The Great American Menu: Foods Of The States, Ranked And Mapped
Kentucky's signature food, a whatever-you-got stew that never tastes the same twice, gets a million imaginary bonus points for its wonderful communal nature: People just bring whatever ingredients they can, and everybody puts what they've got into the stew, and out comes burgoo, and that is just fucking beautiful, even though in reality probably 78 percent of its ingredients were scraped off I-64 with a snow shovel.
This is a hot dog with a chili-like meat sauce, mustard, and coleslaw on it. (Sometimes it has chopped onions on it, too.) Which, yeah, you can get variations of that pretty much anywhere, but West Virginians are serious about the coleslaw part. It's tasty. Like so much else in its home state, it is also low-grade, disreputable, and makes you feel kinda sad and gross if you think about it for too long.
But the cheesesteak mer m'mer Phiwwy cheesesteak mer! Shut it. The famous grease-and-garbage sandwich belongs to the city of Philadelphia, which A) is the worst place on Earth, and B) doesn't come close to representing the entire state of Pennsylvania. In a given day, 500 times as many Pennsylvanians are scraping possums off the motorway to add volume to their scrapple as are standing in line with the tourists in the Junior Varsity Metropolis to have a bucket of Cheez Whiz dumped onto a fistful of thinly sliced sewer rat. Your state food is this salty, greasy, gray, abjectly horrifying pig-rectum-mash, and, fuck you, it is delicious.
(Also, a 9-year-old in her parents' kitchen could make a tastier cheesesteak in 10 minutes than any to be found in Philadelphia. Thhhppbbpbpbppbbp.)
This is pretty much what it sounds like: You put a big wad of meat and some bland tuberous growths into a pot, cover them with water, clamp on a lid, and then parade around smugly barking about the importance of your dipshit state's presidential primary until the water has successfully annihilated any traces of flavor or character from your food, so that it can more closely resemble the people who will be eating it.
The rest from Deadspin
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12. Burgoo (Kentucky)
Kentucky's signature food, a whatever-you-got stew that never tastes the same twice, gets a million imaginary bonus points for its wonderful communal nature: People just bring whatever ingredients they can, and everybody puts what they've got into the stew, and out comes burgoo, and that is just fucking beautiful, even though in reality probably 78 percent of its ingredients were scraped off I-64 with a snow shovel.
My state came in 7th.
Just down the street form a Skyline _____.
That stuff doesn't even deserve to be called shit.
having learned the secrets of Cincinnati chili for my husband (native of those parts) i now actually add a dash of cinnamon to my Texas chili, which gives it a uniqueness that most people love, but can't quite place...
in other words, it's my secret ingredient 
but Cincy chili is good, though i prefer homemade.
and they are absolutely right about the Philly cheesesteak...the first time i got a 'real' one with the dayglo orange 'cheese' i was absolutely shocked and appalled! gross.
It was the only thing I could think of from my time in Ohio that seemed to be unique to the area but... WTF were they going to say that was 'good' about it. Of course, as it deserves... They found nothing 
Funny as the dickens, though.
Minnesotans must really know how to go about turning fish gelatinous
Yum! But I call bullshit on the insults to Philly. I don't think anyone in Philly pushes cheesesteaks. That's strictly a media-driven broken record response like their obsession over Rocky. 
It was basically ground pork sausage and corn meal (as I remember). I love it fried with scrambled eggs and lots of ketchup.
or 'shepherd's pie' that I remember VERY fondly - I used to LIVE on them, lol.
They are still there, except I guess the guy's who used to cook it when I was there have moved on or retired.
"Come on, Mormons. Goddammit."
So true. 
TYY
CT's big food claim to fame is that we're the birthplace of pizza in the US (at Pepe's Apizza followed soon after by Modern Apizza in New Haven) before NYC started making an inferior knockoff of New Haven's pie (New Haven is the originator of both red and white pies, NYC made theirs thicker and softer (New Haven crust is crispy, you can't fold it, it cracks), only uses the now-traditional red sauce, reduced the sauce, increased the cheese (Red NH pies only come with Parmesan and Romano. You have to ask for Mozzarella to get Mozzarella) and started piling on the toppings) and calling it New York style.
If you had to pick one thing as the emblematic food of CT...it'd be the New Haven white clam pie.
If they wanted to stick with the hamburger thing to avoid the New Haven/NY pizza fights (This is a real thing, oddly. CT, particularly Southern CT, disparages NY pizza. NYC claims they invented pizza (10 years later!) and NH isn't real pizza.), they chose oddly...Louis Lunch in New Haven is also the birthplace of the hamburger. They don't steam their burgers though...they grill them in cast-iron like they have from day one. Served on white toast with your choice of cheese, tomato and onions.
