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Goofy question:
philly has cheesesteaks, buffalo has chicken wings, carolina has BBQ, san fran has sourdough... what kind of food is native cuisine to west va?
Yea isn't the hot dog with chili and slaw a WV thing?..... I thought everyone ate it that way but throughout my travels I've found you can't get slaw on your dog ....and when you ask for it they look at you funny....lol.....Don't most other places do the kraut on the dog?
not really native to WV but a meal usually consists of anything fried with lots of grease. I LOVE slaw on my hotdogs and whenever I ask for it up here in DC people give me a weird look....so good!
The foods I remember growing up with are biscuits and gravy, green beans & potatoes cooked with bacon, hominy, okra, cornbread, sweet tea. My grandmother would make her own crackling and was renowned for her chicken & dumplings. And everything had a dab of bacon grease from the can kept on the stove. The funny thing is that both my grannys cooked like that, one passed at 96 and the other will be 97 this coming March.
That's easy - pinto beans and cornbread, seasoned with fatback, with cut up onions or ramps sprnkled on top. Be sure and crumble the cornbread into the beans. Served with fried potatoes and fried apple pies. As for David Kennedy's idea that people in WV eat possum and coon - out of a state of 2 million people you might find 500 people that eat those animals. Maybe he's one of them.
Thank you, Italianbluesboy for the compliment, but I must regress.
To my knowledge, I've never partaken of the possum...but the Raccoon is a different matter altogether. One of the cleanest of all the woodland creatures in its diet and fastisity for excellence in the food chain.
Truely, a delicacy and certainly an epicurian treasure.
As a boy, my father was a great hunter and kept dogs of that hunting breed. Black and Tans, Plots and the Redbones were his favorites. When he was in his 40's we would traipse through the hills sides of Wetzel County and let the dogs run...hearing their melodious strain as they chased the coons over the ridges...What a wonderful sound that was...each had a distinct bark and could be identified as to where he was or what she was doing...There names were Maggie and Ted..one of the most intelligent was Tim, a natural leader of the pack.
We were not into selling the hides and we did not usually kill the animals. If a dog was being trained to fulfill his natural hunting tendancies, once in a while an animal would be shot out of the tree. The largest coon killed was 37 pounds after field dressing and that animal was shot out of a tree with a .38 caliber revolver...An excellent shot as he was a giant boor coon and fel from about 75 feet up in a great towering oak. He almost killed me when he hit the ground and just grazed me as he fell. Thank goodness he was dead as a wounded coon can cause a lot of damage...in the water they will drown any dog.
The meat is slightly parboiled with onion and potatoes...then it's baked or roasted as any meat. The meat is lean and very delicious. Well worth a try if the opportunity comes. During the Depression here the woodlands were denuded of almost every creature expect the box turtle...everything was used for food and now they are returned in abundance.
Squirrel is a dark meat and tastes exactly like Pheasant. Fried squirrel is excellent and so is its gravy. Wild Turkey is not a dry meat like the domestic and fabulous, deer is much like mutton in aroma and taste if not altered. Bear meat is greasy but delicious.
and the fish are contaminated with pollutants and parasites making only the trout stocked and in the natural highland habitats worth taking..once in a while we will take 2 of these on a good day. Just to carry on the ritual.
West Virginia is a wonderland of creatures from our pioneer past...they were placed here for our use by a benevolent God, who saw our needs...I hope that we never are forced to deplete them as we did during the Depression of the 30's. It is wonderful to take my little ones to the forests and show them the creatures that share our world.
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