These Are the Strangest Foods From Every State

The Girl Scouts should sue. Yes, it’s actually topped with marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers.

Intimately associated with the Kentucky Derby — and not related to the French liqueur of the same name — this is a spread made with cucumber, onion, cream cheese, mayonnaise, and sometimes green food coloring. It’s used on canapés, as a dip, and in sandwiches. In fact, it somehow seems like a baby-food version of the cucumber sandwiches served at English teatime.

“Dinner” is not the first thing you’d think of when you see one of these large, aquatic, web-footed reptiles. They’re considered an invasive species, destroying crops and levees in Louisiana, and sites like Can’t Beat ‘Em, Eat ‘Em publish recipes for nutria — though it hasn’t really caught on.

Tomalley, that pungent green goop in the body of a lobster, is the creature’s digestive gland. Most people probably throw it away, but connoisseurs in Maine save it to spread on toast or whisk into sauces or softened butter.

Muskrats look sort of like small versions of nutria (to which they are not related), and they too get eaten. There are even a couple of festivals featuring muskrat in the state. The creature has lean, dark meat, full of tiny bones. One popular way to serve it — in Maryland as elsewhere — is barbecued.