Health craze be damned! Admit you love junk food, we all do. Walk the aisles of any supermarket and you’ll see dozens of brands of chips, cakes, frozen foods and all manner of things drenched in sugar and ready to be fried. Junk food as a cuisine is America made edible. Brought to our shores by the huddled masses of tired, poor and most importantly hungry, foods from across the world were joined together and made uniquely American. On the streets of New York and the tenements of the lower east side people who came from Minsk to Palermo lent each other their expertise and created whole new flavors. In the rail yards, ranches, and gold mines great frontier the same happened between people from Shanghai, Glasgow and Berlin.
As a college student on a budget and and a stress cooker I thought it would be fun to start trying to make some of these foods from scratch, and as an orthodox Jew, I figured I’d try my hand at making them kosher. Being a journalism student, the obvious next step is to blog about it. So for at least the rest of this summer I’ll be cooking my way through the oily sugar drenched history of American immigration and beyond. I plan to have weekly themes ranging from Chinese, to Jewish, and Italian food as well as things like carnival fare that comes with its own unique history.
so why call it Phila-Phried you ask? simple I live in philadelphia and plan on doing a hell of a lot of frying!
phila-phried 