Cheesy potatoes
The New York Times writes about each state's favorite Thanksgiving dishes and comes up with this for Michigan:
Cheesy potatoes, pretzel Jell-O and cheese balls.
Do we believe this?
Well, the Times -- as resourceful as any student -- did an online search.
We asked researchers at Google for help. You can think of every web search that someone does for a recipe as a kind of vote, after all. The researchers didn’t focus on the most popular dish in every state, because that would be “turkey” in all 50 states. They instead looked for the most distinct.
The dishes you see listed here are the result of the analysis. The numbers next to each dish indicate how much more popular searches for it were in a given a state than in the rest of the country during the week of Thanksgiving over the past 10 years. In Michigan, for example, “cheesy potatoes” is 9 times more commonly searched (relative to population size) than in the rest of the country.
In other states, popular dishes include:
Alabama: Sweet potato dumplings
Arizona: Turkey enchiladas
Colorado: Frog eye salad
Georgia: Key lime pie
Minnesota: Snicker salad
Oklahoma: Soapilla cheesecake
West Virginia: Deer jerky
