"x marks the spot" news and stories

Porkopolis: Cincinnati nabbed its first nickname in the 1830s, when the city was America's hog-processing center and rogue herds of pigs were said to wander the streets. Indeed, the ready availability of animal fat was the reason two new arrivals from the British Isles, candlemaker William Procter and soapmaker James Gamble, were persuaded to found their world-spanning partnership in 1837 (the tallow was crucial in making both products).

Almost 200 years later, P&G is still thriving, but the swine are long gone. Chicago took home the bacon by the 1860s, when its hulking meat industry eclipsed Cinti's. But one idiosyncratic legacy does linger from its high-hog heyday: the local delicacy of goetta (that's GET-her).

"It's not really very pretty – it's kind of ugly actually and it is sort of a peasant dish," shrugs local food blogger Cole Imperi. Imperi co-runs the local chapter of tastecasting.com, the social networking riff on restaurant reviewing that's recently emerged. "Goetta's origins were with the pork industry: it's made of ground meat, usually pork shoulder or a cut of meat that's not desirable, with either pinhead or steel-cut oats that kind of makes a cake. You use equal parts meat and oats and add bay leaves, salt, pepper and rosemary into it, then bake. Then you cut off a slice and fry it up in a skillet."

"It's not low, country food, it's all one word – lowcountry. It doesn't have anything to do with class structure - it's purely geographic," barks Nathalie Dupree as soon as she starts discussing her home turf's cuisine. Dupree should know: she's the author of a dozen or so books on the food of the region, the latest of which is "Nathalie Dupree's Shrimp and Grits". Gridding its reach on a map, she sketches from the Pee Dee River southwards, finishing with Savannah.

Another expert, Joe Dabney, quibbles slightly. "Savannah counts, but it came along a little later." Dabney is a longtime newspaperman with his own local cookbook, "The Food, Folklore and Art of Lowcountry Cooking," due in spring. "The heart of lowcountry cooking is in Charleston."

Certainly, it's thanks to Charleston and its history that lowcountry food has such eclectic, exotic roots. Firstly, that now-tony and toned-down city was the original colonial New York, a cosmopolitan metropolis seething with newcomers and defined by its tolerance. Charleston was one of the first colonial outposts to allow Jews to worship without persecution and the congregation is still one of the oldest in the USA. That openness encouraged unusual settlers.

"Everything came through Charleston – it was an elite community for so long. It had an extraordinary variety of people: there was an Italian bakery in town in the early 1600s that fed everyone. And they also planted olive trees there," Dupree explains. British techniques like roasting and stewing became staples, too – a nostalgic nod to the motherland with which Charleston, named after a British king as Charles town, felt such strong links.