August 13, 2009
The Joys of Country Fair Food
Peanut butter and jelly sandwich....on a stick. Photo by Cheryl Carlin.
What are your favorite fair foods? We’ll share our memories if you’ll share yours…
Amanda: In years past, Vermont’s Champlain Valley Fair was one of the highlights of my summer vacation. For just over a week, the fairgrounds filled with midway rides and goofy games, prize-winning heifers and preposterously large pumpkins. There were always booths hawking various crafts, causes and products…and best of all, food!
I was especially attracted to foods on a stick, both for the novelty factor (mom always served dinner on plates, how boring) and for practical reasons: There was no time to waste sitting down for a meal, with so much to see and do, after all! There were ponies to pet, balloons to win and “talking cars” to visit. (That was a simple trick; a two-way radio and a guy hiding somewhere in a booth, but it sure did intrigue me.)
Corn dogs, caramel apples, chocolate-covered ice cream bars and cotton candy were some of the portable snacks I loved best. There was also a “maple sugar shack” which was pretty much heaven on earth: sugar on snow in paper trays, maple milkshakes and maple candies, maple coffee and donuts. The best of the best was the cotton candy spun from real maple sugar.
This week, a friend told me about a new kind of food-on-a-stick, spotted at country fairs in Indiana: Deep-fried Pepsi (there’s at least one YouTube video about it). Even as a kid, I think I could have resisted that one!
Lisa: My childhood was pretty much the opposite of Amanda’s. Okay, my mom also served dinner on plates, and we sometimes went to the county fair—but it was the Los Angeles County Fair. Not exactly a center of agriculture, at least by the time I was growing up.
It wasn’t until I moved to rural upstate New York that I experienced a true country fair. I was a new reporter at a small-town newspaper, and I was asked to write a city slicker’s perspective on what was one of the biggest local events of the year. It was a revelation. The baby pigs on display were born at a farm just down the road, not trucked in from who-knows-where. The drive to the fair went through beautiful rolling farmland, not along a congested freeway. Food was provided by the 4-H Club, the volunteer fire department and local farmers, not just traveling carney trailers.
So, although I understand the appeal of fried things on sticks, the fair foods I get really excited about are the down-home treats: home-baked berry pies, apple cider slushies from the local orchard, and fried green tomatoes with a batter of fresh-picked corn.
In fact, as I approach the fourth anniversary of my inaugural visit to a country fair, I have to wonder if it was that first delicious taste that sealed my future. Instead of just passing through on the way to bigger and (I thought) better things as I had planned, I moved somewhere even more rural. As we speak, I am in the process of buying my first house. It’s an old farmhouse with a few rolling green acres that will be perfect for planting my first garden—as soon as I figure out how to do it.
Ed. Note: As an added bonus, we have a photo gallery of delicious foods from the Wisconsin State Fair taken by our web producer Cheryl Carlin with captions by her sister Jessica.
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Jello puddin pops
When I rode in Ragbrai, a bike ride across Iowa that’s sort of like a state fair on wheels, last summer, vendors hawked ribeye and pork chops on a stick. As weird as it was, ribeye on a stick was pretty tasty.
At the N.C. State Fair, you can buy cotton candy made with maple sugar. It is off white, and DELICIOUS!
Like Amanda, I have grwew up in Vermont and frequented the Champlain Valley Fair, my favorite is and always will be Al’s French Frys. But in recent years I have gained a new perspective for those that actually make the food since I have been volunteering as a server at the local Field Days in the volunteer fire departments food booth. Lots of hard work and lots of good food! Our nachos and chilli cheese fries are excellent I hear.
I grew up in Minnesota, and saw the fair gradually get less agricultural in nature (the shrinking of “machinery hill”). The food was always great- mini doughnuts crunchy with sugar and cinnamon and burning hot when you get them in the paper sack, honey ice cream with sunflower seeds, cheese curds with lingonberry sauce, a big paper cup full of hot chocolate chip cookies (conveniently located near the all-you-can-drink milk bar). Lots of fried things on sticks, but you didn’t want to fill up too fast on mediocre food- pacing and deliberation were key…
I grew up in way Upstate New York, and our fair has also changed, but there is still a lot of agriculture here, especially locally grown foods. The 4-H, fireman and other local groups provide lots of the food. My favorite, however is the salted carnie french fries. Also, some booths serve a pepperoni sandwich – slices of pepperoni in tomato sauce served in a heel of bread.
The State Fair of Texas is the birth place of the Fletcher’s Corndog. When I was a kid, Old Man Fletcher still dipped them himself, at the booth by the midway. He was a rotund fellow with the best bellowing hawking voice in the business.
It is still a must-have fall tradition to go to the State Fair and have a freshly-dipped and fried Fletcher’s Corndog. YUMMMM!
Just a few weeks away.
As a kid in Kansas, freshly-twirled cotton candy was my favorite at the state fair in Hutchinson ! One server showed me the special wrist action required to get the candy to stick to the paper cone. To this day, I resist packaged cotton candy, the packaging deflates some of the delicious airiness of the freshly-twirled.
I think foods you can walk around with is great, Pork tenderloins in Ohio are as big as a large olatem thats worth your money.. I sell home made fudge. but it is the last food you take home…Oh its great teasten fudge..lol
County Fair food always make me go off track and I look forward every year to some new weird food on a stick. And funnel cakes, I dare say are near orgasmic when done right! And thank God I know how to cook yummy sinfully tasteful but healthy food to balance out the party days of summer. Check out this 3 minute recipe http://blog.thecleanseexpert.com/
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