Philadelphians laugh at the pathetic imitations of “Philly steaks” offered elsewhere for the same reason Texans laugh at barbecue made north of the Mason-Dixon line. And both groups are right to laugh. It just ain’t the same.

Every time I order up a mess of barbecue at a place like Rudy’s or County Line or Dick’s Last Resort I think to myself “Someday, one of these barbecue outfits has got to start offering decent bread. Their sales would go through the roof.” I’ve been waiting for the market to correct this problem for more than twenty years now — and it hasn’t happened. And thereby hangs a mystery.

The mystery is the curious persistence of regional food differences in a country with cheap transport and the best communications network in the world. There are places in the U.S. where you can reliably get really good bread — mostly the coastal metroplexes. There are places you can get real barbecue, in the heartland South and Southwest. And these zones just don’t overlap. (Yes, they have a gourmet-bread bakery in Austin. I suspect, if I went there, I’d find it a lot like the Chinese food in Ann Arbor — impressive to the locals, maybe, but only because their standards are so low.)

I could multiply examples. Sourdough bread — I’ve had it everywhere you can get it and it just doesn’t taste right outside of San Francisco. The East Coast versions are competent, but lack some subtle tang. Yeast strain? Something in the water? Who knows?

Cheesecake. There’s a good one. Anybody who has lived in New York won’t touch most cheesecake made elsewhere at gunpoint, and with good reason. Next to a traditional New-York-style baked cheesecake (the kind you can stand a fork in because it has the approximate density of neutronium) all others are a sort of pathetic, tasteless cheese gelatin. In this case the recipe is clearly what matters.

Or deep-dish pizza. Try to get that done right anywhere but Chicago. Good luck. Actually, the Philly/South Jersey area may be the only other part of the U.S.that can almost make this nut, and our thin-crust pizza is better. But why? Why don’t the good techniques go national and drive out the weaker competition?

The obvious answer would be that nationwide, tastes differ too much for one regional variant to dominate. But many cases there isn’t even any dispute about where the best variant comes from; the superiority of “New York style” cheesecake. for example, is so universally understood that restaurants elsewhere often bill their cheesecake that way even when it’s actually half-composed of “lite” garbage like ricotta or cottage cheese. Nobody who has ever tasted one doubts that Philly steaks are the acme of the art. And nobody — but nobody — who can get both passes up Texas barbecue for what they make in New Haven or Walla Walla.

So you’d think that the market would have propagated Texas slow-cooking, San Francisco yeast starters and the Philly steak roll all over the country by now. But some food technologies travel better than others, and some seem curiously unable to thrive outside their native climes. Cheesecake recipes may survive transmission relatively well, but the mysteries of good barbecue are subtle and deep. Pizzas rely on elaborate oven and dough-mix technology that probably tends to conserve regional variations simply because it’s too capital-intensive to mess with casually.

I’ve meditated on the matter and still can’t decide whether I think that’s a good thing or not. The approved thing for travel writers to do is wax lyrical about the wonderfulness of regional variety, as if it would somehow fail to be an improvement in the world if I could get decent bread with my barbecue. The hell with that kind of sentimentality; I’d rather have a better meal.

But there’s a point buried there somewhere — something that isn’t about the bread or the barbecue, but about what it feels like to sit in a dusty roadside joint like Rudy’s, surrounded by cases of Red Pop and overweight rednecks in tractor caps and checked shirts, with the food of the gods melting in your mouth, and thinking “Damn, this place is tacky, but I hope it lives forever.”

Eric S. Raymond, “The Non-Portability of Barbecue”, Armed and Dangerous, 2002-07-18.

Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn’t always that way.

In fact it wasn’t that way until quite recently, historically speaking. I’ve enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant populations. The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on the way is interesting too.

(Oh. And for those of you who don’t understand the appeal? It’s all about endorphin rush, like a runner’s high. Pepper-heads like me have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem, inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has been clinically verified.)

Baseline: Thirty years ago. The early 1970s. I’m a teenager, just back in the U.S. from years spent overseas. Spicy-hot food is pretty rare in American cuisine. Maybe you’d have heard of five-alarm chili if you’d lived in Texas, but chances are you’d never have actually eaten the stuff. If you’re from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco sauce on your morning eggs. Aside from that, you wouldn’t have tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.

[…]

This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an anthropologist would call a “men’s mystery”. Despite the existence of male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic cooking are indisputably a female thing — women are expected to be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who acquires skill is crossing into women’s country. But for a handful of dishes culturally coded as “men’s food”, the reverse is true. Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot food went mainstream.

For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being a marked minority taste to being something like a central men’s mystery in the decade after 1985. I first realized this in the early 1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked meat. There’s a sight you won’t see at a flower show, or anywhere else in women’s country.

The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda’s XXX (my favorite!) to novelty items like “Scorned Woman” and “Hot Buns”, much of the imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.

Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the first place. It’s considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter than you can handle. Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey, watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros was passed repeatedly around the table.

There’s a sneaky element of female complicity in all this. Women chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it) “What good is a man if you rip off his balls?” They leave us capsaicin and barbecue and other men’s mysteries because they instinctively grok that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is essential for the health of Y-chromosome types — and best it should be over something harmless.

Eric S. Raymond, “The capsaicinization of American food”, Armed and Dangerous, 2002-11-02.