About three weeks ago , a friend , with a layover at Philadelphia Airport (probably flying on USeless Air, the layover was six days, not one hour, as there was a one inch snow in Copenhagen) brought me a dozen Philly soft pretzels. Manna from heaven...and while one can order them off the web, it ain't the same as somebody bringing them to you. Being from Philly, my eyes widened and I immediately ate one, about one pound of dough, after putting a line of French's yellow mustard over the entire thing. It was delicious, though missing one basic taste element, bus fumes
. If you buy one on Market Street, the SEPTA bus fumes can make a taste difference. I'm sure jet fumes would be just as tasty, but alas , the windows are always closed in the terminal. The Philly soft pretzel has exactly the right amount of dough and is baked perfectly. Soft pretzels in Boston and New York are too thick, too doughy , too big and the crust isn't crispy enough.
It is one of God's great creations and was given to man as consolation for giving us The 1950's era Phillies.As is the Philly steak sandwich. Yeah, yeah, you can go to a restaurant anywhere these days and get a "Philly steak", but trust me , they aren't the same. My favorite "steak sandwich description" was in Virginia. The menu read , "Thin slices of fillet sauteed onions and served on a long roll". If you see the words "fillet" and "sauteed" near a Philly steak sandwich item, fuhgeddabout it. Move on. If you see someone eating it and saying "This heah steak samwich is delicious", kill them.
Order something else , ethnic, perhaps Jewish, instead, "Jewish Corned Beef on a hard roll with lettuce and butter" ( a sign I actually saw in upstate PA once).
There are two reasons why steak sandwiches in Philly taste better:
1. Its the rolls
and 2. "The Altered Steaks theory"... Remember the movie "Altered States".....you're actually related to the very first human...you have to be...and you can genetically get yourself back there. Same with cheese steaks. All Philly steaks are related to all those that came before on the same grill...and that grill has cooked nothing but cheese steaks since 1924. You're actually ingesting a molecule of the original one baked on that grill.A bit later I shall extol on that other Philly phavorite, Tastykakes....and perhaps essay on hoagies as well.....order a "sub" in Philly, they'll send you to the Navy Yard.
2 comments:
No discussion of Philadelphia culinary art is complete without mentioning scrapple. Scrapple is what results when the butcher's floor is swept, and the rejected scraps from sausage, hot dogs, spam, and olive loaf are collected, pressed together with spiced saliva and crust of smegma, then baked to a fine baseball-sized loaf. It is a fine breakfast meat that makes spam look like, well, spam.
I have often said I need to try a real philly cheese steak yet I haven't had one. I like the 'philly cheese steaks' you can get at a good greasy pit here in chicago but i'm sure it's not the same. Just like a chicago deep dish wouldn't be the same in philly. If I like chicago's fake cheese steak, I can only imagine how orgasmic a really philly cheese steak would taste.
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