If you go to a Mexican restaurant around here, when they bring the tortilla chips there is a 'white sauce' they bring out in addition to salsa. Apparently this vile substance was invented by a restaurant owner in this area.
According to the tale, for a time his restaurant was the only one that had it. Some people apparently actually liked it, which took business away from the competing restaurants, who didn't offer it at the time.
He was protective with the 'recipe,' so other restaurants went about attempting to figure it out, or concocting their own, which they thought was 'better' than the original.
The off-shoot is that new every one of them offers their own version, and some people apparently even choose which restaurant to frequent based on which white sauce they prefer. (As far as I can tell, they are pretty much all equally foul, but to be fair, once I had tried two or three of them I stopped sampling; my wife, for some reason, actually likes the stuff. More salsa for me.)
Everyone who comes to this area to visit or moves here seems perplexed bu the white sauce, which tells me that at least this awful stuff hasn't traveled to other locales.
There is one good local food history, too, though. The guy who invented the waffle cone was from Norfolk. Story goes that it was invented at the World's Fair in the early 1900s. Our local guy was making and selling waffles. Next to hlm was a guy selling ice cream, which they gave out in bowls. At a certain point, the ice cream seller ran out of bowls, and was beginning to turn customers away, even though he had more ice cream to sell.
It was at that point that the entrepreneurial spirit of Mr Doumar (the waffle maker) kicked into gear. He figured out that if he shaped his waffles into a cone, the people could hold their ice cream in it. He would sell more waffles, and the ice cream guy would be able to sell all his ice cream. And thus, so they say, the waffle cone was born.
Mr Doumar was out in front of his little fast-food place in Norfolk still making his waffle cones in an ancient machine well into his 90s. Doumar's is still a very popular please to get cheap eats, and has been featured on several television shows including Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.
His waffle comes are so incredibly delicious that they almost make up for the unholy existence of the dreaded 'white sauce.'