Yup, I'm definitely not from around here

(repost from my other blog, http://hbevert.livejournal.com/)

This week's example: until this week, I didn't know what a Texas sheetcake is. I also don't know how it's different from a sheetcake when I'm talking to a customer at work who wants to make a special order of salads and cake for a party. My locally-raised co-worker insists that all sheetcakes are Texas sheetcakes, but I know that the sheetcakes on our price list are the kind I'm used to and not what the customer is describing. I tell the customer that I'll ask the baker to call her back the next day.

When I ask the baker, "so what's a Texas sheetcake anyway?" the next day, other co-workers filtering in and out of the kitchen during the conversation all indicate that for them, the Texas sheetcake is a family-gathering staple. I get this feeling everyone in Illinois and Indiana knows what this thing is except me, and they can't wait for the next time they'll eat it after this conversation. Clearly this is yet another Southern dish that didn't make it across the Cheddar Curtain (the border between Illinois and Wisconsin).

Here's a description for any of you readers who have never heard of Texas sheetcake either:
1. Texas sheetcake is very flat because it is made with a pretty runny cake batter.
2. This cake is usually a chocolate cake made with cocoa.
3. The frosting is a cooked frosting a la Red Velvet cake, but once again it is chocolate. (Yeah, I had no idea what Red Velvet cake tasted like or how to make it before I got here either, but I'd at least read about it.)
4. There are actually baking pans sold as "Texas sheetcake" pans. They are basically just a larger-surface-area jelly roll pan, perhaps slightly deeper.
5. Very important for a proper Texas sheetcake: spread on the frosting when the cake is straight out of the oven. It will melt all over and make the cake fudgey.

Illinois is a place where the northern smelt fry meets the southern cheesy grits, where the local tastes may vary in the same town on whether hockey puck-style or fluffy biscuits are the vehicle for the sausage gravy, where you have to ask whether the tea is "sweet" or "unsweet" because it could be either. Where we are just far enough south to grow peaches but just a little too far north to see many black-eyed peas. It's a place of regional food fence-sitting, where the sheetcake is from Texas, and the fried cheese curd is from Wisconsin.

I don't have to always feel like an out-of-sorts northern transplant who likes weird "foreign" foods. My Canadian-American co-worker and I can wax poetic about the joys of the Nanaimo bar or poutine. One of the owners grew up in Minnesota, so she knows what I mean when I talk about hotdish, krumkake and lefse. She brought me back some smoked trout from her trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior this summer. It's divine on an English muffin for breakfast. Reminds me of Fischbrötchen Andrew and I ate on the Baltic Sea shore on our honeymoon.