The final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English came out earlier this month, and, as the LA Weekly noticed, there are some great entries for the different ways we describe the things we eat.
Started in 1965 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, DARE is compiled from data collected by a fleet of "word wagons"--vans of researchers dispatched by editor in chief Frederic Gomes Cassidy to interview people all over the country on what words they used to describe their lives. According to the Wall Street Journal, they came back with 2.3 million answers, and have been sorting through them (and slowly publishing them) in the decades since. With this final volume, the people still working on the DARE project have put some of the data online for our learning pleasure.
Apparently, some residents of Southeast NY state call subs "wedges," and the same might go by "dagwoods" in Minnesota, Iowa, or Colorado. New Orleans famously calls them Po' Boys (or "poor boys," as the website says), but that name has apparently spread all around the gulf states, even up to Tennessee.
Even weirder are the names for cottage cheese, though. "Clabber cheese" is the norm in parts of the South, New Jerseyites go for "pot cheese," and the north midlands area including West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland call it "smearcase." The term's a little less disgusting when you consider that those heavily German areas probably used to call it something like "schmearkase," which would just mean spreadable cheese in German, but still.
It's surprising to see that even something as dirt-normal as "the seed of a peach" varies from place to place. Apparently "pit" is the term for the Inland North and Pacific, "seed" is all around except in the North, "kernel" is big in the gulf and mid-to-south Atlantic, and "stone" gets some play more in the North Midlands.
This data is all about 40 years old, so it's more of a snapshot of how America used to speak than an accurate map of today's weird usage, but you can easily while away an afternoon poking around their state-by-state databases and audio archives (there's one 70-year-old Brooklynite on liquor smuggling during Prohibition!).