Derrick Pratt, the director of education and public programs for the Erie Canal Museum, says the Erie Canal shaped Syracuse’s salt potato.

"Syracuse has the kind of natural salt beds underground, but it hadn’t been able to be kind of exploited fully until the canal makes it profitable," Pratt explained. "A lot of Upstate New York’s most famous dishes arrived due to the canal at least in some way or another."

He says that, at one point, Syracuse was making more than half of America’s salt. The salt works were generally worked by Irish and German immigrants, who would often bring their potatoes to the salt fields. They’d toss their potatoes into the boiling salt brine, and once the water had been boiled away, you had your salt, but you also had your delicious salt and crusted potatoes.

And we can thank the canal for the popular beef on weck sandwich as well.

"By the late 1800’s, New York starts passing a variety of laws that restrict how much people can drink or how people can drink alcohol, including one that says you have to purchase food with an alcoholic beverage," Pratt said.

He says alongside the banks of the canal in Buffalo, there was a heavily populated German community with a variety of taverns.

"Foods that are quite common in German cuisine are roast beef and the salt and crusted Kümmelweck roll ... combine it together to make the saltiest food they could, which, of course, would make people even thirstier and they’d drink more beer. Thus is born the Beef on Weck sandwich, still popular in Western New York to this day," Pratt said.

Pratt says it’s incredible how much the 363-mile long canal has transformed New York. Thousands of people used it for travel needed places to eat and sleep — smart for business people at the time, who began to open taverns, grocery stores and hotels.

"Almost everything in upstate New York has in someway or another been impacted by the Erie Canal. It really created this area that I have loved and lived in my whole life," Pratt said.