Utah’s Top-Searched Recipes
Last week the New York Times raised the ire of readers across the country with its state-by-state list of iconic Thanksgiving foods, called “The United States of Thanksgiving.” Double-apple pie for New York. Pear Kuchen for South Dakota. In Mississippi, Ale-Braised Collard Greens with Smoked Ham Hock. Pecan pie for Georgia.
But some of the other state dishes weren’t so typical. The Utah dish was Caramel Budino with Chex Mix Topping. It sure looks delicious, but it’s not exactly a “uniquely Utah” dish, since it’s served only at Briar Handly’s new Park City restaurant, Handle, where more wealthy tourists will likely sample it than rank-and-file Utahns. But there didn’t seem to be a ton of Utah outrage — we were all just glad that it wasn’t green Jell-O.
The chosen Minnesota dish — grape salad — was a major bone of contention. Few Minnesotoans had heard of it, much less served it, and their hundreds of online responses criticized the NYT staff for not doing their homework. Lee Dean, food editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, had a front-page story about the “Grapegate” backlash. Then the Des Moines Register reported that the date-nut cookie chosen to represent Iowa actually came from Illinois.
It happens that a few years ago I did a story about some of the quirky Thanksgiving dishes that are commonplace in different regions of the country. I used Lee Dean’s Wild Rice Stuffing recipe as a dish that’s often served in Minnesota. I wasn’t saying that EVERYONE in Minnesota serves Wild Rice Stuffing, but it’s something outside of the usual Thanksgiving dinner that many people do serve. I talked to a food editor in Alaska who said crab is often served in his neck of the woods. I discovered that deep-fried turkey is more commonly served in the South, with Mirliton Casserole popular in Louisiana.
I didn’t try to do all 50 states, because there are some states that don’t do much out of the ordinary, and then you’ve got to scrounge around and come up with an oddity like “Budino with Chex Mix topping,” which I doubt that more than a handful of Utahns have ever tasted, much less cooked for Thanksgiving.
Partly in response to the readers’ reactions, the New York Times did a follow-up where they asked researchers at Google to look for the top-searched recipes in each state.
“The researchers didn’t focus on the most popular dish in every state, because that would be “turkey” in all 50 states. They instead looked for the most distinct,” according to the article.
In Michigan, for example, “cheesy potatoes” is nine times more commonly searched (relative to population size) than in the rest of the country. (I’m guessing this is a version of what we in Utah call Funeral Potatoes.)
The article cautioned, “You should not interpret the dishes here as the most iconic Thanksgiving recipes in each state, or even a state’s favorite dish. It’s possible that some dishes are so central to a state’s culture that people there don’t need to search for them on the web, for instance. But academic research – on everything from voter turnout to flu epidemics– has found that Google searching can be a meaningful indictor of behavior and attitudes.”
Turns out that Wild Rice Casserole is the top-searched recipe for Minnesota.
And in Utah, it’s — ta-da — Funeral Potatoes. I don’t think a lot of people serve it for Thanksgiving, but one can’t argue that Funeral Potatoes have become part of Utah’s food heritage. The second most-searched recipe was Pretzel Jell-O Salad. I’m kind of surprised, though, that anyone would have to search online for these recipes, as I thought just about everyone knows how to make them.
Frog-Eye Salad was the most-searched for recipe in Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming — go figure!
I’m curious as to what other Utahns would consider a unique Thanksgiving dish often served here, because I can’t really think of anything out of the ordinary.