Edit: You can't tell, Nutmeggers are very vocal and passionate about their food. CT produces an inordinately-large number of top-quality chefs for a state its size. New Haven and Hartford have long been where you go to test your restaurant concept before paying Manhattan rents. So we're used to good food and argumentative about who has the best...I could start an argument over hot dogs: If I asked where the best hot dog in CT is, we'd get 15 answers and they're all legitimate. My money is on Saint's in Southington. Someone else would argue for Doogie's in Manchester. And so on.
I recently discovered this after reading about Must Be Heaven Sandwich Shoppe in Brenham, Texas. Here's a short article on it, plus the recipe. I found it to be incredible, and almost good enough to supplant pecan pie. Almost 
A regular New York pizza is the second best.
Chicago pizza is not even in the same class, being closer to the cheese bread with meat and sauce that the chain pizza outfits misrepresent as pizza.
Every time I visit my daughter in Manhattan, I have a tough time not 'spending' each day's allotted calories on pizza. I just cannot get enough of it, even though I know I should be saving some room for other great choices that are nearly impossible to find in Maine.
I'm kind of a pizza tourist. I sample pizza everywhere I go, and would consider NY's the best, w/NJ's pizza a close second.
Yum!
I've had pretty good pizza in Boston and Philadelphia also.
I'm kind of a "pizza tourist" too.
I was shocked to find one place here in the west that makes a good pizza and take any transplanted friends from NY or NJ there to impress them when they visit.
Tragically, good pizza is as rare as rubies in the west, and a lot of folks in the west believe that those Dominos, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut, etc flat breads topped with cheese, red pseudo sauce, and those funky little round slices of dried cardboard is pizza. So. Not. Pizza.
So it can't really be called a quiche. It's heaven is what it is.
That said, I do enjoy a good Chicago dog too.
Response to alcibiades_mystery (Reply #47)
is DEFINITELY worth clicking on!
Righto 
We have WAY better food over here in the west.
As we like to say in Michigan, "fucking Ohio".
Ohio
52. Cincinnati chili (Ohio)
The Great American Menu: Foods Of The States, Ranked And Mapped
For the mercifully unacquainted, "Cincinnati chili," the worst regional foodstuff in America or anywhere else, is a horrifying diarrhea sludge (most commonly encountered in the guise of the "Skyline" brand) that Ohioans slop across plain spaghetti noodles and hot dogs as a way to make the rest of us feel grateful that our own shit-eating is (mostly) figurative. The only thing "chili" about it is the shiver that goes down your spine when you watch Ohio sports fans shoveling it into their maws on television and are forced to reckon with the cold reality that, for as desperately as you might cling to faltering notions of community and universality, ultimately your fellow human beings are as foreign and unknowable to you as the surface of Pluto, and you are alone and always have been and will die alone, a world unto yourself unmarked and unmapped and totally, hopelessly isolated.
But wait! This abominable garbage-gravy isn't just sensorily and spiritually disgusting—it's culturally grotesque, too! What began as an ethnic curio born of immigrant make-do—a Greek-owned chili parlor that took its "Skyline" name from its view of the city of Cincinnati—is now a hulking private-equity-owned corporate monolith that gins up interest in its unmistakably abhorrent product by engineering phony groups of "chili fanatics" to camp out in advance of the opening of new chains, in locations whose residents would otherwise see this shit-broth for what it is and take up torches and truncheons to drive it back into the wilderness.
Whatever virtue this bad-tasting Z-grade atrocity once contained derived from its exemplification of a set of certain cherished American fables—immigrant ingenuity, the cultural melting pot, old things combining into new things—and has now been totally swamped and consumed by different and infinitely uglier American realities: the commodification of culture; the transmutation of authentic artifacts of human life into hollow corporate brand divisions; the willingness of Americans to slop any horrible goddamn thing into their fucking mouths if it claims to contain some byproduct of a cow and comes buried beneath a pyramid of shredded, waxy, safety-cone-orange "cheese."
Cincinnati chili is the worst, saddest, most depressing goddamn thing in the world. If it came out of the end of your digestive system, you would turn the color of chalk and call an ambulance, but at least it'd make some sense. The people of Ohio see nothing wrong with inserting it into their mouths, which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about the Buckeye State. Don't eat it. Don't let your loved ones eat it. Turn away from the darkness, and toward the deep-dish pizza.
although I may not have picked that for PA, it's distinctly a PA thing made of I don't even know....pig parts and cornmeal? What I do know is that it's divine when cooked in bacon grease and topped with maple syrup. I ate a lot as a kid, and I'm still alive! 
