“Classic” is a term usually reserved for persons or things sharing an almost ineffable quality that combines timelessness, simplicity, grace, and durability of form. These things can always be found exactly where you expect them to be, and will always be the way you remember them being one year ago, ten years ago, and the first time you encountered them. Familiar and comforting, classics wait for you like old friends, standing immobile while dizzying change moves us inexorably forward. Classics are, in a word, perfect, and remain that way.
So much of the annual excitement leading up to the State Fair each year centers around the “new” — new fried food, new cars in the auto show, new rides on the Thillway, new entertainment featuring animals doing strange tricks — that I thought it would be lovely, here at number 22, to take a breath and pay tribute to a grand old favorite. A State Fair classic — the Funnel Cake.
This delicious dessert may indeed be one of the least complicated fair foods you can find. It consists, literally, of a plate of fried batter. That’s it. No special spices. No barbequed Hostess snack cakes. No melted candy bars or crushed up cookies or marshmallow garnish or dollops of icing.
Just. Fried. Batter.
To be clear, you ARE encouraged to add powdered sugar or fruit compote* to your plate of fry, but I think we can all agree that this dessert appears to be exceedingly unsophisticated when compared to everything else on offer at the Fair. It’s Jimmy Stewart in a roomful of Paris Hiltons — it may not be the most exciting or flashy thing we can find, but we’re sure about its high quality and unsullied reputation, and we don’t have to worry about it doing anything we didn’t expect.
I’m convinced that this is the very best funnel cake picture of all time (and was actually taken by yours truly!). Dan and David are two favorite State Fair friends, and in this picture, they look like they are eating purloined funnel cake — their wide eyes seem to say, “O no! We’ve been caught in the act of scarfing illicit bits of sugar and fry! Shall we make a run for it?”A couple of notes about the Funnel Cake:
- Fried batter takes up LOTS of room in the stomach. Plan accordingly.
- Fried batter might just be a GENIUS chaser for Frito Pie. (I think I just had a lightbulb moment.)
- In my opinion, the best funnel cake topping is lots and lots of powdered sugar. Make sure to get as much sugar as possible, because my second favorite thing to do with powdered sugar on funnel cake is take a deep breath and blow it in the face of whichever unsuspecting State Fair travel companion happens to be in my immediate vicinity. Yes, I have been playing the same trick since the age of 5, but I still find it to be highly amusing.
There you have it. A State Fair classic. Delicious, and not to be missed.
*Bleh, does anyone else hate the word “compote”? It’s a terrible name for something yummy – fruit and sugar slurry (which is also not a good name, I know). Seriously, though, doesn’t “compote” sound like something that should come out of the medicine cabinet and be applied directly to jellyfish stings? Help! Who has a better word for “compote”?
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