Thanksgiving comes with its own set of traditional dishes, from turkey to stuffing to cranberry sauce. It's also common for each family to put a twist on the holiday meal with their own recipes that maybe not every American incorporates. But did you know each state may have its own unique Thanksgiving recipe as well?
That's exactly what The New York Times blog The Upshot found when it received some data from Google. The company looked at the "most distinct" Thanksgiving recipe search by each state. The data reflects how much more popular the search term was in that state compared to the rest of the country during the week of Thanksgiving over the past 10 years.
The Upshot analyzed this data and then created a nice, big map of all of the search terms by state, which you can head over to the original story to see. In case you want to learn a bit more about the epicurean curiosity of a specific state, you can also check out the top 10 terms each state searched for more than any other. So let's dig into these results, shall we?
Many of the recipes Americans searched for are variations on traditional Thanksgiving dishes, such as cranberry relish in Alaska, vegan mushroom gravy in the hipster haven that is Oregon and pumpkin whoopie pie in Maine and New Hampshire.
However, the vast majority of the Thanksgiving recipes Americans want to know about are just plain bonkers. People in the Western states of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming want to know about frog eye salad, a mix of pasta, fruit, eggs, whipped cream and marshmallows. Yum? The mirliton casserole reigns supreme in Lousiana, and this squash dish turns out to be more in line with more conventional Thanksgiving delicacies. North Dakota likes something called a cookie salad, which seems to be some sort of cookies, pudding and whipped topping concoction. OK, maybe that recipe isn't so crazy. That actually sounds delicious.
Whether you need a last-minute Thanksgiving recipe to spice up your meal or just need to kill some time during your travels, this data is sure to entertain, inspire some hometown pride and even teach you something, too. Thank goodness for that.
