Why people from Minnesota don't spice their meats



Although I left Minnesota many years ago, and have developed a taste for spicy food, I can still understand why there is a preference for such "un-spicy" food in Minnesota. And the reasons may offend you, but they make perfect sense to me.

The first thing that I want to say is that people in Minnesota eat Iowa beef. If you haven't, well, what I can I say, there's nothing like it (dreamy look appearing in my eyes). Yes, of course I like the stuff I get here in the west, including Angus beef, but really it's not the same. And if someone serves you a spectacular cut of genuine Iowa beef, perfectly cooked, and you reach for the A-1 sauce, or God forbid catsup, you will not be invited back. There is absolutely no reason to destroy that wonderful flavor with any kind of seasoning. No, not barbecue sauce, not salsa, nothing. The thought of someone doing that to an Iowa steak still makes me want to cry, to this day. A little bit of salt and pepper and you're good.

You also need to keep in mind that it's usually cold in Minnesota, and because of that there's always been less of a chance that meat will go bad than in a warm climate. I'm not saying that meat in warmer climates is always suspect, but putting a lot of hot sauce on it will cover a lot of sins. When I got food poisoning from some tacos that I ate in Phoenix in 1979, I never suspected - they tasted fine.

To help fit in better socially in Arizona, and in California, I taught myself to eat things like jalapeños, and I've actually developed a taste for spicy foods. I keep a bottle of Sriracha sauce in the cabinet for times when I want to blow my head off. That's hot! And there have been times when I've put it on a piece of meat that's so tough and tasteless that it did make it palatable.

Image at the top of this post: Meat being delivered in Phoenix in the 1940s.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more