As a descendant of Eastern Washington and North Idaho families, who grew up in Spokane and remains nearby, fry sauce is in my blood. I set out to write a long essay about fry sauce, the condiment that might be the Inland Northwest’s most impactful contribution to the culinary world, about a year ago. There’s been a sticky note in my workspace all that time, crowded out by photos, timelines and deadlines for my ‘real’ work on settler colonialism in the American West.

It reads:“FRY SAUCE: a unique regional flavor”. When I scrawled that out, I already had more in mind than a humble sauce of few ingredients.

Fry sauce (also called, in my Idaho family, just “dip”) began to feel like a stand-in for the entire culture that, to me, always felt normal (until it didn’t). It took me a long time, a lot of travel and connections with strangers, to realize that the region I grew up in simply does not exist in the popular American imagination.

“You live in Washington D.C.?”
No. Washington state.
“Oh, Seattle!”
No, think more like, Idaho.
“Oh…ok. Why?”
“Is Idaho even a real place?” people asked in New York.

I don’t know that these people want to hear me wax poetic or angry about this place, the only topic on which I really consider myself an expert. It’s not rainy, it’s actually high desert in my favorite places. But they don’t picture shrub-steppe and prairie plowed into wheat, or pine forests at the edge of the Rockies, or trout fishing, or huckleberries, or fry sauce.

They don’t picture a grungy, post-industrial mid-size city in the throes of semi-permanent identity crisis, fighting to remain electorally “purple,” and they certainly don’t imagine the passion with which people here rep their favorite Zip’s location.

It just, frankly, doesn’t seem like an important place, so they don’t imagine it at all.