While the stands don't really change from year to year, and the big worry about Spring Fair has more to do with whether it happens to be cloudy or not, Spring Fair redeems itself by offering absolutely anything you can eat standing up.
Sausage sandwiches, Thai grilled chicken on a stick, barbecue sandwiches, jerk chicken sandwiches 84 basically anything that comes out of a cart simply can't be beat.
For this reason, and this reason only, I love Spring Fair. I can't stand the idiotic rides in the parking lot, I'm not 21, and thus not old enough to head to the beer garden for cheap Sam Adams. I have no interest in buying purses or squashed liquor bottles.
Same goes for the booths devoted to social issues (The League of Women Voters, some conservationists, PLASE, and a few communists), especially the anti-choice table trying desperately to personify a fetus, which tends to spoil my appetite.
But the food area 84 they had huge turkey legs, they had funnel cake, sausages with peppers and onions, pulled pork, some weird potato thing that needs a lot of salt, spring rolls, pit beef complete with burnt edges, and sushi 84 though the sushi was mediocre.
Come to think of it, so was the turkey leg. You learn this when your friends bring you to a Renaissance fair, and you decide to eat something interesting, like a whole turkey leg.
There's so much sinew and tendon, and the fact that you're with friends (and thus trying not to be gross) as well as lacking any butchering equipment makes it hard to get all the meat off.
You get far too few bites, are left without any reasonable and neat avenues of bone-gnawing, and throw the thing away. It certainly looks cool though.
The pit beef, on the other hand, was very good. It had black on the edges, a beautiful smoke ring, and strong beef flavor. There were onions, there was barbecue sauce, there was horseradish. The bread was a little limp, but the sandwich was definitely the best thing at the fair 84 hands down.
The student-made spring roll was decent. It was a big, fair-sized spring roll, with a big, tender wrapper. It contained either shrimp, pork, or both, though either choice was a little bland and dry.
The lettuce and rice noodles were unspectacular, but it's hard for me to get down on anything that contains noodles and can be eaten standing up with one hand.
The peanut sauce was great 84 thick, tangy, and far beyond what it was introduced as: peanut butter.
My sausage sandwich was a huge disappointment. I'm from New Jersey, which means I spend my time in New York City.
That means that my sausage sandwiches at street fairs come from the Feat of San Gennaro, which means that I spend most of my life being disappointed by sausage sandwiches.
That's not quite the right word, though. Disappointment seems to imply that it was not a pleasant experience eating this sandwich.
That certainly was not the case here.
I just found the bread insubstantial and a little stale. The mustard was insufficiently sour, the hot sauce was insufficiently hot, and the onions were insufficiently caramelized.
It's way over in the good column of eating experiences, but there's definite room for improvement.
Needless to say, I'm going to have to do a more thorough investigation of Baltimore sausage sandwiches before next year's Spring Fair.
There's a place in Little Italy I've passed a few times that makes their own sausage, and from their selection of cheeses and olives, I imagine they don't kid around with their sausages either.
