Welcome to another minicast from Away With Words.

I'm Martha Barnett.

A while back, we talked about how the name of a particular food that you grew up with

might be utterly mystifying to someone from another part of the country.

Grant described the pork steaks that he ate all the time in Missouri,

and I talked about how my family in Kentucky grew up eating Benedictine,

which is a mixture of cucumbers and cream cheese.

We asked you for other examples, and this came through loud and clear.

You don't have to be in a foreign country to be baffled by the local menu.

We heard from Cindy in San Diego, who told us about the culinary culture shock of moving from Michigan to Boston.

When Cindy and her husband ordered a milkshake there, they were surprised when what we got was milk with chocolate syrup,

as watery as, well, chocolate

milk.

We were really confused.

Then we described to the waitress what we thought we had ordered, and she exclaimed,

in a heavy Boston accent, oh, you want a frat!

Cindy went on to say the other thing we found in Boston was a confection called a whoopee pie.

That's two chocolate cookie or cake-like discs filled in between with white cream or icing in the center.

Never have seen these anywhere else in the country.

And if I ask people here in San Diego where I could get some whoopee pies, they'd just look at me cross-eyed.

Well, Cindy, that sounds a lot like what we in the South used to call moon pies, although,

you know, if I ever need a stage name or a nom de plume, I'm going to give some serious thought

...