone mainstream?  We have our doubts, but it appears that, among Roadfooders at least, it’s certainly common, according to the recent Roadfood.com poll which asked, Have You Ever Ordered Food By Mail?.  Of course, Roadfooders have good food on the brain much more than the public at large, and are likely to go to greater lengths to obtain the things they like.

The number one impediment to food-by-mail, as we see it, is the cost.  More specifically, the shipping costs.  We order food by mail fairly often, and it appears to us that shipping costs have generally become more reasonable over the last few years, but they can still be eye-popping when you’re ordering something that needs to be kept chilled and delivered quickly.  Which is why we limit our Black’s Barbecue orders from Texas to twice a year!  On the other hand, we buy most of our spices from Penzey’s, and grits and cornmeal from Nora Mill.  The key is to wait until you can place a fairly large order.

Which mail-order food sources are your favorites?

King of Pies, Pie of King

Anomalously, Bruce Bilmes’ 2010 Roadfood calendar lists no food that has its formal celebration on January 18. The 19th, for example, is National Popcorn Day. But since January 18, 2010, is Martin Luther King Day, it seems a good occasion to pay homage to what is said to have been the good doctor’s favorite thing to eat: pecan pie. This is a close view of the super-nutty one made by Royers Round Top Cafe in Round Top, Texas.

Cold Day, Warm Chowder

The Roadfood.com poll? Hot Chowder On a Cold Day! I'll Have...  The most popular answer?  Clam chowder; no surprise there.  We’d guess that it’s the only chowder most people have tried if they’ve never been to New England, the spiritual home of chowders.  A chowder we did not offer as a choice is the one pictured above: the superlative and award-winning seafood chowder that is a specialty of The Maine Diner of Wells, ME (Roadfood.com review).  This chowder is chockablock with clams, shrimp, scallops, and lobster, and it will be served by The Maine Diner at the 2010 New Orleans Roadfood Festival.  You don’t want to miss this one, folks!